In the books taken from the underground box, there were no burqas. There were no girls whipped with pomegranate branches and they were never traded for fighting dogs. There was no girl given away to the city’s aged holy man, no beaten girl who threw herself down a well to avoid being stoned to death. There was no girl forced by her father to wear boys’ clothes and to play the role of the family’s son. In those buried books, women didn’t whisper their stories to the water or go to graveyards to talk with the dead about their loneliness.
