Read Dear Zari: Hidden Stories from Women of Afghanistan for Free Online

my one-year-old baby sister who drank formula milk, so my mother somehow had to find clean, warm water to mix with the powder. We all took turns to hold my baby sister while she slept. I remember clearly being driven a long way through mountains and rocks, and how I screamed because I was only small and was being flung around all over the place. The mountains were so full of dust that we sometimes couldn’t see where we were going. Sometimes we couldn’t even see each other’s eyes. The dust covered everything: the lorry, our clothes, our faces. I think even our minds were affected by it.
    We had entrusted our lives to a random driver commandeering an old Russian military truck and his two helpers. So while I feared wemight crash and fall down the mountainside, my mother was no doubt more worried about being in a truck full of women accompanied only by men we didn’t know. She would have been only too aware that we could have been robbed, raped or killed; we’d even heard stories of Afghan women and girls being sold to Arab Sheiks.
    As day turned into night, my mother and the other women got more and more worried. We’d been told that we would arrive in Peshawar before it got dark, yet night had come and we were still in the mountains. We were risking our lives trusting that we would eventually arrive in a better place, and hoping we would finally see my father again after so many weeks apart from him. During that cold night, I thought back to those evenings listening to Muzgan’s endless stories, craning our necks to catch the BBC news and being nagged by Muzgan’s mother. I missed Muzgan. Before I’d left Kabul I had promised to write to her. I’d told her I wanted to hear the end of the story of the little girl in the red hat whose grandmother had been eaten by a wolf, but she had said it would take too long. We’d told each other we would see one another again if we didn’t die in a rocket attack, but that still hasn’t happened. I heard from someone that she’s married and has children, but I don’t know where she’s living. That’s the strange thing about war, it can bring you so close to people, then it pulls you apart. You have to get used to losing friends, leaving one place and moving to another.
    As it turned out, we were lucky. The driver and his two helpers were not rapists. The sky was becoming lighter and the driver said his dawn prayers – Salat Ul Fajr – and then announced in a loud voice that we were going down the mountain, that this road would be easier and that we were on our way to Peshawar. ‘ Inshallah (God willing), the road will be faster and we will get there by midday.’ Full of relief that nothing had happened to any of us in that wild mountain range, my mother told us to thank God for keeping us safe. The rest of the journey was much less dusty and we soon reached a small Pakistani tribal village where a street-lamp cast light on the smooth road ahead. I no longer had to cling on to the bar of the truck, and while my skin was dry from the wind andthe smell of the hairlice lotion lingered in my hair, the dust no longer bothered me. I had swallowed so much of it that it almost felt normal. In comparison, the fresh air and tarmac road felt strange. I had been in those mountains for one and a half days and one long night.
    We finally came to a bus terminal where some local people were selling bread, but the dust in my mouth had killed my appetite. Here we exchanged our Russian truck for a smaller Japanese one, which would take us on the final leg of our journey to Peshawar. The Pakistani border police knew when they saw us that we were refugees who had crossed the border illegally, but there was an arrangement in place between them and the drivers. Our driver simply handed over some money to them, and we continued on our journey into Peshawar. We had with us the telephone number of a friend of my father’s who was living in Peshawar, and he was able to tell us where my father