Afghan Lovers So Close, Yet So Far Apart

KABUL, Afghanistan -- All that Mohammed Abrahim has left of his long-loved sweetheart is a crackly old tape of her voice, a photograph and a couple of her handkerchiefs to soak up his tears.

He lives on the third floor in the Qasaba area, on the edge of Kabul. Nazifa lived on the first floor -- until her father sent her far away last month to cure a forbidden virus called love.

His mother tried to negotiate the couple’s marriage, but Nazifa’s parents arranged for her to wed someone else. That engagement was broken because Nazifa, who like many Afghans goes by one name, is in love with Abrahim. Still, her father has declared that the lovers will never marry.

Abrahim’s hope is not completely dead. But as he sits with head bowed, shyly murmuring the story of his love, tears slip down his cheeks.

After the strict Islamic Taliban movement was driven from power last year, Kabul, the Afghan capital, seemed poised for a more liberal era when young men and women could mix more freely together. The ban on girls and women attending schools was lifted, and arrests of unrelated couples simply for walking or talking together in public eased.

But the tradition of arranged marriages quickly snapped back into place. Private meetings between young men and women are still forbidden in Afghan society. Couples who elope can be arrested and jailed. And marriage for love remains rare.

Lovers who defy the social rules and meet in secret risk heartbreak when their parents marry them off to someone else.

Love in Afghanistan can also be a dangerous business. Farid Kharote, 23, also of Qasaba, had a girlfriend who was engaged by her parents to another man. One evening last month, Kharote hurried to her apartment for a secret assignation. A dozen men ambushed him and beat him savagely. He was hospitalized for three days, after which his love was diluted by a strong sense of self-preservation. He fled the country.

Abrahim and Nazifa, both about 20, met on the stairs of their apartment block five years ago.

“She told me she’d been watching me for a whole year,” Abrahim said. “I was shaking and sweating. I told her, ‘I love you too.’ ”

For five years, he followed her with his eyes whenever she hurried, head down in her burka, across the stony ground near their block. He had no difficulty distinguishing her from other girls shrouded in the head-to-toe garment.

“She is polite. Her eyes are almond-shaped and black,” he said. “She is very small. She’s beautiful.”

Her former fiance lives in Iran. When Nazifa and Abrahim kept seeing each other after her engagement, neighbors talked.

The couple would meet on the stairs; there was nowhere else to go. There they quickly kissed, the moment all the more piquant because of their terror they would be caught.

“I was afraid that if someone knew about our love and saw us kissing, maybe they would tell her father or brother or the man she was engaged to and maybe they would try to kill me or her,” Abrahim said.

Alarmed about the gossip, the groom’s family requested a special ceremony this summer called neka -- which is as binding as a wedding, though the groom is absent. A huge dagger was placed beside Nazifa to symbolize the man. His family planned to move her to their house to live and work.

Abrahim awoke that day in a dark mood. “I thought, ‘I can’t get her. And if I can’t get her, I don’t need my life.’ ”

But the next day, moping on the stairs near her door, he saw engagement presents being returned from Nazifa’s family to her fiance’s family.

Later he learned of Nazifa’s courage. With a mullah and 100 relatives present for the ceremony, she was supposed to repeat solemnly three times that she loved her fiance. She said nothing. The mullah declared that the wedding could not go ahead, and the party ended in recriminations.

From then on the lovers would sit on their balconies each night for hours, he looking down at her, she gazing back. They invented a complex system of gestures to convey their thoughts.

But that was in September, before her father sent her away to the distant city of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan.

Their love is full of sorrow and pain. But for many young Kabul residents, love in this post-Taliban time is more of an exquisite game. Some young men and women ring phone numbers randomly for hours each day, then engage in long, giggly phone conversations when they find a willing partner.

One handsome 18-year-old, Fahim, who asked that his second name be withheld to avoid damaging his chances of marrying the young woman he loves, sat in a house in Kabul, phone-flirting with a girl named Maryam, who was so paralyzed with shy laughter it was difficult to get much sense out of her.

