For the Love of a Son: One Afghan Woman's Quest for Her Stolen Child

ran
towards the truck driver, shouting, ‘Wait! I have changed my mind.
I will make other arrangements.’
    The truck driver reacted angrily. ‘If you
want this tire to be put back on your car, then leave me to handle
it!’ He paused. ‘If you don’t send your boy with me, I won’t do
it.’
    My father shouted at me: ‘Get out of the
truck.’
    The truck driver got out of the vehicle and
started to push my father around, putting up his fists. I was
startled, but flattered that the man wanted me to be his travel
companion so badly. A crowd gathered round the two men. My father
called out for someone to fetch the police. Nadia and my mother
were screeching for me to jump out, to run away.
    I was completely confounded, wondering what
was wrong with my family. I was so pleased to be considered a boy,
and to be given a boy’s responsibility, that I felt angry. My
family was spoiling everything! ‘Let me go! I want to go!’
    Then Nadia screamed over the racket,
‘ Maryam is a girl! She is not a boy .’
    The truck driver was stopped in his tracks,
confused, studying my small figure with new eyes. The police
arrived at that moment and the truck driver wrestled from my
father’s grip and bolted like a frightened horse. He quickly
disappeared from view.
    The agitated shopkeeper warned my father, ‘Do
not trust strangers with your children. That driver was looking for
fun with a little boy. He would have quickly discovered your child
was a girl. He would have killed her or sold her to a dance
house.’
    My shaken father paid a big fee for a taxi to
take us back to our car.
    Visiting the shrine had not brought the good
luck we had sought. I had barely dodged a grim future. The famine
continued, taking many more lives, and creating unrest across the
land. The poor little orphan my mother found to adopt had been so
traumatized that she was terrified of any stranger. When my mother
tried to take the child in her arms, the frightened child ran away
and refused to go with her. We later heard she had been placed in a
poorly run orphanage along with thousands of other desperate
children who had lost both parents.
    During that year of 1973, Afghanistan was a
hotbed of misery. Not long after our trip my parents received a
communication from a mental institution where one of Shair’s
daughters, my cousin Amina, was kept. Amina was only a few years
older than me, but was already married with two children: she had
recently been committed to the hospital and they asked us to come
and fetch her.
    I had known Amina since I was a child. She
was beautiful in spirit and in appearance. I had always admired her
lively personality and flashing green eyes. Amina was not so lucky
when it came to her father. Shair did not allow his daughters to be
educated. They were considered property to use as bargaining chips
in marriage deals, and he sold them off at a young age. Amina had
received no more consideration than had Grandmother Mayana.
    When it came to girls, time truly stood still
in Afghanistan.
    I remember walking into a bleak room where
Amina was waiting. The poor dear was no longer beautiful, although
I did recognize her glittering green eyes which now flashed wildly.
Before I could even smile a greeting, she leapt at me, kissing my
cheeks and wailing.
    I was uneasy because she was so
demonstrative, plus she could not speak coherently. I asked my
mother, ‘What is wrong? I can’t understand her.’
    A sorrowful look flashed across my mother’s
face when she said, ‘Maryam, Amina’s husband used his fists to box
her ears, so damaging her hearing that her world is now silent. She
is deaf.’
    I was infuriated on behalf of poor Amina,
declaring confidently, ‘I would have boxed his ears had he dared
boxed mine!’ I knew that many Afghan men were brutes but I naively
thought that if you fought back all would end favorably. I suppose
my attitude came from living with a gentle father who had never
raised his hand against his wife or daughters.
    ‘So, Amina is not crazy?’ I asked, wondering
why she had been locked up with the insane. Some of the inmates
were screaming so loudly that their cries carried through the walls
to where we were.
    ‘No, Maryam, Amina is not crazy,’ my mother
said with a sad smile, ‘although she became very upset when her
husband took a second wife. When she protested, he beat her up. She
was put here so that no one in her family had to take care of
her.’
    I heard more desperate female voices