Åsne Seierstad - The Bookseller of Kabul

One day he wrote that he would be standing by the lamppost a few houses past hers and that he would be wearing a red sweater. Saliqa quivered with excitement when she left home. She had dressed up in a pale blue velvet costume and was using the jewels she loved, gold-coloured bracelets and heavy chains. She was with a friend and barely dared walk past the tall, slender boy in the red sweater. His face was turned away and he never moved.

Now she took the letter-writing initiative. ‘Tomorrow you must turn round,’ she wrote and pushed the note to Shabnam, the ever-obliging and eager go-between. But again he did not move. Then, on the third day, he turned towards her. Saliqa felt her heart hit her stomach, but she kept on walking. The suspense had been replaced by obsessive love. He wasn’t especially good-looking, but it was him, the letter-writer. For many months they exchanged notes and stolen glances.

New crimes were added to this first one – that she had even accepted notes from a boy and, God forbid, had answered. Now she had fallen in love with someone not chosen by her parents. She knew they would dislike him. He was uneducated, had no money and was from an inferior family. In Hayatabad it is the parents’ wishes that count. Saliqa’s sister married after a five-year fight with her father. She had fallen in love with someone other than the one her parents had chosen and she refused to give him up. The battle ended when the two lovers each emptied a bottle full of pills and were sent in great haste to hospital to be pumped. Only then did the parents consent.

One day circumstances brought Saliqa and Nadim together. Her mother was spending the weekend with relatives in Islamabad and the uncle was away all day. Only his wife was at home. Saliqa told her she was visiting friends.

‘Have you got permission?’ her uncle’s wife asked. Her uncle was head of the family as long as Saliqa’s father was living in a refugee reception centre in Belgium. He was waiting for a resident’s permit to enable him to get employment and send money home – or better still, send for his whole family.

‘Mummy said I could go as soon as I had finished my chores,’ Saliqa lied.

She didn’t go to her girl friend; she went to meet Nadim, face to face.

‘We can’t talk here,’ she says quickly when they seemingly meet by chance on the street corner. He hails a taxi and pushes her in. Saliqa has never sat in a taxi with a strange boy and her heart is in her throat. They stop by a park, a park in Peshawar where men and women can walk together.

They sit on a bench in the park and talk for a short half-hour. Nadim is making grand plans for the future, he wants to buy a shop or sell carpets. Saliqa is first and foremost terrified someone is going to spot them. Less than half an hour after leaving home she is back. But all hell has already broken loose. Shabnam saw her and Nadim in the taxi and went and told Sharifa who informed the uncle’s wife.

The aunt hits Saliqa hard on the mouth when she returns, locks her into a room and phones the mother in Islamabad. When the uncle comes home the whole family enters the room and demands to know what she has done. The uncle shakes with anger when he hears about the taxi, the park, and the bench. He grabs a piece of broken wire and beats her repeatedly over the back while her aunt holds on to her. He hits her face until she bleeds from mouth and nose.

‘What have you done, what have you done? You’re a whore,’ the uncle screams. ‘You are a disgrace to the family. A stain on our honour. A rotten branch.’

His voice reverberates throughout the house, in through the neighbours’ open windows. Before long everyone knew of Saliqa’s crime. The crime that caused her to lie locked in her room, praying to Allah that Nadim will propose to her, that her parents will allow her to marry, that Nadim will get work in a carpet shop and that they can move away.

‘If she can sit alone in a taxi with a boy, I’m sure she is capable of other things,’ says Nasrin, a friend of the aunt, and looks haughtily over at Saliqa’s mother. Nasrin shovels sweetmeats into her mouth with a big spoon, and waits for answers to her pronouncement.

‘She was only in the park, there is no need to beat her within an inch of her life,’ says Shirin, who is a doctor.

‘If we hadn’t stopped him we would have had to take her to the hospital,’ says Sharifa. ‘She was out in the courtyard all night praying,’ she continues. In her sleepless state she had caught sight of the wretched girl. ‘She was there until the call for prayer early this morning,’ she added.

The women sigh, one mutters a prayer. They all agree that Saliqa made a big mistake by meeting Nadim in the park, but they cannot agree whether she was merely disobedient or had committed a serious crime.

‘What a disgrace, what a disgrace,’ Saliqa’s mother wails. ‘How could a daughter of mine do something like that?’

The women discuss the way forward. If he proposes to her the disgrace can be forgotten. But Saliqa’s mother is not keen on the idea of Nadim as son-in-law. His family is poor, he is uneducated, and for the most part he just roams the streets. The only job he ever had, but subsequently lost, was in a carpet factory. If Saliqa married him she would have to move in with his family. They could never afford their own house.

‘His mother is not a good housewife,’ one of the women claims. ‘Their house is shabby and dirty. She’s lazy and doesn’t stay at home.’

One of the older women recalls Nadim’s grandmother. ‘When they lived in Kabul they entertained anybody,’ she says and adds slyly: ‘Men even came to her apartment when she was alone, and they weren’t relatives.’

‘With all due respect,’ one of the women says, turning towards Saliqa’s mother, ‘I must admit I always thought Saliqa was a bit of a show-off, always made up, dressed up to the nines. You should have realised that she had dirty thoughts.’

For a while no one says anything, as though they all agree, without actually saying so, in sympathy for Saliqa’s mother. One woman wipes her mouth; it is time to think of supper. The others get up, one by one. Sharifa mounts the stairs to her three rooms. She passes the back room where Saliqa is shut up. She will stay there until the family have decided what to do with her.

Sharifa sighs. She thinks of the punishment that befell her neighbour Jamila.

Jamila came from a superior family, she was rich, immaculate, and beautiful as a flower. A relative had put aside money earned abroad and thus could afford the eighteen-year-old beauty. The wedding was exceptional, five hundred guests, the food sumptuous, the bride radiantly beautiful. Jamila did not meet the man she was to marry prior to the wedding; the parents had arranged everything. The groom, a tall, thin man of forty-something, travelled from overseas to get married the Afghan way. He and Jamila spent two weeks together as newlyweds before he returned to arrange for a visa in order that she could join him. In the meantime Jamila lived with his two brothers and their wives.

They got her after three months. The police had ratted on her. They had spied a man crawling in through her window.

They never got the man, but the husband’s two brothers found some of his belongings in Jamila’s room, proof of the relationship. The family immediately dissolved the marriage and sent her packing home. She was locked up for two days while a family council was held.

Three days later Jamila’s brother told their neighbours that his sister had died as the result of an accident with a fan which short-circuited.

The funeral was held the next day; lots of flowers, lots of serious faces. The mother and sisters were inconsolable. All mourned the short life allotted Jamila.