This narrative from Salima was told to a Zan Times journalist.
Five years ago, my husband beat me so severely that I only remember losing consciousness from the pain and bleeding. When I woke up, my mouth was crooked, my chin broken, and every doctor who saw me asked who had beaten me.
Before we went to the hospital, my husband made me swear not to say he had done it. He told me to say I had fallen off a motorcycle. When I looked at his old face and white beard, I felt pity and repeated the lie, even though he hit me in the aftermath of something my co-wife said. I had to travel twice to Kabul for surgery until my chin was fixed and the pain eased. The treatment cost 100,000 afghani.
I am 28 years old and the mother of three children.
I am originally from Kunduz. When I was five, one of my eyes clouded over and slowly became completely blind. Only once in my childhood did my father take me to a doctor, who recommended I come back when I grew older for surgery. Instead of getting my eye treated, my father married me off to a man his own age. I was 17.
My husband was a driver on the Kunduz–Takhar route and had gotten to know my father during those trips. He told my father that he would get my eye treated after our marriage. My father was so pleased with the proposal. But that never happened after I moved to Takhar. Not only was my eye never treated but rarely has a day passed without violence. In the last 11 years, my husband has beaten me over the smallest of things, sometimes to the brink of death.
When he proposed, my husband openly acknowledged he already had a wife and seven children. But my father was so happy to marry me to his friend that he didn’t care. After I went to my husband’s house, his wife and his children constantly harassed me. Whenever I complained, I was blamed instead of them.
Sometimes after my co-wife complained about me, my husband told me to pack my things and he would drive me back to my parents’ home. Fearing my husband would again beat me, I would gather a few clothes and my chador and get into his car. I spent half of these last 11 years in my father’s house. Each time, my father would eventually hand me back to my husband. The last time he left me and our children with my parents, I stayed for a year. Finally, my brother told my husband that if he didn’t take his wife and children back, he would complain to the Taliban.
So, three years ago, my husband returned, took us to another district, and rented a small house for 1,500 afghani a month for us. He told me that as long as he wasn’t there, I had no right to complain about anything. He visits every two or three weeks and brings a small amount of groceries, not enough even for one week. He always says, “How can an old man like me provide for two families equally?”
To survive, I go to neighbours’ houses where I wash clothes, clean carpets, or do other chores in exchange for rice or other bits of food. Though I have just one good eye, I do embroidery, earning up to 300 afghani for each piece, which is enough to buy tea and soap.
Some nights when I’m sewing late, I tell myself: If both my eyes were healthy, I could earn more. If my father or my husband had treated my eye, I wouldn’t be like this today. But none of them supported me. They threw me back and forth between themselves like a ball.
Like me, my children have grown up without medical care. I have never taken them to a doctor. Whenever they get sick, my husband brings a bottle of syrup and says they will get better. In winter, I try hard to keep us from falling ill, because there is no one to take us to a clinic due to our poverty.
As a woman who is blind in one eye, I have never received support from any institution. I consider myself a woman without a guardian, living alone with three children. My husband, my father, and no man in my family has ever helped me register as a person with a disability or receive assistance. Once I heard that my co-wife had used my ID card to collect aid. I knew better than to say anything to my husband as the only thing he knows is how to beat.
When he visits us, I must not complain about anything. Otherwise, he may stop coming altogether. So I stay silent and am grateful only that my children can at least feel they have a father who sometimes comes to see them.
Hajer Haidarnia is the pseudonym of a freelance journalist in Afghanistan.
