A new day which smells and tastes like every other day: of dust.

One afternoon Leila pulls the burka over her head, puts on her high-heeled outdoor shoes and sneaks out of the flat; past the broken entrance-door, the washing hanging out, out to the yard. She picks up a little neighbourhood boy as escort and chaperone. They cross the bridge over the dried-up Kabul River and disappear under the trees on one of Kabul ’s few avenues. They pass shoe-blacks, melon-vendors and bakers, and men who just stand around and hang about. Those are the ones Leila hates, the ones with time on their hands, the ones who take time to gape.

The leaves on the trees are green for the first time in many years. The last three years it hardly rained in Kabul and the sun burnt the buds to cinders. Now, this first spring following the Taliban’s flight, it has rained quite a lot, blessed rain, wonderful rain. Not enough to fill the Kabul River to its banks, but enough to make the few surviving trees sprout and turn green. Enough to allow the dust to settle now and again, the dust, the fine dust which is Kabul ’s curse. When it rains the dust turns to mud, when it’s dry it whirls around, gets into the nose, causes inflammation of the eyes, sits in the throat and muddies up the lungs. This afternoon it rained and the wind freshened. But the moist air does not penetrate the burka. Leila is aware only of the smell of her own nervous breathing and her temples pulsating.

On a concrete block of flats in Mikrorayon no. 4 big signs have been hung with the word ‘Courses’. The queues outside are long. There are literacy courses, computer courses and writing courses. Leila wants to sign up for an English course. Outside the entrance two men sit at a table to register new pupils. Leila pays the fee and joins the queue with hundreds of others who are trying to find their classroom. They descend some stairs and enter a cellar, which looks like a bomb shelter. The bullet holes form patterns on the walls. The premises were used for storing weapons during the civil war, right under a block of flats. Planks divide the various ‘classrooms’. Each cubicle has a blackboard, a pointer and some benches. There are even desks in some of the cubicles. There is a low drone of voices; the heat starts to spread in the room.

Leila finds her section, ‘slightly advanced English’. She is early; so are some gangly, loutish boys.

Can it be possible? Boys in the class? she wonders. She wants to turn and disappear but steels herself. She goes and sits at the back. Two girls sit quietly in the other corner. The voices from the other cubicles blend in one low buzz. Sharp teachers’ voices penetrate the walls. Some time passes before their teacher turns up. The boys start scribbling on the blackboard. ‘Pussy’, they write. ‘Dick, Fuck’. Leila regards the words uninterestedly. She has an English/Persian dictionary and looks the words up, under the table, so the boys won’t see it. But she cannot find the words. She feels great distaste for the whole situation: alone, or nearly alone, with a gang of boys her own age, some of them even a bit older. She should never have come, she regrets it. What if some of the boys started talking to her? What a disgrace. And she has even taken off her burka. You cannot wear a burka in the classroom, she had thought. And now she has already exposed her face.

The teacher arrives and the boys quickly rub out the words. The hour is torture. They all have to present themselves, give their age and say something in English. The teacher, a thin, young man, points at her with the ruler and asks her to speak. She feels she is turning her soul inside out, in front of these boys. She feels dirty, exposed, her honour impaired. What on earth was she thinking of? She had never dreamt that there would be boys and girls in the same class, never, it was not her fault.

She dares not leave. The teacher would ask her why. But when the hour is over she rushes out. Throws the burka on and dashes off. Safely home she hangs the burka on the nail in the hall.

‘Awful, there were boys in the class!’

The others stare open-mouthed. ‘That’s no good,’ says her mother. ‘You mustn’t go there again.’

Leila would not even dream of going back. The Taliban might have disappeared but they were still present in Leila’s head, and in Bibi Gul’s and Sharifa’s and in Sonya’s. The women in Mikrorayon were glad the Taliban era was over, they could play music, they could dance, paint their toenails – as long as no one saw them, and they could hide under the safe burka. Leila was a true child of the civil war, the mullah reign and the Taliban. A child of fear. She cried inside. The attempt to break away, do something independent, learn something, had failed. During five years of Taliban reign girls’ education had been forbidden. Now it was allowed, but she forbade herself. If only Sultan had allowed her to go to high school there would not have been a problem. There the classes were segregated.

She sat down on the kitchen floor to chop onions and potatoes. Sonya was eating a fried egg and nursing Latifa. Leila could not bear to talk to her. The stupid girl who had not even learnt the alphabet. Who did not even try. Sultan got her a private tutor to teach her to read and write. But nothing stuck, every hour was like the first one, and having learnt five letters in as many months, she gave up and asked Sultan if she could stop. Mansur had laughed scornfully from the outset at Sonya’s private literacy course. ‘When a man has everything and does not know what more to do, he tries to teach his donkey to talk,’ he said aloud and laughed. Even Leila, who on the whole disliked everything Mansur said, had to laugh at the joke.

Leila tried to lord it over Sonya and reprimanded her when she said something stupid or was unable to manage, but only when Sultan was away. To Leila Sonya was the poor country bumpkin who had been lifted up into their relative wealth only because she was pretty. She disliked her for the many privileges Sultan gave her and because the two girls although the same age had such dissimilar workloads. She had nothing personal against Sonya, who sat around with a mild, absent expression, watching what was happening around her. She wasn’t really lazy either; she had been a good worker at home, looking after her parents in the village. But Sultan would not let her work hard. When he was away, she often helped. Nevertheless, she got on Leila’s nerves. She sat all day, waiting for Sultan, and jumped up when he returned. When he was away on business she dressed shabbily. When he was at home she powdered her dark face, blackened her eyes and painted her lips.

Sonya had made the transition from child to wife when she was sixteen. She cried before the wedding, but like a well-behaved girl, she soon got used to the idea. She had grown up without any expectations from life and Sultan had used the two-month-long period of engagement to his advantage. He had bribed her parents to enable him to spend time alone with Sonya before the wedding. The engaged couple are not supposed to see each other between the engagement party and the wedding day, a custom rarely observed. But it was one thing to go shopping together, quite another to spend nights together. That was unheard of. Her big brother wanted to defend her honour with a knife when he learnt that Sultan had paid the parents money to be allowed to stay overnight before the wedding night. But Sonya’s indignant brother, too, was silenced with ready cash and Sultan got his way. In his eyes he did her a favour.

‘I must prepare her for the wedding night, she is very young and I am experienced,’ he told the parents. ‘If we spend time together now the wedding night won’t be so shocking. But I promise I will not assault her,’ he said. Gradually he prepared the sixteen-year-old for the great night.