Letters to My Daughters by Fawzia Koofi Page B

Instead, they would nag my mother and ask her to stop me from going. They could not understand why she willingly let me risk my life like this, night after night.
    But my mother would probably have thrown herself head first into machine gun fire if it meant I could still go to school. She was illiterate but fiercely intelligent. By seeing me get educated, she was somehow educating herself too. She took genuine delight in talking to me about my classes, and her commitment to me never wavered. She just ignored my siblings’ pleas and nagging, placating them with her winning smile.
    Looking back on those times, however, I too am staggered that she allowed it. I feel guilty when I think about the fear I must have caused her every time I disappeared into the bullet-riddled night. A fear that must have been made all the more acute by the recent loss of Muqim. His death affected the whole family, but none more so than my mother. Every morning, she would visit his grave and put fresh flowers on it. But this simple loving act of a bereaved mother soon gave way to more erratic and, for the family, very worrying behaviour.
    BY NOW the city was turning into a killing zone. From the neighbourhoods where the fighting was worst, we heard reports of hundreds of civilians dying each night. We could hear the crackle of gunfire ripple across the city. On still nights, it would echo off the hills and mountains that surround Kabul, haunting the whole city with the terrible events it was witnessing.
    Rocket fire was most common. The rockets were indiscriminate and would land without warning, sometimes destroying a family home, leaving its residents buried beneath the earth walls, sometimes a shop or a school or a group of women buying vegetables for the evening meal at a market stand. All you would hear was a whizzing sound as the rocket flew through the air; then the whiz would suddenly stop, and seconds later the weapon would fall and detonate. You never knew where or on whom it would land.
    For Afghan women, the constant fear of death was made worse by the twin threat of sexual violence. The tragic story of my friend Nahid illustrates this. Nahid was just eighteen and lived in an apartment near ours. One night some gunmen burst into her house, apparently to rape or kidnap her. Rather than face this fate, she threw herself from a fifth-floor window. She died instantly.
    In other stories, we heard how women had been found with their bodies mutilated or their breasts cut off. In a country where morality is everything, it was hard to believe we had descended into such evils.
    One evening, at around 7 o’clock, I was cooking the family meal of rice and meat when I realized my mother wasn’t home. Normally she would be in the kitchen or organizing other aspects of household life. I had an unpleasant feeling that I knew where she had gone and I had to go in search of her. I was still in my mourning period for Muqim, so I put on my black head scarf and slipped out the door. When a guard near our apartment building told me which direction she had gone in, I knew my worst suspicions were right. She was on her way to visit my brother’s grave.
    There weren’t any taxis about and buses weren’t running at all, so I set off on foot towards the centre of the city. At first, the streets were eerily quiet. The Kabul I had known before the war was bustling at night with cars and motorbikes and people walking to visit friends. Now the streets were all but deserted, cleared by the rattle of gunfire that lay between me and my brother’s grave.
    I kept walking nervously, aware that my mother was somewhere ahead. I began to see bodies in the street, freshly shot or torn to pieces by explosions, their corpses not yet beginning to bloat. I was terrified. But I wasn’t afraid so much of dying as of the fact that these dead bodies were people’s family members. And that tomorrow, it could be my family lying here.
    When I got to an area