J. MALCOLM GARCIA
In Bed 19, a woman suffers from high blood pressure and burns to her feet from boiling water spilled from a pot; Bed 21 burned herself lighting an oil lamp; Bed 20 fell against a hot water heater.
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Dr. Nikzad then took the burned girl into surgery and told her, now I have to strip you. You cannot wear a burqa. No one will touch you. No one from your village will see you.
The girl felt Dr. Nikzad raise the burqa above her head.
“I am exposed,” she said.
My Afghan colleague Aziz looks at the burned girl with mournful eyes. He is dressed in gray slacks, blue shirt. Silver hair combed back, beard trimmed to perfection. But he has the drawn look of sleepless nights.
I can only guess what he is thinking. The sister of his son’s wife burned herself to death just two days before in Kabul.
The mother of a young man the girl liked had asked her parents if he could marry her. Her mother said that she would rather see her daughter burn than have him for a son-in-law. The girl overheard, and told her mother, you will see me burn. She walked into the kitchen, poured kerosene over her head, and set herself ablaze. She burned 75 percent of her body and died in the hospital. She used to be white as a sheet, Aziz had told me, but in the hospital she was black.
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