"Are You A Prostitute?"

Johra Kaleki, who came to Canada as a refugee with her family from Afghanistan, retains the cultural and religious values that she is most familiar with as an Afghan-Canadian.  She has four children, all girls.  The oldest, Bahar, is now over twenty years of age.  And it was Bahar - so far - who managed to contest her parents' cultural-social values.

And Bahar lived to tell the tale of her final confrontation with her parents - but just barely.  Bahar had turned from a compliant, biddable child who obeyed her parents' wishes to a defiant young woman who chose to defy her parents' orders.  They had no wish for any of their daughters to behave with the casual social behaviour that they noted in other young women in Montreal.

Bahar was informed she could not go out with boys, dress indecorously, or go anywhere without her parents' permission.  That worked for quite a while, until Bashar began attending a CEGEP, when she began to feel herself to be too confined, her parents too controlling.  As she rebelled she began to behave in a manner that her parents found confounding and threatening.

Two years ago, 19-year-old Bahar Ebrahimi stayed out beyond dawn.  "I felt like she would never be fixed", the mother told Sgt.-Det. Alexandre Bertrand in a video that recorded her interrogation after she had been taken into police custody and charged with attempted murder.  She spoke of her efforts to steer her daughter in the path of virtue, all failed.

When her daughter returned home from her second night out Johra Kaleki told her husband who was weeping while confronting their oldest daughter, to "Just leave us alone for five minutes.  Don't come until I call you."  She would solve all their problems.  All she needed was that five minutes.  She embraced her daughter, told her to lie on her stomach and she would massage her back.

"Then I stab her, stab her neck.  She said, 'No mom!'  I said, 'It's for your good.  Let me finish'."  In recounting the event she responded to a question whether the knife blade had been sharp:  "No, it wasn't.  I wish it was.  I wanted to give her the peace that she needed", she responded.  That eternal peace would be death for her daughter, a peaceful conscience that she had done right, for herself.

Bahar managed to survive the attack.  Her father, hearing his daughter's screams rushed down, grasping the knife from his wife.  "I said to my husband, let me finish her", after which she attempted to choke the girl.  Bahar escaped her mother's even while she chased her upstairs and attempted to break through the locked bedroom door where she dialled 911.

The first time that Bahar had stayed out late her parents went to a local police station to file a report.  They had been informed by their daughter that she was going downtown to a concert.  The officer told the parents that nothing could be done by them.  "He said 'She's safe.  Don't worry.  She's a teenager."  Little did he realize that she was an Afghan-Canadian teenager, expected to obey.

After the second late night when Bahar told her mother she had spent much of the evening walking, her mother said she was horrified: "I asked her, 'Are you a prostitute"  Are you a whore?'"

"I hope she gets well", the mother told the detective toward the end of the interview.  "She live with that wound.  She remembers me."  What she experienced, the mother said, would ensure that her daughter would gain by it, it "will make her strong and give her wisdom.  It means she will give up her ways of living."

This caring, loving mother came very close to giving up her daughter to death, closing off her opportunity to do any more living.