MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan — On the surface, the Gul sisters seemed to have
it all: they were young, beautiful, educated and well off, testing the bounds
of conservative Afghan traditions with fitted jeans, makeup and cellphones.
But Nabila Gul, 17, a bright and spunky high school
student, pushed it too far. She fell in love.
Her older sister, Fareba, 25, alarmed at the potential
shame and consequences of Nabila’s pursuit of a young man outside of family
channels, tried to intervene. Their argument that November day ended in grief:
side-by-side coffins, both girls dead within hours of each other after
consuming rat poison stolen from their father’s grain closet.
Interviews with family members and government and hospital
officials here reveal a tragedy of miscalculation: Under pressure from her
older sister to halt communication with the boy, Nabila tried to eat just
enough poison to scare her family but not kill herself. But she misjudged.
Overwhelmed by guilt and grief, Fareba followed by taking her own life on the
doorstep of the city’s most holy shrine.
The sisters’ deaths shattered their family and have
struck a chilling chord for the residents of Mazar-i-Sharif, a city
increasingly marked by the despair of its young women. For many, the deaths
have come to symbolize a larger crisis: an intensifying wave of suicide
attempts.
Although the government says it does not collect data
on these cases, the city’s main hospital says it has been overwhelmed, with
three or four such patients coming in every day, up from about one or two a
month a decade ago.
The number of attempts has grown with such speed that
the head of investigations for the police, Col. Salahudin Sultan, says he can
no longer follow up on them.
“We don’t have the time or resources to investigate
these,” he explained. “We would hardly get anything else done.”
As for the questions of why, and why here, there seem
to be as many theories as there are cases. Most explanations focus on Mazar’s status
in Afghanistan as an affluent cross-cultural hub, relatively more liberal and
exposed to European influences. While Afghan girls here regularly are exposed
to the social norms of the West through television serials and the Web, the
fact is that they live in Afghanistan’s conservative and male-dominated
society. The clash is cruel, and can be heartbreaking.
“Most of the girls don’t die, but they all take poison
or at least threaten to kill themselves,” said Dr. Khowaja Noor Mohammad, the
head of internal medicine at Mazar-i-Sharif Regional Hospital. “This is their
cry for help.”
The doctor who tried to save the Gul sisters, Dr.
Khaled, produced a patient ledger for the past two months. As he pored through
the list, he uttered the names of several young women who had attempted
suicide: Fatima, Mariam, Zulfiya, Zar Gul, Basbibi.
“There are probably 200 cases in here of attempted
suicide,” said Dr. Khaled, who goes by a single name, waving the ledger in the
air. “In the last 12 hours, we had three.”
Perhaps no case is more emblematic, or more discussed,
than the deaths of the Gul sisters.
The two came from an educated, progressive family.
Mohammed Gul, their father, is a prosecutor. Nabila was on the cusp of
graduating from high school, and planned to attend college in the city. Fareba
was already attending college and hoped to follow her father’s footsteps into
the legal profession. The young women were determinedly modern, and would not
have seemed out of place in many Western cities.
Nabila was impetuous, with a quick temper and a strong
sense of self. She often challenged what Fareba told her, rejecting the
deference held for elders in Afghan society. Fareba, a softhearted woman who
often wept after small arguments, confided to a close friend that she felt
Nabila did not respect her.
Their last fight, the morning of Nov. 26, involved a
boy Nabila said she was in love with. Fareba thought the relationship was
inappropriate, and urged her sister against it. Nabila refused, and the two
began shouting.
Their mother heard the fight, and ran in to break it
up, slapping Nabila twice across her face for talking back to her older sister,
according to people close to the family. The younger girl ran off in tears.
An hour later, Nabila’s mother discovered her on the
floor of her room, white foam dripping from the corners of her mouth.
At the hospital, doctors tried desperately to cleanse
the rat poison from her system as family members surrounded the bed, begging
Nabila to recover.
The mother shot an angry glance at Fareba and said: “If
Nabila dies, it will be your fault,” according to a doctor in the room at the
time.
Mohammed Gul sat quietly, holding his daughter’s hand.
She went in and out of consciousness. She said that she had not meant to take
so much poison, and that she regretted it now.
At 2:30 p.m., Nabila died. On the way home from the
hospital, her father suffered a heart attack, and was admitted as a patient.
At the house, people began to gather. The Guls’ eldest
son, Abdul Wahid, played host to the mourners who crowded into the pale green
parlor of the house. But he was worried about Fareba, the sister he was closest
to. She was not answering calls or texts.
At 4 p.m., his phone rang. It was Fareba. Her voice
hoarse and slow, she said she was at the Hazrat Ali shrine, a stunning mosque
of cerulean tile in a sea of white marble. Stuck at the house with the
visitors, Abdul Wahid asked his uncle, Malim Faiz Mohammad, to get her.
When he arrived at the mosque, Mr. Mohammad spotted a
crowd near the entrance to the shrine. He found his niece lying on the cold
marble in the center of the crowd. Strands of foam leaked from a corner of her
mouth.
He rushed her to the hospital. Doctors put Fareba in a
room down the hall from her father, who was still recovering. Neither knew the
other was there.
No one else knew of Fareba’s whereabouts, either. With
the family preoccupied preparing Nabila’s body for burial, the uncle said, he
decided then to keep the matter to himself, not wanting to upend an already fragile
household.
The doctors worked on Fareba for more than an hour. Her
uncle stood by silently as they performed the same procedure that had failed to
revive her sister hours earlier. At 5:30 in the evening, the doctors pronounced
Fareba dead.
“Dying this way just doesn’t make sense,” Mr. Mohammad
said in an interview. “I wish they would have died in an accident.”
He took Fareba’s body back to the house, but hid it in
a separate room off the side of the compound where no one would see it. He
still could not bring himself to tell them the bad news.
The truth came out the next day.
Early the next morning, Mohammed Gul woke in the
hospital. He sat for a while in the sun-washed room, gathering his belongings,
still unable to grasp Nabila’s death. He needed to talk to Fareba about what
had happened, he thought.
Back home, he was escorted to the courtyard, where
coffins sat side by side.
“Why are there two coffins?” he asked his brother. “Who
is in the second one?”
The sisters are buried together in a nondescript
graveyard a few miles from the family home, their graves marked with two wooden
poles and a mound of stones. A band of Tajik children roams the cemetery,
turning the muddy slopes into a playground.
Mohammed Gul rarely eats, and suffers continued bouts
of sickness. His wife, devastated, rarely leaves their cold, concrete house.
Reminders of the loss spring from everyday rituals like sitting down at the
kitchen table, with two chairs now empty.
The parents seek comfort in small ways. At night, Mr. Gul and his wife sleep in the girls’ room, he on Fareba’s bed, his wife on Nabila’s. They have given away the sisters’ belongings, as is customary, except for a pair of dresses. On bad days, the parents clutch the clothing to their faces.