A wedding is like a small death. The bride’s family mourns in the days following the wedding, as though it were a funeral. A daughter is lost, sold or given away. The mothers especially grieve. They have had complete control over their daughters, where they go, who they meet, what they wear, what they eat. They have spent most of the day together, got up together, swept the house together, and cooked together. After the wedding the daughter disappears, completely; she goes from one family to the other. She cannot visit when she wants, only when her husband allows her. Her family cannot drop in on her without an invitation.

In an apartment in block no. 37 in Mikrorayon a mother laments her daughter, who now lives an hour’s walk away. But it makes no difference whether Shakila is in the village Deh Khudaidad immediately outside Kabul, or in a foreign country thousands of miles away across the sea. As long as she is not on the mat by her mother’s side, drinking tea and eating sugared almonds, the loss is just as hard to bear.

Bibi Gul cracks another almond; she had hidden it under the mattress so her youngest daughter Leila would not find it. Leila makes sure that her mother does not eat herself to death. Like a nurse at a health-spa, she has forbidden sugar and fat and snatches the food out of Bibi Gul’s hand if she helps herself to something banned. When she can afford the time she cooks special fat-free food for her mother. But Bibi Gul pours fat from the family’s plates over her food when Leila is not watching. She loves the taste of cooking-oil, warm mutton fat and deep-fried pakora, or sucking marrow from bones at the end of a meal. Food is her comfort. If she feels peckish after supper she often gets up at night to lick pots and scrape pans. Bibi Gul never loses weight, in spite of Leila’s efforts; on the contrary, her girth increases every year. And anyhow, she has her little stashes everywhere, in old chests, under carpets, behind a crate. Or in her bag. That’s where she carries cream toffees: discoloured, mealy, grainy cream toffees from Pakistan, cloyingly sweet and sometimes even rancid. But they are cream toffees, there is a picture of cows on the wrapper and no one can hear her sucking them.

The almonds, on the other hand, she must crack in silence. Bibi Gul feels sorry for herself. She is alone in the room. She sits on the mat and rocks backwards and forwards, while hiding the almonds in her hand. She stares into space. The sound of pots and pans banging in the kitchen reaches her. Soon all the daughters will have left. Shakila has gone, Bulbula is on her way out. When Leila goes she won’t know what to do. No one will be left to look after her.

‘No one is going to get Leila before I die,’ she says about her nineteen-year-old. Many have asked for her but Bibi Gul’s answer has always been no. No one else will look after her the way Leila does.

Bibi Gul doesn’t do a stroke of work any more. She sits in the corner, drinks tea and broods. Her working life is over. When a woman has grown-up daughters, she becomes a sort of warden who bestows advice, guards the family’s morals – in practice, the morals of the daughters. She makes sure they do not go out alone, that they cover up appropriately, that they do not meet men outside the family, that they are obedient and polite. Politeness is, according to Bibi Gul, the greatest virtue. After Sultan, she is second in command.

Her thoughts drift to Shakila who now lives behind tall mud walls; unfamiliar walls. She pictures her heaving heavy buckets full of water from the well in the backyard, surrounded by chickens and ten motherless children. Bibi Gul worries that she might have made a mistake. What if he is unkind? Anyhow, the flat is so empty without Shakila.

In truth, the little flat is only a tiny bit emptier without the daughter. Instead of twelve, eleven people now live in the four rooms. Sultan, Sonya and their year-old daughter sleep in one room. Sultan’s brother Yunus and the oldest son Mansur sleep in a second. In the third room, the remainder: Bibi Gul, her two unmarried daughters Bulbula and Leila, Sultan’s two younger sons Eqbal and Aimal, and Mariam’s son Fazil – their cousin and Bibi Gul’s grandson.

The fourth room is a storage room for books and postcards, rice and bread, winter clothes in the summer and summer clothes in the winter. The family’s clothes are stored in big boxes, as none of the rooms has cupboards. Every day a lot of time is taken up searching. Standing or sitting amongst the boxes the women of the family examine garments, shoes, a lopsided bag, a broken container, a ribbon, a pair of scissors or a tablecloth. The items are either deemed worthy of wearing, or are just studied and put back into the box again. Only rarely is anything thrown away, and the number of boxes grows. Every day a little reshuffling takes place in the storage room; everything has to be moved if someone is looking for something at the bottom of a box.

In addition to the huge boxes containing family clothes and rubbish, every member of the family has a small chest with a lock. The women wear the key fastened to their dress. The chest is the only private item they possess and every day one can see them sitting on the floor bent over it. They take up a piece of jewellery, look at it, maybe try it on, put it back, apply some cream they forgot they had, or sniff some perfume someone gave them once. Maybe they pore over a photograph of a cousin and get lost in a dream, or, like Bibi Gul, take out some cream toffees or a biscuit squirrelled away.

Sultan has a glass-fronted bookcase through which the covers can be read and which he can lock. The bookcase contains collections of poetry by Hafez and Rumi, and hundred-year-old travelogues and frayed old atlases. In secret places between the pages he also hides his money. Afghanistan ’s banking system cannot be trusted. In this book-cupboard Sultan has his most precious works, books that have been dedicated, books that he wants to read sometime in the future. But for now he is in his bookshop all day and has no time. He leaves home before eight and returns at eight in the evening. There is only time left to play with baby Latifa, eat supper and lay down the law should anything have happened in the family while he was away. Usually it has not; life for the housebound women is quiet and it is beneath Sultan’s dignity to resolve their squabbles.

In the bottom of the cupboard Sonya keeps her personal things. Some pretty shawls, some money, toys that the mother, from her simple background, thinks are too good for Latifa to play with. The Barbie doll copy, which Latifa was given on her first birthday, still sits on top of the cupboard, wrapped in wrinkled cellophane.

The bookcase is the only furniture in the house; there is neither TV nor radio. The only ornaments are threadbare mats along the walls and large, uncomfortable cushions. The mats are used for sleeping on at night, sitting on in the daytime. The cushions are pillows at night and prop up backs during the day. For meals a waxed cloth is put out on the floor. Everyone sits around, cross-legged, and eats with their fingers. When the meal is over the cloth is washed and rolled up.

The floors are cold stone covered with large rugs. The walls are cracked. The doors are lopsided and some cannot be closed and have to remain open. Some of the rooms are separated by just a bed-sheet. The holes in the windows are stopped with old towels.

In the kitchen there is a sink, a gas primus and a hot plate on the floor. On the windowsills lie vegetables and bits and pieces from the previous day. The shelves have curtains to protect the crockery from dirt and smoke from the primus. But however hard they try to keep it clean, there is always a layer of grease, to which a sprinkling of Kabul ’s perpetual dust clings, over benches, shelves and sills.