Free Dear Zari: Hidden Stories from Women of Afghanistan by Zarghuna Kargar

hot and bothered by the time I arrived. I knocked on the old wooden door and waited; but then I noticed it was ajar and tried to peek through it when Sharifa’s younger sister opened the door and invited me in. As I went into the garden I noticed there were piles of mud bricks and planks of wood everywhere; there seemed to be some sort of building work going on.
    Sharifa came out to greet me. I hadn’t seen her for several weeks – she had lost weight and become pale, and as I hugged and kissed her on the cheek as I normally would, I noticed that her lips were dry. I was sure something awful had happened.
    ‘Salam, Sharifa. What’s wrong? Where have you been? Why haven’t you been coming to class?’ I bombarded her with questions but she didn’t reply to any of them; then she began to cry. She asked me to come into her bedroom and began to tell me about the building work, but I interrupted her.
    ‘Are you building a new house or something?’
    ‘My dad needs a new room,’ she said.
    I understood immediately what she meant. Sharifa’s father needed to have a room separate from the rest of the house for his new bride.
    Inside the house everything was as quiet as if there had been a death and the household was in mourning. No one laughed or smiled. Sharifa told me that her family had decided to exchange her for his new bride, a girl who was just seventeen, the same age as Sharifa and me. In return, Sharifa would be marrying a man in his forties whose wife had died. She would have to look after this man’s children and in so doing give up any dreams she might have had of a handsome young man of her own. Sharifa’s happiness was being sacrificed to secure her family’s future.
    As I walked home I prayed fervently that there would be some kind of miracle, or that Sharifa and her family would reject this plan. Sharifa was forfeiting her future with no guarantee of the desired outcome. Who could be certain that the new wife would even give birth to a son? Sharifa’s extended family kept saying that people who marry again eventually have a son, but who knew whether that was true?
    Two months passed and I heard nothing from Sharifa. She wasn’t allowed to leave the house and I was busy with school and household chores. I would occasionally wonder what had happened to her but had gradually come to accept that it was her destiny to marry an old man and safeguard her family’s future. One afternoon after school, though, when I got off the bus, I saw one of Sharifa’s younger sisters in the street. She was out buying medicine from the chemist’s. I stopped her and anxiously asked how Sharifa was. She said that Sharifa had had to get married before her father brought the new bride home because Sharifa’s husband needed help with his five children, and that Sharifa was now their stepmother even though some of the children were almost the same age as her.
    ‘But where is she now?’ I asked. ‘Is she here in Peshawar?’
    Her sister’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Yes, she’s in Peshawar but she’sliving outside the city, in a remote village. Her husband’s house is a long way away and she’s not allowed to come and visit us very often.’
    Sharifa’s sister started crying. ‘We don’t really see our sister any more. She’s too busy looking after her husband and his five children.’
    I was trying to imagine how young the children must have been, seeing as Sharifa herself was not much more than a child, and asked, ‘What about your dad? Did he bring home the new bride?’
    The sister shook her head, and I asked why not.
    ‘My dad is seriously ill. He fell ill the week before he planned to bring home his new wife and was taken into hospital. I’m going now to take him these tablets that the doctor has prescribed.’
    Sharifa’s eventful life started to occupy my mind once again. I explained to my mother what had happened and she immediately suggested we should go and visit Sharifa’s mother to see how she was.