Gula’s life: a chronology without dates

With her son and three daughters, Gula crossed into Afghanistan after completing sentence in hospital on Wednesday

PESHAWAR: “I’ve called this place home. Now, they have asked me to leave,” says the famed green-eyed Afghan woman who once epitomised the plight of refugees while resting on a hospital bed in Peshawar. She then wraps herself into a blanket and goes into silence.

A heavy contingent of police and law-enforcement agencies stand alert outside the Bolton block of the Lady Reading Hospital to guard her. Sharbat Gula, whose striking gaze and piercing green eyes captivated the world when she appeared on the cover of National Geographic in 1984, blames the media for her deportation. And this time she refuses to reveal her eyes. While the world remembers her as Steve McCurry’s famed Afghan Girl, for her family, Gula is a mother, a wife and a hepatitis C patient who lost her husband six years ago and eldest daughter three years ago to the same disease. She has three girls and a boy between the ages of five and 14.



A look into Gula’s life in Peshawar is like a chronology without dates. Her arrival date in Peshawar is disputed. What remained of a sort of record is now confiscated by the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA). Her family members with whom The Express Tribune spoke to believe she came before 1984. However, just two years later she married the brother of a social worker, Haji Shamshad Khan, who visited the Nasir Bagh Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar for philanthropic work. Khan’s brother, Rehmat Gul, worked alongside Gula’s brother in a shop and that is where the relationship was formed.

After her marriage, Gula moved to her in-laws house in Nauthia. It was there when her husband made her a Pakistani identity card [long before NADRA’s database was digitised].

With the passage of time, the health of her husband deteriorated. That is when National Geographic photographer McCurry rediscovered her in 2002. That got her some financial support. Gula bought a house for Rs4.6 million and used her identity card to strike the deal, despite the insistence of her in-laws that the property should be registered against some male member of the family. But while her husband lay on the deathbed, she wanted to make sure her children had a home. The house was bought, says the family and one of her brother-in-laws was given the lower portion.

But then on one April morning in 2014, Gula heard that NADRA was digitising all CNICs and that’s when she landed in trouble. Five months later, investigators arrived at her doorstep and not just hers but the CINCs of the 48-member family were blocked. “She was asked one question: who were the officials who made her the card,” says her husband’s nephew, Naimat Gul. There was a court summons. “That’s when we realised that we need to get her to Afghanistan,” he adds.



Gula’s village is in Kot in Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province. “Dae’sh wields a considerable influence there, and sending her back would have meant certain death,” he concludes. The only reason Gula stayed back was to sell her property. While the deal was made at a much lower price, the blocked CNIC made it impossible to complete the transaction. And that is when she was taken into custody by the FIA. Gula, along with her son Moeed and three daughters — Zahida, Masta and Alia — crossed into Afghanistan after she completed her sentence in the hospital on Wednesday. She crossed Torkham at 2:37am, says the official record.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 10^th, 2016.