The meeting turned to poetry next. The women had brought contemporary landai with them. Traditionally, the poems were traded at henna night, the evening before a wedding when women gather around the bride to decorate her body. The landai are sometimes sung to the beat of a small hand drum. (Because singing is associated with loose morals, poetry can be seen as shameful for women, a notion that the Taliban’s conservatism helped foster.) Landai once focused on the godar — the place where village women went to fetch water and where men, who were not allowed to approach them, tried to steal looks at their beloveds from a distance. These educated women used landai to speak of larger issues, like Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s one-eyed spiritual leader who is rumored to be dead, not a guest of Pakistan: “Grass is growing on the blind man’s tomb/Stupid Talibs still believe that he’s alive.” Amail read one about America’s failing military efforts: “Here, they fight the Taliban/Behind the mountains, they train them.”

When I asked who brought this one, Zamzama, 17, raised her hand amid nervous giggles. She seemed both embarrassed and emboldened to be criticizing America to an American. Along with her 15-year-old cousin, Lima, Zamzama joined the group two years earlier. Lima had recently won the group’s literary prize. When she was 11, she began writing poems addressed to God.

“I started reading them to my father,” Lima said. She smiled and glanced around at the others who were suddenly listening. “My father doesn’t know much about poetry.” An engineer, he heard about Mirman Baheer from a colleague and now sends his daughters here weekly to learn to write. “He gave me this,” she said. She held up a blue plastic notebook embossed with the words “Healthnet — Enabling People to Help Themselves.” Lima stood to recite her latest poem: a rubaiyat, the Arabic name for a quatrain, addressed to the Taliban.

You won’t allow me to go to school.

I won’t become a doctor.

Remember this:

One day you will be sick.

Following Zarmina’s story meant traveling to Gereshk. I wanted to see how she’d lived, and I wondered what, besides her brothers’ anger, led her to take her life. It seemed impossible that I would find the family of one dead girl among 50,000 people or that, if I did, they would speak about her, but I went anyway, as there was also the slight chance of meeting Meena Muska, the teenager who called Mirman Baheer and invoked Zarmina’s name. I began my search in Helmand’s embattled capital, Laskhar Gah, of which Gereshk is a suburb. Government sources and a local network of traditional leaders called maliks (they belong to an Afghan organization, Wadan, the Welfare Association for the Development of Afghanistan) helped me gather a list of reported cases of women and girls who died violent deaths in Gereshk in the past two years. The list was brief but grim. Was I looking for the girl who was found drowned in the Helmand River in a sack? No. The girl who had her head shaved and then was chopped into pieces by her husband’s brothers? No. Well, then, there was only one left: a girl who in 2010 set herself on fire and died in the Kandahar hospital.

“Ten years ago, no one heard about these problems,” Fauzia Olemi, Helmand’s minister of Women’s Affairs, told me when we met. “Now we have a network of organizations that investigate them.”

It was a balmy afternoon in Lashkar Gah, and Olemi wanted to show me some of Helmand’s modest successes for women’s education, which included a three-day workshop on the health benefits of eating tomatoes, okra and other vegetables. Because Helmand is among the largest poppy producers in the world, there’s a special effort to encourage farmers to plant other crops.

In a squat, cement-block government building, about 50 women sat in front of a whiteboard, which read, “If you eat two kilograms of tomatoes a day, you will be cured of cancer.” This group was very different from the one in Kabul. Many of the women were in their 20s and 30s, their faces deeply lined from working in the fields. It was nearing midday, when the insurgents would begin to explode I.E.D.’s along the road, and the lesson was almost over. As the women gathered their things to leave, I asked if any of them liked poetry. As soon as the question was translated, a wisp of a woman leapt to her feet and began what looked like freestyle rapping in Pashto. She shook her bony shoulders to four-beat lines that ended in a rhyme of “ma” or “na.” Gulmakai was 22 but looked 45. She made up poems all the time, she explained, as she cooked and cleaned the house. She said,