Laila has the premonition on a spring morning of 1994 that “Rasheed knew” what she had been keeping from him (251). It is the day she has planned to leave with Mariam and Aziza. With both Laila and Mariam wearing burqas, they are nervous about being found out.

At the Lahore Gate bus station in East Kabul, the women have to find a man to pose as a family member because the freedoms that women enjoyed under the Communists between 1978 and 1992 were now over. Since the Mujahideen’s takeover in April 1992, Afghanistan became “the Islamic State of Afghanistan” and women’s rights, including the prerogative to travel without a male relative, were curbed (253).

Laila finds a young man named Wakil, with “soft eyes [and] a kind face” and tells him that she is a widow travelling with her mother (Mariam) and daughter (Aziza) and that they were going to Peshawar to stay with an uncle (255). He understands that she wants to travel with his family. She slips him some money.

However, a militiaman stops themand tells them they are not getting on the bus and takes them to a police station at Torabaz Khan Intersection.