Hope
I was born between two pieces of cloth: one blue, one the faded white from Shajaa’ s torn wedding dress. With patient but shaking hands, disheveled but firm stitches, Shajaa granted me life.
Her hands were not meant for writing. They reeked of all the naan and halal she was forced into making for her husband’ s men – the Taliban. At night, while he lay snoring, her trembling fingers stroked my spine – a comfort shared, but mostly sought. I remember the first time a pen touched my pages. It was stolen from the men, just like the words Shajaa later learned to write –“ school”,“ freedom”,“ future”.
Shajaa wrote day and night; she was slow in the presence of daylight, barely breathing on the lookout for footsteps, but at night she wrote as if every word were her last.
When she died, they said it was her lungs. Not the endless years of swallowing her own voice.
On August 15th, 2021, they retook Kabul. The sounds of gunshots in the streets replaced voices in the classrooms. School bags lay untouched in the corners of rooms, their books belonging to another lifetime. The airport, once promising escape, was no more than a symbol of broken dreams.
A century had passed when Shajaa’ s daughter Sabira found me. She never wrote, only fondled my covers, eyes wide as an abyss, reading a braille of courage that had been buried deep with Shajaa’ s kafan. She was merely fifteen and was already fluent in the language of lowered eyes and oppressed thoughts. 236 months and they were back. Laughter became a companion she no longer knew how to speak to. Freedom came and went in a fractured heartbeat. Life became a corridor Sabira walked without looking out the window. It wasn’ t her fault, survival had been etched into her soul before she learned how to read, hemmed into every expression, every breath taken too loudly.
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