By Asma Rabi

The street was narrow, barely wide enough for two cars to pass side by side. A shallow, murky stream of wastewater trickled down the edge of the road. It slithered quietly beneath the rickety planks that served as makeshift bridges between homes, shops, and one ageing school. A refugee school, tucked between crumbling brick walls and the echoes of stories too heavy for its broken wooden doors to hold.

That day, the sky was grey. Not ominous, just dull. As if the sun, too, was waiting for something. I entered a school whose bricks had never seen plaster. Inside, the classroom was dark; the light filtered through barred windows. The benches were mismatched, and the paint faded. But that day, as I stepped inside with my tablet and keyboard, something inside that unfinished room felt complete.

Her name was Zarmeena

She sat near the back, wearing a white scarf. Her hands were clasped together on her lap, and her eyes big, brown, and restless, followed every movement, every word. She was 14, maybe 15. When I asked her why she wanted to study, she didn’t hesitate. “Because I want to become someone,” she said in a whisper. “Someone who understands things. Someone who doesn’t have to be told what’s right for her.”

Later, she told me she was engaged.

“It’s okay,” she said. “My parents chose him. Parents always want what’s good.”

I remember walking out after the interview. The clouds had cleared. The sun was sharp and sudden, almost too bright for a moment. I sat in the car, closed the door behind me, and returned home in silence. I submitted the interview the next day and moved on.

But I never forgot her.
Years passed.
Then, in 2025, I received a call.

It was an unknown number, and I almost didn’t pick up. But I did. And on the other end, it was her. Zarmeena. Her voice was still quiet, but quicker now, urgent. There wasn’t much time. She said she had memorised her textbooks. Every line of her Grade 11 and 12 curriculum. “I know them by page,” she said. “Ask me anything.”

But she wasn’t calling to show off.

She was calling because she was being forced to leave. Her family, like thousands of others, had received notice. Their time in Pakistan was up. They were to return to Afghanistan.

Back to a country where her dreams were now illegal.I asked if she had gotten married. She said no. Her fiancé had been killed.

In the days that followed, I tried everything. Calls, messages, contacts. But it was too late. She was gone. Deported back to a country where girls are told to stay home. Where schools for young women are shuttered. Where futures like Zarmeena’s are silenced before they begin.

As of 2025, over a million Afghans, many of them undocumented, have been repatriated from Pakistan under evolving state policies and shifting diplomatic pressures. According to UNHCR, the scale of these returns has strained both resources and rights. Especially for girls. Especially for those like Zarmeena, who held onto their books like lifelines.

Pakistan has been a place of refuge for over four decades, extending shelter and solidarity through countless crises. But with economic burdens, border politics, and the lack of a comprehensive protection framework for many Afghans, the space for refugees, especially young women seeking education, has grown narrower than the street that led me to that old wooden door. Millions of Afghan women and girls are about to return to a country where their futures are systematically erased. Women in Afghanistan are not allowed to study beyond grade six, stripped of the right to work and confined to their homes. Even ordinary spaces of freedom, like beauty salons, have been shuttered. Leaving women with fewer places to breathe or to simply exist beyond the four walls of their houses.

Zarmeena never asked for much. Just to keep studying. And though she may now be across a border, in a place where girls must hide their notebooks, I still believe her story can cross boundaries. Because somewhere, those pages, those she memorised word for word, are still inside her. And somewhere, someone has to keep reading them aloud.

Zarmeena’s name has been changed to protect her identity.