Discovery
Amina was crying softly when the village elder and several other men brought her to her great-uncle Mohammad Assan's house, just a few steps from her parents' hut.
" 'Keep a close watch on her,' " Assan recalled the village elder telling him.
Assan ushered Amina into a large, empty storeroom. Even by the standards of Gazon, it was grim -- no carpeting to cover the mud floor, no sheet tacked up to hide the mud ceiling, no window except a slit high up in one wall.
Assan said he brought in a carpet and unrolled it for Amina to sit on.
"Did you do this? Is it true?" he asked her.
Amina turned away from him without a word, Assan recalled.
"Well, try to get some sleep then," he remembered saying.
Judgment
Gazon's mosque is a rectangular, mud-brick building that sits on the river bank and is surrounded by a large, rock-strewn courtyard.
By mid-morning on the day after Amina was discovered with Karim, it was filled to bursting with hundreds of men, not only from Gazon but from five neighboring villages. Word of the suspected adultery had sped through the valley as though carried by the wind.
The men squatted in the courtyard or perched on the low stone wall around it, fingering worry beads and trying to chat over the roar of the river while they awaited the arrival of their community's most important member.
In mid-afternoon, Maulvi Yousaf arrived.
Yousaf, a stooped man in his mid-fifties, wears a blue-gray turban and has puffy cheeks and a snowy beard that give him the look of a kindly grandfather. But when he speaks about topics that anger him, such as the central government's neglect of Badakhshan, his voice becomes loud and harsh.
