KABUL, Afghanistan — The last time Zaheer Ahmad Zindani thought he could still see, he was 17 and in a hospital bed, heavily drugged and covered with shrapnel wounds from a Taliban bomb.

He asked the doctor for a mirror.

“The doctor told me, ‘Son, you don’t have eyes, how will you be able to see your eyes?’” Mr. Zindani recalled. “I raised my hand to feel my eyes — it was the ashes after a fire has burned, and nothing else.”

That was five years ago. He remembers that even in those first moments, when the reality of his blindness made him howl with grief, another realization took his breath away: His love for his childhood sweetheart had already been difficult because the girl’s family did not see him as worthy. Now, it was surely doomed.

“If I had lost my eyes and had her hand, I would still be happy,” he said. “But now I neither have eyes, nor her.”