Tiny Dancer: The Incredible True Story of a Young Burn Victim's Journey from Afghanistan

329 Pages·2005·2.7 MB·English

by  Anthony Flacco

Tiny Dancer
The Incredible True Story of a Young Burn
Victim’s Journey from Afghanistan
Anthony Flacco
Copyright
Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008
New York, NY 10016
www.DiversionBooks.com
Copyright © 2005 by Anthony Flacco, with Dr. Peter Grossman and
Rebecca Grossman Cover photo courtesy of Peter and Rebecca
Grossman
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or
portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
For more information, email [email protected].
First Diversion Books edition January 2013
ISBN: 978-1-938120-90-9
Dedication
To Sharly
for the magic of believing
Chapter One
Zubaida (Zu-BAY-dah) was only nine and a half years old, but she
was already well aware that her remote desert village in
southwestern Afghanistan was an ancient place. She couldn’t avoid
knowing that hundreds of years earlier, the village of Farah had been
a major site of the region’s trade activity—her daily life was carried
out amid tall mud-brick ruins that hadn’t seen their true form since
back in the thirteenth century when Genghis Khan swept through the
region with the Mongol hordes.
She knew. She just didn’t care.
Zubaida’s existence was punctuated by the cultural music and
dance that had surrounded her every day of her life. And as music will
do with some people, the melodies and rhythms managed to pass into
her blood and soak into her bones, so that a major portion of her
waking existence took place while she hummed without thinking
about it or danced without self-consciousness. It was within her love
of music and dancing that Zubaida found something to lift her out of
boredom and steer her away from depression whenever she found
herself alone amid the ancient and isolated ruins.
Lately, she felt her music carrying a special power over her. Her
time in this life for carefree dancing was soon to end; under
prevailing laws of the ruling Taliban forces, she would never again be
allowed to run and play in public with other girls, or to have a boy for
a friend under any circumstances, with the coming of her tenth
birthday. She knew that, and she felt the sense of time shrinking itself
tighter around her.
So despite the crushing mantle of heat on this July afternoon in
2001, Zubaida felt the rhythms and melodies playing inside of her
wisp-thin body while they helped her to pass the closing days of her
childhood with a measure of personal happiness.
It was still early in the day, and she was alone at home while all of
her older siblings were scattered around the village at their tasks. Her
mother and older sister were visiting neighbors. It was a perfect
opportunity to let loose her urges to openly sing and dance. It was
wonderful to be so free and to give herself over to the music. After all,
there were no brothers and sisters around to trip over, no grouchy
parents to tell her to keep down the noise, and best of all, no Taliban
cleric glowering down his disapproval that a female child should dare
to give vent to a moment of youthful joy.
Zubaida felt herself surrounded by a bubble of time and
opportunity that presented an ideal setting for some intense young
girl exuberance. All she had to do was to tap into the music and glide
on its waves; it animated her from head to toe. It moved her through
the house in wiggling gyrations and twisting leaps. Once she started,
there was no stopping her. She was well aware of the endless cruelty
of the Taliban enforcers and knew that they would violently
disapprove if they saw her like this—but she also knew that the
Taliban tended to ignore this desert region most of the time, in favor
of seeking more plentiful converts amid Afghanistan’s larger towns
and cities. And so as long as she remained hidden behind the thick
mud-brick walls of the family home, she was safe from all of them.
The temporary solitude also offered her a good opportunity to
take a bath with some privacy, so she burned off excess energy by
humming and skipping and twisting her way through preparing the
bath and filling the small tub. When she bent to light the heater’s pilot
flame, she noticed that the little fuel tank was nearly empty. So she
stood up again and danced away, singing one of her favorite passages
over and over while she retrieved the household’s kerosene can and
carried it back to the heater.
Lost in her music, alone in the house, it was easy for a girl who
was not yet ten years of age to lose track of little details—like making
sure the pilot light was out before she tried to fill the heater with fuel.
Instead, even though she knew better than to risk sloshing the fuel by
jumping around with the can in her hands, she was still able to
improvise a few fancy footsteps and hold the can steady while she
moved toward the heater.
Zubaida’s music was such an integral part of her frame that her
body nearly danced by itself—as if she could sit comfortably and
watch the world swirl by while her limbs danced of their own accord.
Her ability to control her movements was so strong that if she hadn’t
been a forgetful, barefooted kid who neglected to kick her shoes out
of the way before approaching the heater, there would have been no
problem for her that day.
It was the forgotten shoes. The shoes came after her as if the
Taliban had hired them to punish this upstart girl for her private
moment of joy.
In that first instant, when her toes of her first foot hit the edge of