He was trying to set up a meeting.

“When I meet her, I’ll continue my friendship -- if she’s beautiful. If not, I’ll just cut it,” he said after hanging up, the meeting not quite arranged.

First meetings are usually fleeting. The scene might be an ice cream shop. He’ll recognize her from some item of clothing. If she is wearing a burka, she’ll lift the garment’s face panel briefly so they can exchange glances.

“The first time she doesn’t come up close. She just says hi, and that’s it. It takes five or six minutes just to see each other. Later, if I want to meet her, I can go to our shop, which has a room at the back and a sofa,” Fahim said. Couples use the back rooms in shops for talking, kissing and cuddling.

After the phone call, Fahim and a male friend prowled the neighborhood looking for girls to follow and flirt with -- called “street teasing.”

“It’s no fun,” said a 17-year-old high school student also named Maryam, complaining of the flirtatious remarks young men make in the street.

“It happens whenever we go to the city and there are some boys on the way and they tease us. They’ll normally follow me for an hour.”

Mina Osmani, 16, a butcher’s daughter who wants to be a journalist, is a brave, perky girl who talks to boys on the phone in her spare time.

“Do you want to meet tomorrow at 12?” a boy asked her over the speaker phone.

“Yes,” she said, but added, “I am scared. Should I tell a lie to my father?”

“Tell him I’m your classmate,” advised the boy.

Most young men have one ideal girl who fits their model of perfection, the one they hope to marry -- usually a relative. Fahim said his cousins -- one of whom he might marry -- and his sisters are extremely virtuous, and very different from his girlfriends. His sisters and cousins would never go out walking and meeting boys, he said.

Brows furrow deep when you ask an Afghan man what he would do if he found out his sister had a boyfriend. It is an unthinkable question.

In the Taliban era, it was dangerous for lovers to meet, but not impossible. There were private rooms in restaurants where they could go, at the risk of a Taliban raid. A rendezvous could be arranged in the back rooms of shops or at a family house left vacant for a few days.

Young lovers who were stopped and questioned by the religious police would claim to be siblings or spouses. The police would separate them and order each to list all the other person’s relatives. So the first thing new lovers did was memorize a long list of relations.

After the Taliban fell, there were more opportunities for boys and girls to meet and talk, on the way to school or in classrooms. The area where girls congregate in front of Kabul University was optimistically dubbed the “Park of Love,” though it is rather unapproachable for boys.

But security police still stop couples driving in cars or seen together in quiet streets and question them.

Soldiers patrol some campuses and ensure that girls and boys don’t meet there out of classrooms.

“The boys are hanging around, mooning after the girls,” said Marina, 23, who is studying to be a teacher. “But now the soldiers won’t let the girls leave the faculty building. You can’t walk with boys in the university.

“If there are boys and girls sitting together and studying, it’s not a problem. But if they’re walking somewhere or sightseeing or they’re laughing together, then the police can arrest them,” she said.

One boy who came to meet a girl at university reportedly was beaten by soldiers, shoved into a car and driven away.

After Nazifa’s engagement was broken, she became damaged goods in the eyes of potential suitors. Abrahim, who is poor and unemployed, sent his mother to propose again, but Nazifa’s father asked for $400 as the “bride price” -- the money paid by a suitor to a woman’s family. When a generous friend came up with the money, the father doubled the price.

For Abrahim, love is a thread of torture and wild hope that runs crookedly through his life. However much he puzzles over his love, there is no solution unless Nazifa’s father relents. Meanwhile, there is the threat that her family will marry her to someone in Kandahar, where the bride price is high.

“I feel depressed. I feel exhausted,” Abrahim said. “I think: What’s wrong with me? Why don’t I have money? Why don’t I have power?”

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Dixon was recently on assignment in Afghanistan.