TRAGEDIES (CHILD BRIDES)

By: Nasser Yousaf

Child Brides

Some days before this year’s Booker prize winner was announced, newspapers across the world carried reports of a phenomenal jump in sale of the six shortlisted books. Such blatant publicity in the rather serious world of literature, and the manner in which it influences our reading preferences, has come to be accepted without a whimper. The flip side of such gimmickry is that it recedes lesser known writers writing on important issues into oblivion.

Every book is said to be a mirror that shows us what is inside us. A couple of months ago, one found out that one such mirror, lying unnoticed on a shelf in the Abbottabad Public Library, was ‘Opium Nation’ by Fariba Nawa. Now in her mid forties, Fariba emigrated to the US with her parents in the early eighties when resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was gaining momentum by the day.

Many years later at the turn of the millennium, Fariba decided to return to her motherland only to find it still struggling with an endless insurgency and its concomitant pitfalls. She found out that the Soviets had now been replaced by the US led NATO alliance, but what troubled her most was the abysmal state of the Afghan society, rent asunder by social evils. Originally from Herat, she travelled the length of Afghanistan to come up with a heart-wrenching account of a country in the grip of a grave human tragedy.

The decades-long war in Afghanistan has inspired many books on the myriad conflicts, extreme poverty and the poor state of infrastructure in this sad country. In fact, the number of books written on Afghanistan during the last four decades far outnumber the sum total of all books ever written on this ancient country. With one title more tempting than the other, most of these books were penned down by writers and travellers from the west. But one must know that it is none other than the native who tells his/her story the best, and this is what Fariba appears to have done in her book.

While bravely pursuing opium traders through out the remote and unfrequented corners of her godforsaken country, events and encounters, one seedier than the other, bring Fariba face to face with Darya, the ten-years old protagonist of her moving account. What is most poignant about her narrative is that it is not fiction but based on the writer’s true experience. In her hometown of Herat, Fariba discovered that Darya had been pledged by her father to an opium trader from Helmand in lieu of a debt pending against the former on account of losses incurred during an opium shipment to Iran.

As Fariba doggedly pursues Darya with the aim of rescuing her, she incurs the strong displeasure of the child’s father and the deep consternation of the proposed bridegroom, a man old enough to be the child’s father. As often as possible during her visits to Herat, Fariba would visit Darya in her house only to see a glint of light in the child’s forlorn eyes, a light that kept fast receding under mounting pressure exerted on her parents by the man to be her life partner. When after one relatively long absence Fariba returned to Afghanistan from US, she found Darya to have had been married off. Dismissing suggestions from Darya’s mother to consider the matter closed, Fariba stubbornly travelled to the redoubtable confines of Helmand only to hear that at age twelve Darya had become mother to a son.

The foregoing is not intended to be a review of ‘Opium Nation,’ but one wouldn’t offer any apologies if it is considered to be one for the book indeed is a looking glass that we Pashtuns must not try to screen with trite platitudes. Daily, we come across scores of Pashtun girls of Darya’s age on the streets and in the bazaars of our cities, begging out rightly or pretending to be selling coriander leaves only to be pitied at in expectation of alms.

It is impossible not to think of Darya lurking behind these ten or twelve-years old girls. When asked about the whereabouts of their parents, these children either feign ignorance or reply curtly that their fathers were daily wage earners. Invariably, all these girls are Pashtuns, and undoubtedly would be married off by their parents to the first best contenders.

Ironically, using women as commodities is a regressive facet of the Pashtun culture which is not only tolerated but finds acceptance in a society that considers honour to be its guiding motto.  Hitherto, we would hear of parents asking for a price from the bridegroom’s family in return for their daughter’s hand, and willy-nilly, the custom found acceptance among a section of the Pashtuns. In another gruesome spectre, girls are used in settling disputes arising out of enmities. All these shady dealings become all that more galling if the victims happen to be minors.

If the provisional report of the 2017 census is any guide, then Pashtuns appear to be procreating at an astounding rate. More mouths mean more societal degeneration. Instead of taking pride in flimsy notions that treat Pashtuns as valiant strategic assets, Pashtun politicians and literati need to focus on cleaning stables in their yards.L