the first shoe, she instinctively shifted her weight to the other foot to
retain her balance. It should have worked, but the other shoe was
waiting to foil her. It tangled itself between both of her feet and
caused her balance to shift just enough that she couldn’t find any
stability to the floor. Instinct opened her arms and she let the
kerosene fall away, so that all she had to do was balance her own
weight. That move, at least, was successful—instead of sprawling
headlong onto the water heater, she only fell to her hands and knees.
If the small tidal wave of kerosene had not splashed directly over
the heater’s pilot light, she probably would have jumped right back to
her feet without so much as a bruise. Instead, a sheet of fire roared
up from the pilot and leaped into the air, igniting the fuel that had
spilled onto her.
It turned the nine and a half year-old tiny dancer into a blazing
human torch.
The music inside of Zubaida instantly snapped off. It left her head
and seemed to leave the planet. Confusion and panic took its place
and seized control of her.
Her first sensations were mostly emotional—she screamed in fear
to the empty house while she tried to beat out the flames that were
already enveloping the top half of her body. But when she inhaled, the
superheated air immediately scorched her throat and lungs, cutting
her cries into terrified yelps.
It was only then that the first full wave of physical pain hit her, and
it came with the force of a vicious animal attack. Flaming orange
teeth bit through her hair, tore through her skin and into her flesh,
digging toward her bones. She lost all control of herself and gave in to
mortal panic, flailing at her clothing and staggering around the room,
colliding with the thick mud walls.
Next door, her mother, Bador, and her eldest sister, Nacima,
bothheard Zubaida’s initial screams. Even though they didn’t
recognize her contorted voice, the tone was so gut wrenching that it
brought them running. They arrived in time to see her collapse into a
helpless, burning pile.
The two women were products of their age, essentially
uneducated and seldom allowed to travel beyond their neighborhood.
They were kept ignorant of as much of the world as could be withheld
from them. But within the confines of the home walls, they were
fiercely independent. There was no situation where they would react
in any way but to immediately attack it with full fury. They had the
presence of mind to grab the tub of bath water, hoist it between them
and pour it over the burning child—who had now been on fire long
enough that the hungry flames were not only feeding on the spilled
fuel but on the oils of her flesh itself. The impact of the water snuffed
the flames, but the sight of what remained in that smoking pile
dropped them to their knees.
An hour after the flames were extinguished, Zubaida lay writhing
on the floor while her sixteen year-old brother Daud frantically
searched the town for their father. There was no phone anywhere in
the village of Farah; the only way to search for anyone was to run, call
out, spread the word. Back at home, Zubaida’s agonized sounds were
fully joined by those from her mother and sister and even a few of the
neighbor women. They lent their throats to her suffering and helped
her to scream the pain away, just as the women of their families have
done for centuries.
In such a remote place, no one had any better medical treatment
for catastrophic burns than to continually drizzle water over the
burned area in the attempt to cool her skin. There were no strong
drugs and not even any alcohol to ease her pain in this region of
devout Shiite Muslims. But although Zubaida was deep in shock by
this point, for some reason she never passed out and remained fully
conscious.
For her mother, Bador, that fact was both a source of reassurance
and an instrument of torture. It was reassuring to see life in Zubaida’s
eyes, but any attempt to touch her daughter sent fresh waves of pain
flashing through the girl, causing more of Zubaida’s screams to fill the
air and to claw at Bador’s helpless heart.
Finally, after that first hour, the lethargy of shock began to settle
in. With no IV to keep up Zubaida’s fluid levels, she lapsed into bouts
of uncontrollable shaking. Her family grew alarmed by the low, weak
moans that began to rise up from a body that was too exhausted to
protest any louder.
What no one could hear was Zubaida’s voice inside of herself,
where she was still screaming at full force. She screamed like a desert
animal being eaten alive. She screamed her horror and her shock and
her pain, and most of all she screamed her molten rage that this thing
was happening to her. It was only because her body’s strength was
nearly gone that the screams emerged as little more than groans.
They hung in the air like questions no one could answer.
Now Zubaida’s father arrived, gasping. Mohammed Hasan stared
down in horror at his little girl while he fought to make his brain
believe his eyes. He was gazing at a burned cinder of a child, barely
recognizable. He shrieked in horror. Then he cried, unashamed, right
along with the women. He begged for help from Allah, from the
Prophet Mohammed, and from Ali—Mohammed’s anointed one,
champion of the Shiite Muslim people.
If the prayers worked, the Intervention they brought was only a
small consolation. The way that events played out made it seem as if
Allah had agreed to keep Zubaida alive, but only alive enough so that
she didn’t die on the spot. It seemed that everything else was being
left up to their own humble earthly actions.