and reading to the women of Mirman Baheer by phone. Then came the spring day in 2010 when Zarmina got caught reading these poems and her brothers beat her. A couple of weeks later, according to her aunt, when the girl was cleaning the house, she locked a door behind her and set herself alight, a common means of suicide among women in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The custom can be linked to the outlawed Indian practice suttee, when a wife climbs on a funeral pyre. The practice and even the Hindi word--suttee--exist in Pashto, too. In this sense, it is possible that Zarmina saw her choice to die for love as romantic and honorable.from The New York Times: Why Afghan Women Risk Death to Write Poetry
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