Translated from the Dari by Dr. Negeen Kargar
I remember us sitting under our apple tree before the school day started, laughing at the minister for education. We were drinking green tea and sitting with pens and paper, preparing for our protest. We needed to choose our slogans. I suggested: “Wake Up, Minister! Where Are Our Teachers and Books?”
But Shaherbano laughed at me. So I said, “What about ‘The Minister Is So Incompetent He Can’t Even Keep His Promises!’” I loved my slogans but Shaherbano couldn’t stop laughing. She wiped her running eyes with the corner of her white headscarf.
“Nekbakht, say something good, don’t ruffle the minister’s feathers.”
“When the headmistress gave you permission to hold the protest, did she say we had to please the minister?” I retorted.
“The point is to get his attention so he does what we want.”
Finally, we decided to write: “Dear Minister, We Want Teachers! Dear Minister, We Want Books!” Between ourselves, we also said a lot of other things to the minister but we didn’t write those down. Shaherbano said, “If I become minister for education, I won’t let any girl be uneducated.” I laughed again, but when I looked across at Shaherbano, I saw she was no longer laughing with me. I said to her, more seriously, “But Shaherbano, you are daydreaming! When we finish school next year, for us that will be the end of studying: how can you become minister for education?”
Shaherbano looked away from me at the flowers in the garden. She said, “Remember these blossoms. I am telling you now that one day I will be minister for education and I will go from door to door, telling families to let their daughters go to school. When those little girls follow me, I will give them notebooks and pens. I will give them notebooks and pens to last them until they can finish a PhD.”
“Are you saying you’re fed up with sharing your pen and notebooks with me?” I teased her.
She smiled. “You never stop fooling around.”
I heard my mother call out fiercely that I needed to come quickly and finish the carpet. Most days I missed school because I had to help weave the carpets my parents sold. I made a face. “Dear Minister, I have to go. Or she’ll shout that I can’t go to school and I have to marry the shepherd.”
“Your mother didn’t listen to my mother, did she?” Shaherbano replied.
“What can I say? All they care about is what people will say: one ear stuck to the wall and the other stuck to the door.”
“Can’t you try to explain?”
“What’s the point? They don’t want me to marry now, but they like to discuss it when they run out of money.”
“I wish there was something I could do.”
“My lovely friend, the only reason I still come to school is because of you.”
It was true. Whenever I felt down and didn’t go to school, Shaherbano would come like an angel to rescue me and draw me out, like a car stuck in the mud. The idea of a protest had come to her while she was trying to help me.
That’s how it all began: I had missed school one day after a family had come to ask my parents for my hand. Shaherbano came to see me after school. She saw my eyes, red and puffy, and scolded me. “Why are you crying instead of coming to school? You know we had history and geography today!”
I cut her off. “I don’t care about history and geography—especially Afghanistan’s geography. It’s just made of war and cruelty, fighting and Taliban. I wish I had been born in another geography!”
Shaherbano was angry. She said, “It’s because our people are illiterate. Even many of our kings and ministers were illiterate: they could only fight, not read or write. And people danced to the drum of their ignorance. Now they say the Taliban has changed, but how could they change without reading a book? If a person never reads a book, how can he change? If all our parents were literate, girls like you wouldn’t face these troubles. Our geography itself would not be in such constant danger. Nekbakht, our history must change at some point.”
Deep in my heart, I believed every bit of her speech. I wanted things to change, but I always felt small compared to my problems. I was silent.
Shaherbano looked at me. “Who was it this time?”
“My parents want me to marry the shepherd Khudadad.”
“You are not married yet, he only came to ask for your hand. If you finish your studies, maybe you can change your parents’ minds. I will tell my mother to speak to your mother.”
I took a deep breath and hugged her. I said to her, “My dear sister, what would I do without you?” And I really meant it.
I told her my father wanted to beat me when I said I wouldn’t marry his cousin Khudadad because he smelled of sheep. I reminded her how, when we asked our chemistry teacher what love is, he had thought for a long time. Then he said, “Love is an element. Whatever you see and like, that is love.”
Shaherbano asked me, “What is your love, Nekbakht?”
I said, “All I know is that my love is not Khudadad!”
We both burst out laughing.
Shaherbano stayed at my house and reviewed the day’s lessons with me. She did this often. Sometimes she’d deliberately leave her books with me so that I couldn’t miss school the next day.
But again and again, our teacher was absent. Each time, our headmistress would warn us that no teacher would be present the next day. I said to Shaherbano, “I don’t think there is unbroken studying in my destiny.” She took my hand forcefully and led me to the headmistress’s office.
“What are you doing?”
“Come with me, you will find out.”
When we entered the office, the headmistress was busy leafing through pages in a folder. She looked up kindly. “Tell me, my dears, what do you want to say?” Shaherbano asked if we could stage a protest to demand teachers and books. The headmistress took her glasses off to see us better. She smiled. “You can, and I hope you succeed,” she told us.
Shaherbano was excited and assured her we would. I didn’t say anything until we had left the office, then I scolded Shaherbano for attempting the impossible. “How can we do this?!” Once again, Shaherbano convinced me with one of her speeches and I felt ashamed of my fearfulness. That’s how we came to be sitting under the apple tree, coining slogans to put to the minister for education.
After we had made our posters, we took them to a printing shop and made some copies to hand out to the girls in other classes too. The headmistress helped us get police permission for our protest and instructed the school’s security guards to support us. She found journalists to come to our forgotten corner of Kabul and cover our protest. They would need to find their way there anyway, but no one knew yet what was coming.
