On the run: a modern day Romeo and Juliet
THE LOVERS by Rod Nordland (Hodder £16.99) JANE SHILLING
ONE day in 2010 two teenagers fell in love. Nothing unusual about that — except that this was in Afghanistan, where falling in love can be fatal.
Ali and Zakia were born in the Bamiyan valley. As children, they worked together in the fields, but as they grew up, Ali fell in love with his childhood friend. He asked her to marry him, but she told him it was impossible: they came from different tribes with a centuries-old tradition of mutual hostility.
Heartbroken, Ali joined the Afghan National Army. By the time he returned to his village two years later, he had given up on his love for Zakia, but as soon as she saw him, she walked boldly up to him and accepted his proposal.
Months later, when their lives were in great danger, Ali asked Zakia what had made her love him. ‘You were gentle,’ she said. ‘And you spoke to me with kindness.’
Those are rare qualities in a culture where men often don’t address their wives by name, but Zakia’s choice of husband was not her own. Her father would decide that, and the consequences of defying him could be appalling.
Ali persuaded his father to make a formal request for Zakia’s hand in marriage; he asked three times, and each time was refused.
But Ali and Zakia were lovers by now, and there was no going back. When Zakia’s family discovered the affair, she fled to a women’s shelter.
It was from there that the New York Times foreign correspondent, Rod Nordland, received an email in February 2014, asking if he would write about Zakia and Ali’s plight. He took the next flight to Bamiyan, little suspecting that he would become, as he puts it, an inadvertent Friar Laurence in their Romeo and Juliet love story. Afghan notions of ‘honour’ regard women as the chattels of their male relatives, whose loss must be avenged by death. Zakia’s family vowed to kill the young couple. Nowhere, as they would discover, was safe.
When the account of Zakia and Ali’s story appeared in the New York Times, the response was overwhelming. Readers offered money and help.
The local media picked up their story and soon they were celebrities in Afghanistan as well as the U.S. Their high profile gave them some protection, but it also meant they were instantly recognisable, and more than once their hiding place was betrayed.
Then, too, they were frustratingly hard to help. Ali was passionately devoted to Afghan poems and legends about doomed lovers: both he and Zakia saw their relationship as a great love story, whose outcome destiny would decide.
There is no fairytale ending. As interest in the story dwindled, so did the offers of asylum. Besides, Ali and Zakia were reluctant to leave Afghanistan. In spring 2015, now the parents of a daughter, Ruqia, they were back in Ali’s village.
Their future remains dangerous and uncertain. Zakia’s family lives nearby and, as Norland points out, there are many cases where families have waited for years before exacting vengeance.
Though his beautifully written book is tinged with melancholy, there is a glimmer of hope: Zakia and Ali are adamant that Ruqia will be educated and marry for love. A former Afghan Women’s Minister describes Afghanistan as ‘the worst place in the world to be a woman’. But perhaps, Nordland suggests, Ruqia will be the true beneficiary of her parents’ unshakeable belief that love conquers all.