Taliban. - A different kind of daughter: the girl who hid from the Taliban in plain sight

For every woman and child of war and oppression the world over, struggling to play and learn in peace.

May these pages help to light your dark paths to freedom.

Contents

Prologue: A Prophecy

They send girls like me to the crazy houseor simply stone us to death. Lucky girls might get married off to a rival clan, in the hope of tainting the tribes blood. I am the product of one of those punitive tribal marriages. In a sentence meant to damn them both, my maverick mother married my renegade father having never laid eyes on him until their wedding. The tribal elders did not foresee the instant love match or the combined force of my parents courage and shared ideals. They certainly did not foresee me. And they could not stop our brazen family of Pashtun rebels from multiplying.

Even among my own, I was considered a different kind of daughter. I hated dolls, was miserable wearing fancy dresses, and rejected anything remotely feminine. My ambition would never come to life in a kitchen, or flourish within the four walls of our home. Just to stay sane, I needed to be outside, under the open sky and running freethe very thing that tribal law forbade.

When I was still very little, my father borrowed an old Zenith television set and VCR and came home from the local bazaar with a used video about the hunting tactics of lions. Buried in that video, as in everything my father showed us, whether on television screens or in old books, was a life lesson that we had to search to find. Sitting on the cool clay floor of our living room, we watched a lion in the heart of the hot African plains stalk a herd of gazelles. The lion is actually a very slow predator, yet it hunts some of the fastest creatures on earth. From the outset, the lion was physically outmatched. Still, hungry as he was, he lounged like a lazy king in swaying grasses, casually surveying his surroundings. Every now and then he got up, stretched, and inched closer to his prey. As the gazelles looked over, he simply stared back with a devil-may-care attitude, betraying nothing of his intent. The gazelles placid confidence came from the fact that they could so easily outrun the lion, but that false faith in their ability would be their undoing. The lion possessed two game-changing talentsa cut-throat patience and a phenomenal ability to conceal itself. I remember well how the graceful beast leapt out from the grass and dug its teeth and claws into the exposed neck of a stunned gazelle that had been unaware of him sitting there all the while. How stupid the gazelle was, I thought, and how cunning the cat.

*

Just before my fifth birthday, I complained to my father that I could not suffer another suffocating dress and would prefer to wear loose clothes like the boys Id watched playing outside in the dirt. He laughed and then told me not to worry. It might have been the yellow T-shirt and shorts he bought for me at the bazaar that set everything in motion. I didnt heed his warning to wear them only within the high walls of our property. And in my part of the world, for a girl to venture out uncovered was haramforbidden, a sin against God.

On the day I wore my yellow outfit, the panorama of peaks and valleys past our front iron gates lured me. It was the first time Id been alone outside the house, ready to run out under the open sky. With my clean dark hair all coiled and done up in a rainbow of ribbons, I slipped into the blaze of noon, the shirt already sticking to my back, braids and skin dripping sweat. The sun heating my limbs, I stopped for a moment in the courtyard, held out my arms, and experienced a great rush of freedom. I looked down at my legs, seeing the smooth landscape of my own limber form, so often concealed and already going pink. Then I pulled back the latch, pushed open the heavy gate, and bolted. Coming back unobserved, I never told a soul what Id done.

On a sweltering afternoon, I sat kneeling by a low windowsill, chin cupped in my hand, staring out over the wide river plain behind our house. My mother had put me in a new dress, constellations of beads and silk threads embroidered all over the heavy fabric. It confined me head to toe like a coffin. From outside, I could hear rippling laughter as a group of boys played, running and kicking up clouds of dry dirt that blotted out my view of the serrated horizon. I heard the constant thud of feet kicking a ball, and I felt, as I watched and listened, a sudden fist of intense heat punch at my gut. There were ten of them at least, all dressed in loose clothes, kicking a soccer ball around between the low projections of rock. The ball zigzagged between their nimble feet and I panicked as I sat in the house, suddenly understanding my own fate as though reading my future in a bookembalmed for life in pretty clothes, doomed to either go to school or stay home. In that moment, my heart went to stone. There was no in-between for girls like me who wanted to run outside and play games and sports in the open air. Suddenly I was aware that, despite all my liberal fathers efforts, his myths and big maps of the continents, and everything about the wider world hed tried to teach me, I would never truly be free. In our culture girls remained indoors, quiet and veiled for life.

I didnt think about what I did next. I simply got up, backed away from the sill into cool shadow, tearing off the dress, ripping at the seams, clawing at the arms. Then, in a quiet rampage through the house, I pulled every one of my dresses out of the closets and into the garden. One by one. They were so heavy, it took an entire hour.

The cooking pit under the tree outside was shallow, just four bricks and a few sticks of wood set under a grill, but I knew where my mother kept the kerosene and matches. In a cabinet on a shelf in the kitchen. I moved fast, before I could change my mind, knowing full well that if I allowed myself to think too much, I would stop. Hauling down the full can of kerosene, I dragged it with both hands slowly across the floor without spilling so much as a drop, then out the back door, cutting a long track in the dirt leading straight to the pit. I had already stacked the dresses in a pileone atop the otherover the cooking bricks, their ornaments reflecting facets of sunlight, fabrics almost leaden. Even when the wind gusted through the garden, the garments remained as still as corpses. Staring at the heap, I hesitated for only a second: it was a shame to incinerate that beauty, and yet to ignore what I knew was to seal my own death sentence. I soaked the clothes in kerosene clear as water and I struck a match. Standing back, I watched the flame fly at my command like a small shooting star.

In a sudden burst, all the air around me raced up, rushing through my hair and stealing my breath, and the stack of dresses suddenly disappeared before me, behind a wall of flames. All those beads and crystals sparked, destroyed in an explosion of hot red embers rising straight into the blue sky, billowing with black smoke. All that bright silken color disintegrated within minutes into browns and blacks. I ran into the house and found my brothers shirt and pants, an outfit we called a shalwar kameez, and slipped them on. Then I went to the kitchen and found a sharp knife. In a moment, I was hacking away big chunks of my black hair, tossing the clumps into the flames, which turned them instantly to ash.

My father stood there a long while, watching, though I hadnt seen him, his gaze going from his wild, dancing child to the lifeless heap of dresses. I learned much later that on that hot afternoon, hed seen another girl in methe sister hed failed to save so many years before. From an upstairs window, hed glimpsed her figure hauling a pair of heavy galvanized buckets full of water across the family courtyard. Then she stopped suddenly and stood strangely still. He saw the first bucket drop, then the second. Spilled river water streamed over the hot stones as the buckets rolled past her feet, the hem of her dress dripping. He heard his sister gasp just once in pain and watched her body fall as though a bolt of lightning had struck her.