The Times Magazine 49spilling out into the corridor. Daanya, 28,
here with her two younger sisters, fled after
being forced into marriage with her cousin;
Nek Bakht, 16, here with her mother and
siblings, explains how they had to leave her
elder sister behind, not even having time to
tell her they were going. Later, her mother
approaches me with Nek Bakht’s kohl-ed
younger sister in her arms, attempting, in
halting English, to ask if there is any chance
of helping her eldest daughter and her
husband escape. Neither of us can bring
ourselves to tell her the truth, which is no.
Hope, even the faintest sliver of it, is what
keeps so many of the group going.
Malika, 19, has brought the burqa she had
to wear for the crossing in order to go through
all the Taliban checkpoints unnoticed. A harsh
reminder of what her country has descended
back into, and also a memento that ultimately
saved her life.
Najma tells of the perilous journey from
Kabul to the border – all the girls having
to carry their backpacks under their burqas
and hide their phones down their underwear
where the Taliban would never check. “A
soldier stopped our bus and wanted to know
why we were all leaving. I told him the first
thing that came to mind – that everybody
was sick. ‘How can you all be sick?’ he said.
He was right! How could we be? I was crying
with relief when he finally waved us on.”
Shakila tells me how, on reaching the border
and holding up her documents for inspection,
a soldier beat her back for accidently exposing
the flesh of her forearm. “The Taliban do not
even consider us human,” shrugs Saaleha, 22,
an engineering student who looks like a movie
star with her slanting Hazaran features and
meticulously made-up eyes.
When I had been in Islamabad six weeks
earlier, everyone was huddling around two-bar
heaters, bought in the local market and used,
in the absence of working stoves, to heat
saucepans of water. This time around it is
sweltering, the rickety fans above us doing
nothing to circulate the stale, heavy air. It is
the third hostel they have moved into since
they arrived.
The neighbourhood is Pashtun and
deeply conservative (like much of the area
immediately outside the city of Islamabad)
and the locals have made it clear the group
are not welcome. Mirwais, 28, the chief
community coordinator, who forfeited his
chance to go to Canada with the first batch in
order to see the second one to safety, tells how
the girls have rocks thrown at their windows
and laser torches shone into their rooms at
night. In order to lay low, he has reluctantly
advised them to wear burqas whenever they
leave the hostel. A journalist whose outspoken
views on female rights had made him a target
back home, he hated having to suggest this.Wasn’t that why they risked their lives to
come here? But he knows they have no choice.
“We are Afghan refugees. Most of us are
Hazaran. Here we don’t have any voice.” In a
gesture of solidarity, he and the men have said
they will substitute T-shirts for traditional dress.
Meanwhile, with the world’s attention
focused on Ukraine, the plight of Afghan
women goes from bad to worse. Not only
have the “Taliban 2.0” reneged on their deal
to allow girls back to school, they have
enforced segregation in public parks and
forbidden women to get on flights without a
male chaperone. Three suicide bombs went off
at nearby schools last month. Two weeks ago,
the Taliban decreed that all women must
wear the burqa in public (most already wear
a veil, but many cover only their hair), and
made their male “guardians” the enforcers- if women’s faces are seen in public, the
men will now be fined and jailed. The order
suggested that, if possible, women should
not leave their homes at all.
As the country ricochets back into the
Stone Age, 14 million Afghans are on the
brink of starvation and families that were
once comfortably off are being forced to sell
their daughters in order to eat.
“If I had stayed, I would have been forced
to marry an older man with money,” says
Marzia. “Many girls I know had to do that.”
Despite the welcoming smiles, a collective
dejectedness has set in since I was last here.
Some look unwell. As a deathly pale Nek
Bakht suddenly excuses herself from the
room, her hand clutched to her mouth, Dyana
matter-of-factly explains how quite a few of
the group have been hospitalised because
of the contaminated water. Eczema is rife,
especially among the girls whose exposure
to the outdoors is limited.
It is their mental health, though, that is
most worrying. Particularly among the girls
who had to come here alone. One, who has
asked for her name not to be revealed, has
been hospitalised twice for attempting suicide.
Most corrosive to the general spirit, it feels, is
not so much the grimness of the surroundings,
or the very real threats to their safety from
the locals, as the sense of rootlessness, the
lack of any place to call their own.
“I feel a little like a bird trying to find
a tree for a nest,” explains Najma, pale just
like her younger sister, but gaunter than
I remember. “However, each time I find one,
it gets burnt down and I have to find another
tree, and then another. Where do we call
home any more? Where?”
“It’s hard for human beings not to belong
anywhere,” adds Marzia, “and sometimes we
cannot help losing hope.”
We really need someone from the team
permanently on the ground here, but all of us
have jobs and families who are already resentful
about the amount of time we are spending on
this. Not for the first time I feel bad about the
guilt trip my sister and I laid on our mum for
not being around more when we were growing
up. It didn’t occur to us as teenagers that
all the political prisoners and earthquake
survivors she was always off helping might
have needs greater than ours.
On our last day, we sit in a circle with a
couple of boxes of gulab jamun sweets and
pistachio-studded halwa and talk more about
their ambitions and what they want to do if
and when they reach Canada.
Sadaf, a budding entrepreneur, tells how
she is following the reality TV show Shark
Tank on her phone to learn how to write up a
business proposal. Humaira, 21, a tall elegant
girl – and a survivor of that school bombing
last year that killed several of her friends- wants to study fashion. Malika wants to
be a journalist. Shirin, 18, whose china doll
features belie her footballing skills (she was
on the verge of being picked for the national
team just before Kabul fell), is desperate just
to be able to go outside and play football
again. Dyana wants to continue her master’s
degree and qualify as an anaesthesiologist.
Most of all, though, she dreams of making
her own choices.
“It is up to me whom I marry, when I get
married, when I get pregnant. It is up to me
whether I get married at all. We need to be
the decision-makers in our lives.” n
To help the students with a donation, go to
30birdsfoundation.org‘IF I HAD STAYED AT
HOME I WOULD HAVE BEEN
FORCED TO MARRY AN
OLDER MAN WITH MONEY’
ALAMY. SOME NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED
A protest against the Taliban ruling last year that boys
in Kabul could return to their schools, but not girls