It used to be so different here. I remember what it felt like to have the sun shine on my face, the wind gently ruffling
through my hair. To walk freely, with my arms swinging through space, as if filled with an energy that gravity and
earthly limitations could not touch.

Now, it is all changed. I am told I must not enter that world, that if I do, I will distract the men from their holy
mission. That I am a vessel filled with evil, and my body is their enemy.
It's hard getting used to wearing this black cloak, too. The days here are so hot. Sometimes I feel as though I've been
engulfed in a furnace, and I can't breathe. But I dare not rip it off and fling it far away. I risk beating, humiliation,
punishment. If I expose myself to their eyes, they'll drag me to my house by my hair and stand there to make sure
my husband beats me. Saira's husband tried to make it look as though he was striking her hard, while keeping the
blows as light as possible. But they caught him out, and then administered a whipping to them both.
My daughter can't understand why our windows have been painted dark. "But I want to see outside, Mama," she
cries softly in the mornings, when the morning light is at its most kind. I try to silence her, with kind words, with
bribes, with my own tears. I hold her and cry with her. It's at times like these that the world feels as if it is spinning
backwards, and throwing us all off its surface with its deceit.

I have stopped trying to understand.

We have our own network, we sisters, daughters, friends, mothers, wives. We speak to each other not with words,
but with looks. We read the messages of sorrow that criss-cross each others' faces. This line for my collection of
classical music that they destroyed, tearing out the reels of tape and stringing them along the trees like ribbon. That
frown for the woman down the street, who was a journalist at the newspaper station, until they drove her away from
her job and burned her files. A sigh is all that escapes my elderly aunt, who could not see the doctor for her
pneumonia. No woman shall be examined by a male doctor, they said. She died three weeks ago.

Our men - if anything, they are doubly weighted by the burden of watching us being buried alive. There is no joy in
our houses, no life in our hearts. We are the living dead.

They have told us that the only life for us is in the house, taking care of our children, doing the washing, cooking,
cleaning. If they could, they would gouge out our eyes so we could not see, our ears so we could not hear. But see
and hear we do, and with every heartbeat we record more and more of this injustice in our hearts.

I, too, used to have dreams! I was going to go to Paris and study French for a year there. I hoped to see the Eiffel
Tower, the Champs Elysees, the Rue de Rivoli. Or perhaps I could have taken a trip to Eypt and gazed upon the
Great Pyramids. I would have taken in the intoxicating sights and sounds and smells of Cairo, sipped a cup of mint
tea in a roadside café.

Now, all I can do is watch the sun rise in the morning and set in the evening through the panes of blacked out glass in
my house. And count the days that go by, and listen to the crackle of artillery fire in the distance. When I pray, I ask
God if this is the way He wanted it to be for us. Sometimes I think about the Prophet, and how loving he was to his
wives. He treated them as precious gifts, not dirty pieces of offal to be thrown out with the morning's garbage.
How I wish I had paid more attention to the plight of my sisters in Afghanistan! When they, too, were made
prisoners in their own homes, surely they must have screamed - but I was too foolish to hear their voices and heed
their warning. "We are modern!" I told everyone proudly. "We are Pakistanis! We will never stand for that kind of
treatment."

May God forgive me for my arrogance.