A HOMECOMING DENIED
Wahidullah plays a game of karam at the UNHCR sponsored English language training centre
The Globe and Mail, January 13, 2007
SONYA FATAH
NEW DELHI — Wahidullah and Rahila Malikzad live with their two young children in a shabby room in south Delhi. They are thousands of kilometres from home, but they are safe. In their native Afghanistan, the enmity between their families would have left them dead long ago.
They met more than five years ago, when their families lived in the same apartment block in Kabul. But their union was forbidden: Wahid was of the Tajik tribe and Shia; Rahila was Pashtun and Sunni.
Her family supported the Taliban and her eldest brother was an enlisted foot soldier. When her parents learned about her romance with Wahid, they beat her.
The couple fled overland to Pakistan, where an imam in a local mosque married them. For two years, they were settled in Hayatabad, close to the frontier city of Peshawar. Wahid continued to work in the carpet business and soon accumulated some wealth.
But after their first child, Farhad, was born, the couple yearned to return home. They hoped their success and their newborn child, a son no less, would warm their parents’ hearts. So, with little Farhad in tow, the two returned to Afghanistan.
Now, they acknowledge their naiveté. “It was my fault,” said a soft-spoken Wahid, resting on his haunches in one corner of the room. “I saw her youngest brother in the market place and told him where we lived. Rahila’s brothers sent hit men to hunt me down.”
With less than 20,000 rupees (about $500 Canadian), they fled once more, this time to India, a country that has warmly welcomed a steady stream of Afghan refugees since the Taliban came to power in the mid-1990s.
India has no defined refugee laws and treats refugees under Article 21 of its own Constitution, which confers upon all individuals the right to life. That means Wahid and Rahila can stay on the assumption that their lives are in danger, but like other refugees in India, they don’t have the right to work in the formal sector.
For Wahid and Rahila that is a minor worry. They are still waiting for the UN to approve their refugee status. Meanwhile they survive on the pittance that Rahila earns for cooking food and washing clothes for an elderly neighbour.
“We are happy here in India,” a liberated Rahila said in her family’s sparsely furnished New Delhi room. A single bed stands in one corner and a ruby red carpet is spread across the stone floor. A TV, a gift from a well wisher, is the only sign of wealth.
“We are not in touch with my family or my husband’s family. Our lives were in danger in Afghanistan. We left everything behind but we are safe here.”
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