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was staying. When we arrived at the house, my father was there waiting for us.
    I had always seen my father clean-shaven and in a suit, smelling of after-shave and smiling. Yet here he was now in a dark green shalwar kamiz (loose trousers and dress or top) looking older and greyer. My parents cried as they hugged each other, and we girls wept too as we clung to him, but my baby brother behaved as if nothing had happened while my baby sister stayed asleep. My dad ended up holding her in his arms for hours. After a while we became worried that she was showing no sign of waking, but my mother simply said she was tired after all her crying and the long journey, and would wake up later. My father, meanwhile, told the other women how grateful he was to my mother. He said she was his hero because she had managed to bring his family back safely to him.
    At last I was able to change out of my old black corduroy trousers and grey jumper, and have a hot shower. Finally, the smell of the head-lice lotion disappeared, and all the lice were dead. I think the journey had been as effective at killing them as the lotion had. In the evening my baby sister woke up, my mum washed her and she contentedly drank her milk, while we were given a traditional Afghan meal of Kabuli pilaw rice, lamb and spinach. The food tasted wonderful after so many hoursof hunger and it was such a relief to be reunited with my father, but looking back I can see I didn’t fully appreciate what a narrow escape we’d all had. I now give thanks to God for keeping us safe in that old Russian truck, and for reuniting my family.
    After dinner that first night my father’s friend’s wife said to my mother, ‘Sister dear, you do know this is Peshawar, don’t you?’ My mother replied that, of course, she knew we had come to Peshawar. But the friend continued, ‘Sister, you must appreciate this is a very different kind of society to the one you’ve left behind in Kabul.’ My mother was now uncertain as to what she meant, and asked in what way it was different. ‘It’s very strict, and your daughters are not dressed appropriately. They will have to wear a hijab and cover their faces.’ My mother protested that we were still very young, but our hostess insisted that in Peshawar we would be considered women and it would be dangerous for us to go out dressed as we had done in Kabul.
    The next day while my father looked for a place for us to rent, my mother went shopping to buy us shalwar kamiz and hijabs , and for the first time in my life I felt repressed. In Kabul the restrictions on women and girls’ clothes hadn’t affected us that much; I’d had to wear a headscarf outside and for school a long black hijab , but I had also been allowed to wear jeans, corduroy trousers and blouses or sweaters. I’d been comfortable in trousers all my life, yet now I was expected to wear a shalwar kamiz , and even though I didn’t actually mind wearing one, I didn’t like the fact that I had to wear it. I asked if I could wear my jeans with a kamiz shirt, but was told I couldn’t. Worse still I had to wear a large scarf called a chador , which covered my head and face, and left only my eyes showing. For an eleven-year-old child like me, this was too much. The shalwar kamiz might have been a traditional piece of clothing for Pakistani women and children, but it wasn’t one I had grown up with. During my early childhood the dress code had been relatively relaxed before the Mujahedeen had made women wear the black hijab (something they’d enforced even in the refugee camps). I noticed now that some Mujahedeen groups treated Afghan and Pakistani women differently,and that they looked down on Afghan women and called them ‘Kabulis’, meaning they’d come from a liberal country that didn’t adhere closely to Islamic laws. And we were instantly recognisable as refugees because we had to wear the black hijab while the Pakistani women didn’t – instead they could wear colourful