Nagina drew her modest light-green cotton dupatta, the scarf that Pakistani women drape over their arms, head and chest, up over her face as she cautiously peered out from a muddy white tent to watch her youngest child, a barefoot, trouserless four-year-old boy in a navy blue shirt streaked with mud. The timid Pathan woman has four other children, three older girls and a boy, but her daughters are not with her in this overcrowded cluster of tents known as the Khandar relief camp in Nowshera, a flood-devastated northwestern district some 90 miles west of the capital Islamabad in the insurgency-plagued, religiously conservative Khyber Pakhtunkwa province. "We are trying to keep the girls away," Nagina says, "because parda is impossible now."
Parda, which is also spelled "purdah" and means "curtain" in Urdu, is the practice of shielding women from men they are not directly related to, both through physical segregation and through the custom of modesty, that is, with the women wearing clothing to conceal their shape. It is observed by many women in rural areas of Pakistan, including in the majority-Pathan northern belt bordering Afghanistan. In these parts, a family's honor is often tied to the chastity and obedience of its women — and protecting and defending the honor of women from verbal and physical harm is part of an ancient code of honor and revenge. But the code is all too often taken to extremes. Barely a week goes by without stories appearing in the Pakistani media about an enraged male — from across Pakistan's multiethnic spectrum — who has killed his female relative or relatives for some perceived infringement of "honor." For women adhering to Parda, it's usually easier and safer for them to simply remain secluded in their homes.
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Akbar Ali, a 27-year-old driver who has been in the Khandar camp for 18 days now with his wife and two-year-old daughter, is simmering. He is desperately trying to rent a house at any price he says, to get his family indoors, but there's little left on the market. He has been offered work, but turned it down because he did not want to leave his wife, who used to be in parda, alone in the camp. "We are all Pathan but we are still very different from each other. The men move around the camp. I'm just afraid that one day if they say something to my wife, it will cause a problem, a fight because I will have to respond, it's my duty."
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