Mariam
ack in a kolba, it seemed, after all these years.
The Walayat women's prison was a drab, square shaped building in Shar-e-Nau near
Chicken Street. It sat in the center of a larger complex that housed male inmates. A
padlocked door separated Mariam and the other women from the surrounding men. Mariam
counted five working cells. They were unfurnished rooms, with dirty, peeling walls, and
small windows that looked into the courtyard. The windows were barred, even though the
doors to the cells were unlocked and the women were free to come and go to the courtyard
as they pleased. The windows had no glass. There were no curtains either, which meant the
Talib guards who roamed the courtyard had an eyeful of the interior of the cells. Some of
the women complained that the guards smoked outside the window and leered in, with their
inflamed eyes and wolfish smiles, that they muttered indecent jokes to each other about
them. Because of this, most of the women wore burqas all day and lifted them only after
sundown, after the main gate was locked and the guards had gone to their posts.
At night, the cell Mariam shared with five women and four children was dark. On those
nights when there was electrical power, they hoisted Naghma, a short, flat chested girl with
black frizzy hair, up to the ceiling. There was a wire there from which the coating had been
stripped. Naghma would hand wrap the live wire around the base of the lightbulb then to
make a circuit.
The toilets were closet sized, the cement floor cracked There was a small, rectangular hole
in the ground, at the bottom of which was a heap of feces. Flies buzzed in and out of the
hole In the middle of the prison was an open, rectangular courtyard, and, in the middle of
that, a well The well had no drainage, meaning the courtyard was often a swamp and the
water tasted rotten. Laundry lines, loaded with hand washed socks and diapers, slashed
across each other in the courtyard. This was where inmates met visitors, where they boiled
the rice their families brought them the prison provided no food The courtyard was also the
children's playground Mariam had learned that many of the children had been born in
Walayat, had never seen the world outside these walls. Mariam watched them chase each
other around, watched their shoeless feet sling mud. All day, they ran around, making up
lively games, unaware of the stench of feces and urine that permeated Walayat and their
own bodies, unmindful of the Talib guards until one smacked them.
Mariam had no visitors. That was the first and only thing she had asked the Talib officials
here. No visitors.
None of the women in Mariam's cell were serving time for violent crime they were all
there for the common offense of "running away from home." As a result, Mariam gained
some notoriety among them, became a kind of celebrity. The women eyed her with a
reverent, almost awestruck, expression. They offered her their blankets. They competed to