97 pages • 3 hours read
Farah Ahmedi, Tamim AnsaryThe Other Side of the Sky
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 8-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary: “Losing My Family”
When Ahmedi informed her father that she was going back to wearing Afghan clothes, he told her and her mother to go to the bazaar and pick out fabric. He would make her all new clothes of her own, so she did not need to borrow her older sister’s. New clothes have special importance in Afghanistan, so this was a significant gesture on her father’s part. Spending the morning in the bazaar with her mother also allowed Ahmedi to reconnect with Afghan culture again—she was so relieved and relaxed to feel her heart warm again that she hardly noticed the sound of traffic, gunfire, and rocket explosions. They returned from the bazaar, however, to discover that a rocket had hit their home and killed Ahmedi’s father and sisters. Grief stricken, the family had lost everything. Days after the rocket killed Ahmedi’s family, the mujahideen retreated from Kabul, leaving the capital city to the Taliban. Combined, these two events would forever change the family.
The Taliban’s presence meant that Ahmedi and her mother could not go out into the city without a male escort, which meant they became dependent upon the assistance and generosity of neighbors. Word soon came that the Taliban were conscripting all males as young as seven into their army. Ahmedi’s family are ethnically Hazara, from Hazarajat, the valley in central Afghanistan, and the Taliban was known to bear “a special hatred toward Hazaras” (99). The family decided that the prospect for Ahmedi’s brothers at the hands of the Taliban were grim, and along with their neighbors, decided that the boys should escape to Pakistan. Ahmedi’s older brother set off, holding Ahmedi’s younger brother’s hand, along with the neighbor boys, hoping to catch a bus to Jalalabad, about halfway to the Pakistan border. Ahmedi never saw them again.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Escape from Afghanistan”
Ahmedi and her mother continued to live in the bombed out remains of their home, along with their neighbors. One day, they received a letter from Ahmedi’s mother’s cousin in Quetta, a city on the Pakistan side of the Afghan border. She had heard about Ahmedi’s father’s death, six months afterwards, and wrote to tell Ahmedi and her mother to come stay with her in Quetta. The cousin told them not to tarry in Peshawar, the Pakistan city just across the border from Afghanistan, because it is a Taliban stronghold, but to come directly to Quetta which she felt was much safer. Ahmedi and her mother decided that they had to attempt the journey; life had become untenable for them in Kabul.
They faced with numerous obstacles, however. Aside from their lack of money for safe and reliable transportation, there was also the problem of being two females traveling unaccompanied by a man through Taliban dominated territory. They made it to Jalalabad by bus, then had to jostle for a van ride from drivers taking people to the border. The van took them to about half a mile from the border, where they were deposited among hundreds of families crowding at the border hoping to get into Pakistan. They eventually crossed the border with another refugee family by sneaking at night through a mountain pass some distance away from the official border crossing.
Chapters 8-9 Analysis
Ahmedi conveys the intensity of this period of her life, losing her father and sisters, the subsequent departure of her brothers from her life, followed by the harrowing escape to Pakistan, in a personal and direct narrative style that does not attempt to hide her vulnerability. This allows the reader to understand the complexities of surviving war and creates the opportunity for empathic connection. Ahmedi shows that the ways people cope with situations that go from horrible to worse can sometimes be confounding. When she and her mother arrived home from the bazaar to find their family killed, strangers in the crowd that had gathered pulled her away from the scene, murmuring, “Don’t look. Everything will be fine…God is gracious” (90).
Later that night, when she and her mother collapsed at her uncle’s house, Ahmedi finally unleashed her wails for her father and brothers. At the moment she opened her mouth, someone slapped her hard across the face and said, “Your crying will distress [your mother] even more. You stop that crying and control yourself!” (91). These moments reflect how difficult it is to endure a life that has already seen so much pain. Ahmedi also hints at the relationship between the larger macropolitical context in which war occurs, on the one hand, and the everyday reality for people living through war, on the other hand. Ahmedi writes that her father and sisters, as it turns out, died in the Taliban’s final battle for Kabul. Because she did not know at the time of the larger significance of the rocket explosion that destroyed her home, she also could not have known that it would mean her brothers would be sent away and she and her mother would become refugees. The lived reality of war also means that it impoverishes people. What looks like corruption—a border guard taking bribes, for instance—is in fact a reflection of the poverty of war.
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