By Nigar
A year is a short time for Sarah’s silent mourning over the grave of her dormant dreams. No, it’s not; it’s been one year, 300 and some days since Sarah looked at her father and mother and her educated brothers and sisters and asked why school is forbidden now that it’s her turn. One brother lowers his head to escape Sarah’s eyes, hiding his inability to tell her the truth of the new reality.
Sarah herself witnessed how no one said a word as the school gates turned into a wall. She thought, “It’s as if the world no longer has eyes to see and ears to hear Sarah’s voicelessness and desperateness.”
Her mother sewed her a long black veil so that the brightness of her eyes and face doesn’t weigh on the eyes of dark minds, and stays safe from their harassment. These days, Sarah carries her school bag to informal learning centres, where she learns English as well as painting, which silently keeps her dormant dreams alive.
Sarah sometimes loses the count of friends’ weddings in the past year. On her way to a learning centre, she counts with herself, “Laily, Marzia, Bahar, Qudsia …” Laily became a bride in spring. They made her wed her cousin. Two days after Laily, Bahar was engaged. Laily is Sarah’s age. There were two candles on her birthday cake: the numbers one and three for her age of 13. Two weeks before Laily’s wedding, Sarah gave her a 24-colour pencil set as a gift — a reminder that they were supposed to learn painting together.
Sarah knows that people around the world will see photos and videos showing the horror of child marriages but they will never see Sarah’s silence. The gates of the schools will stay closed, and the girls will silently become brides and give birth to children like themselves.
It’s been more than 300 days since the school gates have been closed and poor Sarah doesn’t ask a word. Now, Sarah is biting her nails one by one. She plucks her hair, strand by strand. She is exhausted from sitting at home all the time. When her mother calls for her, she gets up, sighs, and sits down, sighing again. Her temper sometimes annoys her mother. Occasionally, she has seen her mother whispering to her father and brothers, “It’s good for a girl to go to her man’s house when she grows up; Sarah has also grown tall this year. I wasn’t even 13 when my dad sent me to your dad’s house.”
It is not only Sarah’s bad temper. A year has passed since her sister-in-law and sister are also required to stay at home and not go to work. Her brother fights with his wife when she asks for money for house necessities. Razia, her sister-in-law, says, “They have taken away the little amount of money we had been earning. Now, we all have bad tempers and bicker for nothing.”
Her sister, Nafisa, just reads books from dawn to dusk. She jots down points about how to live a happy life and gives them to Sarah, who distributes copies among the girls at a learning centre. Maybe they will relieve the sadness of their days and lessen the heavy burden of closed schools.
Nigar is a pen name for a writer who lives in Afghanistan.
