Kabul, December 2 , 2024 (Navroze Bureau) – Hashimi is sitting on her father’s lap, stroking his beard, in Kabul, Afghanistan when an advisory message plays out on the television. “Don’t come to Australia illegally on boats”, a note for the many immigrant residents risking, often losing, their lives to get across. Little Benafsha thinks Australia is just on the other side of the big river in Kabul. “I shall go there, pedar (Father, in Dari language) one day, I have to just cross the river”. The father tells her she has to learn swimming first. “Don’t worry, I can go in a boat!” The father laughs but assures her that she can go the proper way one day but she has to study hard and grow up.
Nearly one-and-half decades later, in 2021, the 21 year old Hashimi has ended up in Canberra in Australia, escaping the clutches of Taliban, surviving the death of her father, an Afghan special forces soldier, in mysterious circumstances. But she also witnessed an aunt who bled to death, besides myriad shootings, before dragging her entire Afghan team of women along with her. All this when she was still a teenager, three years back. It’s a remarkable story of hope, will-power, selflessness, stubbornness, and a lot of cheekiness.
We meet at an outdoorsy cafe the morning after India’s warm-up game against the Prime Minister’s XI. Almost immediately, she excuses herself and hops off to play with a dog that was barking rather loudly and she laughs, a lovely full-throated aural memory that will stick in the mind, when the dog’s owner says ‘he likes his own voice’. When she plonks back on her chair, she announces, “I have a cat, Lilly. I love lilies and my Lilly. We talk a lot.” It’s probably the rare imagery of the morning when she reflects her age; the rest of the time, as she narrates her life story, immense inspiring maturity floats in the air.
It’s a story that’s difficult to decide where to start. At that moment, perhaps, when the Taliban had taken over the city, the 18-year old rushes to the bank to withdraw money for her family of 10 but instead hears the Taliban soldiers outside the bank, firing in the air. Or at the Checkpost at Pakistan border, when she is fleeing with the family in the middle of night ‘sadly like a pack of thieves” and is stopped by the Talibs, who bark at her brother Hamid to tell “this girl to stop talking, who has given a girl rights to talk, just stand aside.”
Or the moment when her phone starts to ring, with a popular Farsi love song triggering outrage in the Taliban soldiers, and her brother muttering, ‘we are all going to die’ even as he tried to stop the call. It was her friend, a cricketing team-mate wanting to know her whereabouts.
It’s perhaps best to start with why that friend was reaching out. Not at that moment, but how Benafsha became the rallying group leader for the girls of her cricket team, and their families, to get to Australia in a move that’s bound to have positive repercussions for generations to come for those families. “No, no, it was a combined team effort, I couldn’t have done it without my friends,” she says but it’s clear that they couldn’t have even dared to dream this life without her.
She was the resourceful one, tirelessly pursuing opportunities outside, sending emails to all parts of the cricketing world and beyond to see a possible light at the end of the Taliban tunnel. The first three emails were her passport to survival and better life but unbelievably she chose to ignore them. The US authorities offered her escape due to her father’s past with them, Canada threw her a lifeline and so did Dubai, but she is adamant that she wants her team with her.