Nic, an American development worker, has spent years working in Afghanistan and has become increasingly jaded by the violence, hypocrisy and futility he has witnessed. Divorced, alone, and with little more than a tenuous long distance correspondence with his daughter, Nic is a man without a home, doing work that has lost all meaning. For his final assignment in Afghanistan, Nic must go to a remote Pashtun province that is heavily controlled by the Taliban to implement an anti-poppy strategy in collaboration with the Provincial Governor. When he arrives, he accidentally gazes into a beautiful Afghan widow’s (Shakeila) eyes at a checkpoint. She is quickly covered with a Burqa and he is left with the only image of her he can see – her scarlet painted toes - before she rides off on motorcycle driven by her 14 year old son (Siddiq). Nic encounters Siddiq again a few days later when the boy is transporting a patient on his motorcycle to a medical clinic, where Shakeila is the only doctor. This leads to an encounter between Nic and Shakeila and what passes unspoken between them cannot be denied by either. Nic cannot help himself and continues to visit Shakeila at the clinic despite the mortal threats to both for such a forbidden relationship. Meanwhile, Shakeila is being relentlessly pursued by a local Taliban commander, Dadullah, the right-hand man of the Provincial Governor (Mussah Khan) who Nic is working with. To further complicate matters, Mussah Khan is the brother of Shakeila’s dead husband – and according to the Pashtun custom, he controls of her fate. |