A few days ago our house hosted a small get-together amongst other development worker friends. The doorbell rang, a tall Afghan woman walked in, and the din of the gathering suddenly hushed as one of my housemates went to talk to the woman privately. After a lengthy conversation and whispers that I only vaguely grasped, the woman left and the housemate returned with a look of sorrow on her face, and explained the whole story.

Our next door neighbor is embroiled in a family dispute that, in this country, can only be solved outside the courts. Boy meets girl, boy marries girl, families disapprove. It had the underpinnings of Romeo and Juliet but as my housemate continued to explain, tragic love is not so romantic in Afghanistan. The girl’s family is so disapproving that they bring charges against him (for what, I am unsure) and he is temporarily detained in prison. A judge rules him innocent, the man is let go and sets out to start a new life with his pregnant wife, away from both families. Of course the young wife’s family is even more incensed, now that the legal system, in their eyes, has failed them. So they instead rely on the tried-and-true cultural tradition of “bad”.

“Bad” itself, as it was explained to me, is merely an in-kind transfer of goods, similar to bartering – I’ll trade you my juice for your cookies. In this case, however, it is being used for retribution, and the commodities to be traded are women. I’ll take away one of your daughters now that you have taken away one of mine. The wife’s family threatened to do this by marrying one of the daughters in the husband’s family into their family. Since this is done in revenge it is understood that whoever the unfortunate girl may be, she will essentially be a slave to that family for the remainder of her life – if not something far, far worse.

Whatever punishment was threatened, it was serious enough to warrant the entire family of nine women and two men to pack up all their things that day and flee across the border to Peshawar, where they will return, once again, to their former lives as Afghan refugees in Pakistan. The mystery woman who came to our house was the eldest sister, the lone breadwinner. As neighbor and friend of my housemate, she came to say goodbye before taking her family away to safety, in the night, indefinitely.