A tulip in the desert

A Tulip in the Desert is the story of Amina, a nine year old girl from a small village in the Waziristan region of northern Pakistan. She lives in an extended family system surrounded by the families of her father’s male relatives in an enclosed compound called a kot. Amina narrates the next ten years of her tremulous life. Ups and downs in her tale open a window into the enigmatic society of ultra-conservative Waziristan where modernity has made little inroads. Life is particularly harsh for girls as they are kept extremely constrained and their fates are decided entirely by their male relatives. Amina puts up an enduring fight against the system albeit at a high cost. As if life isn’t hard enough for her, she develops a forbidden passion for an elite sport, a sport that has no place in this “medieval” society, and is utterly forbidden for a Waziri girl. Her passion for this sport starts as another one of her battles but soon becomes an all-consuming war during which she finds totally unexpected allies and even more unexpected adversaries. A new twist comes with the start of the American-Afghan war. Thousands of Afghani Taliban flood her village as refugees but soon start imposing their versions of Islamic laws and morality. On one front, Amina’s family and other villagers become repeated targets of Taliban vengeance while on the other front they become collateral damage of the American bombing. Amina recounts how these events seal the fate of each member of her extended family while decisively impacting her passion for playing her sport at an international level.