I knew that my parents would never allow me to protest, so I did not ask their permission. Shaherbano’s determination had infected me too. If they beat me, they beat me—they couldn’t kill me. I joined Shaherbano on the street. When I was in the middle of the road, stopping the traffic from moving, I felt that, instead of blood, divine power was coursing through my veins. I felt my body gripped with happiness as we shouted our demands for books and teachers.
Every time we shouted, people looked at us—because our voices came from our hearts, filled with our little sorrows and the dust of life’s trouble. In just a few words, we shouted out the hopes of many girls. At that moment, I felt so powerful I believed no one could block my path or rob me of my future.
After an hour of protesting, I sat down with the other girls from Sayed ul-Shuhada high school. Our excitement ebbed as everyone grew tired under the hot sun. When I came home, I found my mother angry. She told me off in every way she knew how; she told me that if a girl is seen on TV no one will marry her. I was tired and did not confront her. I wanted to avoid a beating.
The next day I waited again under the blossoming trees in our garden till Shaherbano came to ask why I hadn’t come to school. I told her that the Khudadad family knew that I had joined the protest and had told my father I shouldn’t be allowed to go to school anymore. I said to Shaherbano, “You carry on and become minister for education. That will be a better way to solve the problems of girls like me.” I told her she should take my uniform and my school things and use them in my place.
Shaherbano said, “Please don’t give up.” She even said she would talk to my father if I thought that was a good idea. She told me the police had come to our school that day. She was hopeful it was because of the protest—that they were checking whether we really didn’t have books or teachers. She was right, in a way, that our voices had been heard somewhere: soon we wouldn’t need either books or teachers.
The next afternoon, I waited again for Shaherbano to come and ask me why I hadn’t come to school. But as I lingered under the trees, I heard a deafening noise. Before I could work out what it was, there was another explosion, then another, then gunfire. I stood still while the neighbors talked loudly. They were saying the school had been attacked.
My first thought was of Shaherbano. As I ran towards the school, I said to myself: Don’t be crazy, nothing has happened to her. I felt the ground was pulling my legs down. But even from where I was, I could see enormous clouds of dust and smoke. As I got near to the school, I felt suffocated, first by the smoke and dust-filled air, then by the sight of scraps of clothes, metal, and flesh. I tried to swallow the pain in my throat so I could get past and enter the school premises. There was blood everywhere I stepped; even the water in the drains ran red.
People surrounded the dead bodies. I could hear loud cries and screams from all around. In a corner, was a heap of bags and books by a half-burnt wall. There was an old sign on the wall. It read “Freshly Dug Well.” Yes, a well drilled deep enough to accommodate all the dreams of Afghan schoolgirls. People were collecting the bloodied belongings and remnants of their children. I scanned the books and notebooks, praying that none of Shaherbano’s would be there.
I searched everywhere but I found no sign of Shaherbano. Maybe she’d been wounded and taken to hospital. I went to one of the hospitals where they were taking the dead and the injured. There were injured bodies everywhere, and chaos.
There was a row of corpses covered in white cloths. From time to time, a person would uncover each body, looking for the person they were missing. I saw an older man reciting to himself as he lifted each cloth, “My daughter—my Kamila—is OK. She is a good girl. She is fine.” But when he reached the last corpse, he fell to the ground. I feared that I also couldn’t stand, but I could.
A woman was lying on a bed, holding a small body. In another corner, a young boy was sitting in shock next to a body. I went to him and tried to ask kindly, “Was she your sister?” Through cracked lips, he replied hoarsely: “She is my younger sister.”
“Where are your mother and father?”
“I have an injured sister in another hospital—my mother is with her. My father is trying to find my older sister.”
Pain squeezed my throat. I felt such hatred for the attackers, I had nothing to console him with. I turned around and, tears flowing, looked over the scene. On one of the hospital walls was a list. As I approached it, I realized that all the names were mixed together: the martyrs, the wounded, and the witnesses. I looked through them, one by one, but Shaherbano’s name was not there.
I went to another hospital; her name was not there either. I went to a third hospital. Just as I was deciding Shaherbano must be safe, I found her name on a list of martyrs.
I read it several times to make sure it really was my Shaherbano’s name, and her father’s name. I leaned on a wall and I passed out. When I came to, I remembered what I had just seen and fainted again. I do not know how many times it happened.
But later, I remembered the day Shaherbano asked me, “What is your love, Nekbakht?” Now I knew my love was her and my friendship with her. She had done so much for me; nothing could have stopped her but death. I wasn’t going to abandon her dreams now.
My family ate in silence that night. As we sat around the dinner cloth, I played with the potato on my plate. I said, “I am going back to school tomorrow.” I watched my mother with one eye and my father with the other. I felt cold sweat running down my back. My mother began to say, helplessly, “Khudadad—” but my father cut her off. “Am I her father or is Khudadad? I say my daughter should go back to school. We don’t know how long any of us has. Go, my child, and live the way you want to live.”
I was speechless. Shaherbano was right. We had to show some spirit in the face of our struggles. Two days later, I put on my black school uniform and white scarf and filled my bag with notebooks. I cut a fresh branch of blossom from our garden and went to school.
This story is written in honor of Afghan schoolgirls, and in particular the students of Sayed ul-Shuhada high school in Dasht-e-Barchi, Kabul. The story draws on the real events of May 8, 2021, but is a work of fiction.