This small book offers a heartbreaking glimpse inside the lives of Pashtun women, whose days are constricted by a fundamentalist society that views them as second-class citizens. From birth they are doomed, but their hearts refuse the limitations imposed by males. Their minds overflow with words of love and unrequited passion.

The crux of their suffering, as expressed by the Pashtun women, is the moral dimension of their subjugation. As women they are repressed, scorned and abused from birth to death. Their shame is that of a mother who gives birth to a daughter, passing the news to a father who mourns the birth of his child. A boy child would receive a party and a fusillade of gunshots to announce his arrival in the world, the girl child only sadness.

The girl child is destined to a life of inferiority: When she marries, her husband shall not meet with her. Still, she willingly accepts her burden, performing lifelong duties from dawn to dark. Resistance grows within her heart, expressed either in suicide (forbidden in Islam) or in song (landays). The earliest landays have three themes: love, honor and death. Landays are about physical reality, not spiritual, and they address only issues of the heart: woman as tragic heroine, destined never to know fulfillment.

If a woman falls in love, it is with the knowledge that she will never know the expression of that love, only its loss; she will be protected by the men in her family, married to the husband of their choice -- commonly known as “the little horror." This woman will never compose a landay to her husband, because love and fidelity belong exclusively to the lover. The lover may escape retribution, but the woman will feel the wrath of the men:

“By your side I am beautiful with my mouth extended and my open arms/
And you, like a coward/
you let yourself be rocked by slumber.”

After the Russian Invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the landays take on a patriotic tone as well, as millions are massacred and more than four million seek refuge in neighboring states. The landays from the period of exile lose some of their lightheartedness, anchored by mourning and addressing instead the loss of native soil, the despair of exodus, battle and love of place:

“God, do not let any woman die in exile!/
With her last breath she will forget Your Name/
so as to think only of her native land.”