Love marriages

Dear readers, these do exist, in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif. I have it on the authority of my dear confidante in the office, who has been helping me with my Dari with great patience. Three times today, within the space of half an hour, she listened to my halting reading of the story of the clever fox and the foolish wolf.

My first Dari teacher was an Afghan refugee I met in Khujand, who had almost no teeth. It was he who first introduced me to “the claywer fowcks and the fawlish who-olf”. He was a dedicated and a gentle teacher, who took great pains to initiate me to the mysteries of Dari pronunciation, but despite all his efforts, such they remained, because coming from his mouth, all consonants were as one. Poor man, I wonder what has happened to him – the fate of the Afghan refugees who found themselves in Tajikistan is a sad one. His nephew, who was one of my English students and who introduced me to him, was a doctor who had never been able to practice, his training cut short by the Taliban.

But now that the Taliban are gone, love marriages are again taking place. They are as yet a small minority, and the definition is quite wide, as any boy and girl who have not met through the auspices of the parents, are committing a love marriage. There is quite an air of scandal surrounding such matches, even though they normally do take place with the consent of all available parents, and I usually get asked through modestly down turned eyes whether mine was a love marriage. Usually couples who marry for love meet in the university, which just goes to show that even candy coloured lip gloss and purple eye-shadow are much more beguiling than a blue cotton grille and a muffled murmur beneath it.

My friend who gave me this news has a mobile phone that beeps and trembles with received text messages very often while I sit with her, and these are never left unanswered for more than a minute, so, who knows but that there might be another love match on its way?

I am keen to find out more.