In Gareshk, the rural hometown of Zarmina — the poet who’d set herself alight with heating oil — the hospital parking lot teemed with a parade of men, new mothers, and their swaddled babies on a warm February day in 2012. None of them looked like the teenage girl with whom I was hoping to meet. She, too, was a poet and she called herself Meena Muska, which means love smile. It looked like she’d stood me up, which was hardly surprising since at first she’d refused to see me. Muska was also a secret member of Mirman Baheer, the women’s literary circle. Although she’d never met any of the others, she phoned in regularly to read her fledgling poems. On the phone she called herself “The New Zarmina,” yet she’d never met the girl who’d recently died. Like Zarmina, she’d been pulled out of school by her father. Like Zarmina, poetry was her only link to ongoing education and the wider world. Like Zarmina, she seemed to be careening toward a family disaster which they were powerless to stop.

This alarmed the members of Mirman Baheer in Kabul, who feared that she too might kill herself. But as with so many young Afghan girls, it was too hard to tell, over a patchy phone line, whether she was simply prone to drama or under serious threat. When I asked (with the help of my translator Asma Safi) if I could meet her, Meena refused. It was dishonorable, Meena claimed, for a Pashtun to meet an American given the havoc that the U.S. had wreaked on Afghanistan. It was also impossible for her to leave her home without her father’s permission and even more improbable that I would be able to pay a visit. With Asma’s help, the two devised a plan on the phone: Meena would tell her father that she was sick and had to go see the doctor at the hospital. I would meet her there.

Now, here we were in the midst of a market town thick with militants, sweating under burqas and waiting. “She didn’t come,” I lamented to Asma. “Wait,” Asma said, “I think that’s her.” In front of our Toyota station wagon, a pair of rhinestone slippers poked out from beneath a mountain of jade cloth and it was clear that the woman was struggling with something. “She’s making a phone call,” Asma said. Sure enough, seconds later, Asma’s phone rang and the voice instructed her to go around the side of the building to a withered garden of matted grass and petrified roses. Meena wasn’t alone; she’d brought a chaperone, her meira, or second mother, her father’s second wife. Meena explained that in the end she’d whispered to her mother where she was going, in case we kidnapped her. Her mother had sent along this junior wife to keep her daughter safe.

The four of us — Meena, her meira, Asma, and I — sat in a circle on the grass and pulled back our burqas enough so that we could see each others’ faces without anyone wandering past being able to see us. With dark curly hair and pale green eyes, she was a beauty, probably about fifteen, she guessed. Like Zarmina, she’d been engaged since birth to a cousin, but he’d recently been killed by accident in a roadside bombing, and now she would have to marry either his much younger brother, or a much older one. Both repelled her, but this was the custom.

She pulled out a thin notebook with an apple tree on its cover. Here were her poems, which she didn’t want me to write down. They were no good, she said, plus she didn’t want them rendered in English, the enemy’s language. Instead, aloud, she shared the popular and ancient landay above (p. 288) because she too was separated from her dead fiancé. As Asma scribbled the Pashto down in my notebook, Meena pulled two combs from her purse. On them perched rhinestone butterflies. She gave one to me and one to Asma. I wanted to give her a book of my poems, but such a thing would endanger her should her father or brothers discover it. So instead I took the scarf from my neck.

For more than a year, I haven’t spoken to her. Her numbers (she had three mobile phones in her purse — clearly, a well-heeled girl) don’t work anymore, and after Asma’s heart failed on the way to the hospital in Kabul this past fall, it seemed all the harder. I suppose I could keep trying to reach her through Mirman Baheer, but no one could bridge our two worlds as Asma did. And I don’t want to have to explain to Meena that Asma’s dead. So our shared memory remains that one hour in the winter garden.