![]() ![]() Although they never studied beyond fifth grade themselves, the couple valued education-even for young girls who were routinely denied access. ![]() They resettled in a southwestern area of Pakistan populated by fellow displaced Hazaras, members of a Persian-speaking minority community ruthlessly targeted by the militant group. In 1998, Salehi’s parents escaped the terror of the extremist Taliban movement by fleeing their native Afghanistan. ![]() Resistance, you could say, is built into her DNA. “I wanted to prove to this woman that I can do this-I am doing this-and nothing bad is going to happen.” “So I rode even farther,” says Salehi, now 21, giggling as she recalls disappearing onto a neighboring street. And she instructed the teenager to go back inside and put on a longer head scarf, one that would drape past her knees in a show of modesty and submission to Allah. On those occasions, she made sure not to violate cultural norms too egregiously, staying on her street and never losing sight of the modest home where she shared one bedroom with her parents and three siblings.Īs Salehi pedaled, a neighborhood woman scolded her for careening down this path of certain moral decay and social ignominy. Salehi often paid her little brother 20 rupees, the equivalent of 26 cents, to borrow his red set of wheels. One mild evening in the gritty Pakistan neighborhood where she grew up, 16-year-old Tamanna Salehi did something vulgar and unthinkable for a young woman: She rode a bicycle. ![]()
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