Gita Mahasti Payda

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Nabila Saeedi

I wanted to walk up to the door and knock, but there was no one left behind it to open it anymore. The seven colored flowers in the garden had withered, the tall cypress trees no longer stood at the gate to cast their shade, and from inside the classrooms there was no sound of chairs scraping or desks being arranged. The teachers who used to scold the playful girls were gone too. The space was empty of the students who once sang with such excitement every single day.
From atop the crumbling walls, I looked into the deserted schoolyard. The wind twisted through the emptiness. My eyes followed the dusty, abandoned steps leading to the classrooms. Tears gathered in my eyes as I turned back toward home. I stared at the tiny stones sinking deeper into the dirt beneath my feet. Even passing by the spring near the shrine no longer felt the way it used to. I looked at everything with a tired, distant gaze. I didn’t even want anyone to greet me.
At the gate of our house, Nilab — the neighbor’s daughter — hurried toward me, smiling. She said, “Sahar, I brought my math book so you can teach me.” Her home wasn’t a suitable place for lessons, and I wanted children her age to keep learning.
That evening, I went to my aunt Laila’s house.
Aunt Laila lived with her husband and her son. Her husband was blind, and her son, Fardin, went to university every day and returned in the evening. People didn’t visit my aunt much, and she rarely left the house because she had to care for her husband. Her home felt like a safe place — somewhere we didn’t have to fear bad things happening.
My aunt agreed to let me use the basement of her old, half abandoned house as a classroom.
The basement had clean air and smelled of damp earth. The floor was firm and even, though the ceiling and walls were cracked in places. But since we didn’t want the authorities to find out, it was the best place we had.
I told Nilab to gather her friends and bring them to our little class the next day.
On the first day, only Nilab and two of her classmates — the ones who hadn’t been able to return to school — came with me. When I say “those left behind from school,” it feels like someone is driving a steel dagger into my heart, pulling it back a little, then stabbing even harder. There were only a few years between me and my students, and I myself was one of those “left behind.” That fear — the fear of our secret class being discovered — never left me.
My mother strongly opposed me teaching under such conditions. She said, “Your father isn’t here, your brother has left the country, and Maryam is still so young. If the Taliban take you, where am I supposed to look for you?”
After a while, to calm my mother, I could think of no solution except to close the class. The next day, at the end of the lesson, I told the girls that class would be closed for a week.
The days passed like years. Loneliness and regret clung to me. One day, a small boy came to our door and handed me a letter.
I opened it. It said:
“If you are not here, we will disappear again.”
At night, that sentence echoed in my mind: “If you are not here, we will disappear again.”
In my dreams, I saw myself explaining lessons on the board. But when I woke up, there was no class — not even a trace of it.
I couldn’t bear it anymore. I reopened the class. The girls were full of excitement, chatting happily as they reunited. I told them we had to be more careful this time. One girl from the back row called out, “If our voices shorten the life of this class, we’ll speak very softly — just please stay, teacher.”
One day, while we were solving math problems, someone pounded hard on the door. Silence swallowed the room. A fear I had never felt before washed over me. The girls’ eyes were wide, their breathing fast. We all looked at one another. I told them, “Stay calm. God willing, it’s nothing serious.” I walked slowly toward the door. Before I reached it, another loud knock shook the room.
With my heart in my throat, I opened the door — and it was Aunt Laila returning from the market. Breathless, she said, “Sahar, my girl, a fat man with long hair and a long beard passed me in the alley. As I walked by, I heard him on the phone saying, ‘I found the secret class. You all get here within half an hour.’ Then he hung up.”
I quickly prepared the girls to leave one by one. We rolled up their notebooks and tucked them inside their collars under their scarves, securing them with pen cases. Each girl slipped away toward her home, a few minutes apart.
At night, I dreamed again of the class — someone knocking, the girls crying, all of us terrified.
One summer afternoon, I was standing by the spring near our house. The village women were washing clothes, and children splashed in the water nearby. My mind was still in that basement when someone gently tapped my arm. I looked up, tired and distracted, and saw Nilab — neat, energetic, smiling as always. I pulled her into a tight embrace, and my tears soaked her scarf.
She said, “Teacher, my mother agreed. You can hold the class in our house. Will you come?”