Suffering from second and third degree burns over 70% of her body, she is now swaddled head to foot in bandages in one of only two specialist burns wards in Afghanistan. A metal frame keeps the blankets from weighing down on her body.
Speaking groggily through a haze of painkillers, her story is muddled. She insists there was no dispute with her husband-to-be or his family, or that she was being forced into a marriage she did not want – all reasons that have been cited by many of the increasing number of women who have resorted to self-immolation in recent years.
Instead, she says she was simply upset by the preparations for the wedding feast.
"Often they are ashamed to say what happened," says Ahmed Shah Wazir, the doctor in charge of the understaffed and under-resourced burns unit in the Istiq Lal hospital in Kabul.
Few places highlight the miseries of women in Afghanistan more than Wazir's workplace.
The number of women admitted after setting themselves alight has been increasing "day after day", he says.
In the first three months of the current year on the Persian calendar, there have been nine women who have covered themselves in domestic fuel. Last year, the hospital saw 21 such cases.
Problems for women in Afghanistan are usually framed in terms of domestic abuse and the lack of rights and traditions that prevent women from taking jobs or even leaving the house without the permission of their husbands or male relatives.
What few protections they do enjoy have come under steady assault from a government that, although headed by the nominally progressive Hamid Karzai, is in hock to profoundly conservative religious and tribal leaders.
But for Wazir, the cause of all the problems faced by the desperate women he treats is the feeble state of the Afghan economy and inequalities within extended families who typically live under one roof.
"People say the problem is violence, but I think that is really secondary to the problem of poverty," he says.
"You have all these people living in one house and you get situations where one brother says to the wife of another brother that your husband doesn't earn any money, you are wretched people. Often, the girls who come here say they have a problem with their mother-in-law."
Once unheard of, self-immolation has become a favoured technique among desperate women, Wazir says, because of a perverse glamour created by an Afghan media that is quick to report new cases. "In the 1990s, we never saw cases like this, but then it was copied from Iran by people in the west of the country. Now they hear these things on television and they think it is a way out of all their problems."
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