Enjeela Ahmadi-Miller - The Broken Circle - A Memoir of Escaping Afghanistan

All the light in her eyes had been beaten out of her. She walked around a mere shell of herself. I hated every minute we were in this ugly village. The sight of that man—her husband—made me want to yell and scream at him. But Masood had warned me not to interfere, not to say anything a little girl shouldn’t, or my life would be in danger; all of our lives would be in jeopardy.

Mina and I prayed together. We prayed that no one would ever beat her again. And for me to see Mommy and Padar again. We did this every day for several weeks, and I began to think things were changing for her, to believe that Allah heard our prayers.

Then one morning, Masood came to me.

“Sit here, Enjeela,” he said, pointing to a place beside him. He had a serious expression. “I want you to stay in our camp. The neighbors are going to have a funeral today.”

“Who died?” I asked, surprised.

“I don’t know.” He averted his eyes. My heart began to tumble like it would fly right out of my chest. I didn’t believe him.

“Is it Mina?”

“No, no,” he said. “Just stay here for today. Pack your things; we’re leaving early in the morning.”

I shot up from my seat and ran to the other side of the village, expecting to see her smiling and waiting for me. We would play juz bazi , then tell stories, then have a tea party. When I got to the other side, I looked around and she wasn’t there. A body wrapped in white sheets was laid out on the ground, and seated beside it were Mina’s husband and his other wife. I searched every other face in the crowd of people who were surrounding the corpse, but Mina wasn’t among them. But I didn’t see any children in the crowd. Maybe they didn’t allow children to attend. Not even child brides.

Other villagers stood around the shrouded body. The old man sat, and when I made eye contact with him, he gave me a hateful stare from across the courtyard.

I had never known hate for another person before I met him. Even the soldier in Kabul who came to our house searching for Ahmad Shah or the Russian men who harassed Padar hadn’t made me feel this burning distaste. As if I’d swallowed some fruit of awakening, my eyes were opened to the evil in men’s hearts. As I stood there staring back at the man, my knees became weak. I broke his gaze and collapsed in the dirt. I cried as I continued to search for Mina in the crowd. If it wasn’t Mina in the shroud, then where was she?

Zia walked up, put his hand on my shoulder, and told me that I needed to come with him; we would need to eat before it was time for us to go. As I rose to go with him, I could feel an emptiness in the village behind me, that the light Mina had brought to it was gone—all that remained were tattered clothes hanging on skinny bodies in the dust, and in the center, the wicked man and his brutal wife. If Masood was right, and all of Afghanistan allowed such despicable traditions, I hoped the entire country would collapse into dust too.

As we ate, Laila kept saying that Masood was right, if we tried to help her, the villagers would probably beat us, or maybe kill us, too. Our money wouldn’t have solved anything. Masood just shrugged when I glared at him.

“What if it’s not her?” I cried. “We’re just going to leave her behind?”

“It’s too bad,” he said. “But her lot is here with her people.”

Their willingness to just slough off Mina’s life as if she were some worthless possession turned me rancid inside. I went to my makeshift bed and lay there tossing and turning all night, unable to sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw her smile. How could we leave her with this animal for a husband? I couldn’t stop crying.

We rose early, shouldered our packs, and stepped into the darkness. We passed the last mud hut shrouded in quiet shadow. The dusty path wound through the rugged countryside as we followed close behind Masood’s brisk steps. I prayed for Mina as we walked, that she was alive and would sleep safely in peace, and that one day soon, she’d know the love and joy of a real family.

A few days after we left Mina’s village, we hiked single file through the early morning, down a dusty track leading to another nameless village. My body moved forward, step upon step, but so much of my heart had stayed behind with Mina. The thought of her living for the rest of her life with that intolerable old man as a husband shook any ideas of fairy-tale romances out of my mind. I was a different person than when I had entered that mud-hut hovel. I understood a wariness about life that I hadn’t known before. I had been soft and malleable, so trusting of adults and enamored with my life in Afghanistan—now I had been gelled into something firmer, more complex, and guarded. I had always believed that my life was in the hands of God—and he would take care of me. But now I wasn’t so sure about that; my fate had the feeling of chance to it. I became more watchful about what was going on around me, about the men of this land and their ways. And possessed of a new determination, I would not lie down and let evil happen to me. I had to be as courageous as possible—and if I died, then so be it. If it was my time, I would die; if not, then I would live. But I would not let these men make a victim of me.

I’d never felt so alone, so stripped of everything that could protect me and my sisters and Zia. Only Masood stood between us and the dangerous wolves of the Afghanistan countryside. As protective and loyal as Masood had seemed so far, I still feared deep down that he might disappear into the night and leave us at the mercy of these wicked men who lived in their dirt houses. I’d made a trade in that little place: my simple way of seeing the world, for Mina’s face, her vibrancy, her deep desire to see beyond her narrow life she’d been fated to, sold into slavery by her parents, into an anonymous existence. If she couldn’t leave with me, I wanted to live for her, for what she could have discovered.

The dust coming off the road settled into every pore of our bodies, on our clothes, in our hair, and covered the bits of food we ate out of Masood’s pack. I lost track of how many days we walked. Sleeping under the stars on the side of the road in the hard dirt. We must have traveled a good distance, because the land began to change. It became slightly undulating, and then we passed through an area that at one time must have been heavily wooded, but now the forest had been thinned down to scraggily looking pine trees. The green pine needles broke up the pervasive brown scenery of the rocks, boulders, and dirt that all melted into one tone of dried-out earth. We finally came to another village; it looked like a fortress with a mud wall surrounding it—threatening to keep us out.

Inside the gates, we found an open area that had been turned into a makeshift campground filled with tents. Others escaping Kabul had ended up in this same remote place on their way to Pakistan, just like us: families, groups of men, and some who were alone.

Masood surveyed the place and turned to us. He squatted down to eye level, and with an ominous tone, he said to us, “Don’t talk to anyone here. Don’t trust anyone. Stay with each other, and don’t wander off.” He stared especially hard at me and repeated, “Don’t talk to strangers.”

I had no intentions of trying to make any more friends. Walking through the tents, I quickly noticed that most of the travelers carried Kalashnikov or hunting rifles and looked at us warily as we passed, as if they were sizing us up. From the way they dressed, some of them must have come from Kabul; others were in the traditional dress of the countryside, but they all were tense and suspicious. The cities and towns were emptying out in the face of the growing arrests and torture by the army. People didn’t trust each other. Some could be spies sent by the government to see who was escaping.