A ravenous desire to learn

The Afghani girls rose at dawn to cook breakfasts, lunches, and dinners for their family. They washed clothes and cleaned the house. They tended to their baby brother. They spent hours bent over wealthy women’s sheets and shirts, filling fine fabrics with perfect, symmetrical embroidery.

Laila and Jaila had lived this way since they were 7 or 8.

A Taliban bomb had ripped through their father’s Kabul watch store and killed him in 1996. Their mother, Saddiqa, was broken and terrified at what would happen to her young family without her husband’s protection. She fled Afghanistan, taking her five children to Quetta, Pakistan, where she spent long days cleaning houses. The two older boys sold matches and socks in the street. Laila and Jaila kept house and sewed. They all scraped together a life.

School was somewhere other kids went. Laila and Jaila saw children pass their house in the mornings, dressed in their blue-and-white uniforms. The sisters looked over their friends’ shoulders as they did homework in the afternoons.

They begged their mother to let them go to school, too. Somehow, the girls had gotten the idea of being doctors into their heads.

Next year, their mother said.

“It was always next year, next year,’’ Laila recalled.

There was no reason to expect next year would be different. Laila and Jaila were like millions of girls who happened to be born into countries and families that condemned them to hidden lives of servitude. Maybe they would marry and move to their husbands’ homes at some point, but none of the days that stretched out before them would vary much from those they’d already endured.

Then one of Saddiqa’s clients, an educated woman, told her about a program that resettled widows and their families in the United States. Saddiqa applied and reapplied. With no education, the mother, who is now 46, scrambled to comply with endless requests for documents, walking miles to get to the UNICEF office. She slept there so she could be first in line in the morning.

Five years later, in 2004, the family was flown to Boston. Within a month, they had an apartment in a pale green two-family in Malden, and the girls found themselves in Charlotte Dumont’s ESL class at the Salemwood School.

“It took them three minutes to scrawl their names,’’ Dumont recalled.

They were 13 and 14, and they hadn’t had one minute of education in their lives. They were terrified, and thrilled.

“You should have seen our writing,’’ Laila said, sitting on a brown leather couch with her mother and sister in her living room on a recent evening. “The letters were these crappy creatures! It was so bad.’’

They threw themselves into their studies, staying up till 3 a.m. some nights, pushing and coaching each other, trying to make up eight missed years.

“It was so hard for us to believe we were finally at school,’’ Laila said. “Every day, as soon as we got home, we would study. All we had was our books, and we loved them.’’

They absorbed the culture, too, getting used to the short skirts girls wore, men and women holding hands. The sisters were dressed in jeans and t-shirts last week, their toenails painted.

It was clear to Dumont early on that the girls were special. They were absorbing everything so quickly, ravenous for more.

“Watching them in school was like watching somebody who has never had food,’’ she said.

Dumont started saving their work, certain they’d get so far that they would find their early efforts hilarious. Within 18 months, the two inseparable girls with the long dark hair had made it up to grade level, taking places in mainstream math and science classes, where they shone.

Dumont called Malden High to tell her colleagues the Abdul Nabi sisters were coming, to watch out for them, to take care of them.

“I didn’t need to make that call,’’ she said.

The girls took college prep, honors, advanced placement classes. They studied through nights, asked for extra help, reproached themselves when their work fell below their own exacting standards. They found time for volunteer work, jobs, and summer leadership camps where they kayaked and hiked. They were ferocious about all of it.

“They give off this aura of being these nice, smiley, gentle, maybe somewhat shy girls,’’ said Malden High School Principal Dana Brown. “But they both have stomachs of steel.’’

Less than six years after they walked into their first classroom, Laila and Jaila Abdul Nabi will be walking across the stage at MacDonald Stadium this afternoon to collect their diplomas.

In the fall, Laila will go to Bryn Mawr, on a full scholarship supported by the Posse Foundation. Jaila will begin studies at UMass Boston. Staying at home for college will allow her to keep looking after her brothers and her mother, who has battled emotional problems since her husband’s death. Both girls plan to go to medical school.

The sisters still share a room, where they talk long into the night. Jaila finishes Laila’s sentences, or translates when her sister talks too fast, which is often. In a few months, they will be separated for the first time.

“I don’t want to think about it,’’ Laila said.

“I don’t know how we’re going to live without each other,’’ Jaila said. “Maybe I’ll apply to her school.’’

A couple of weeks ago, Dumont presented the Abdul Nabi girls with folders full of their early work. They found their efforts hilarious.

Yvonne Abraham is a Globe columnist. Her e-mail address is Abraham@globe.com.