It was in 1984 when Steve McCurry took her picture in a refugee camp in Peshawar. The next time he got to click the picture of one of the most famous faces in the world was after 17 years .She seized the imagination of so many people around the world because her face, particularly her eyes, expressed pain and resilience as well as strength and beauty.

Steve was searching for her ever since he photographed her and the search went on for 17 years. After learning that the refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, where he last saw her was about to be razed into a housing project, McCurry went back one last time along with his team.

He went into the villages and showed it to the elders who in turn showed it to their friends and sources. The team was falsely led many a times, with a man saying it was his wife and a girl so freaking similar to her claiming it to be her photograph. After a lot of disappointment and frustration, they got closer to her with contacts that led them to her brother and husband.

"His eyes were the same color as hers and as soon as we saw his eyes, we thought, 'this is amazing. This is closer than we've ever been,'" the McCurry the photographer said when he saw her brother.

After negotiations with the "girls" husband, the National Geographic team got the permission to meet her. Still, to be sure about the girl who had been photographed 17 years earlier, the team obtained verification through iris-scanning technology and face-recognition techniques used by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.

She is Sharbat Gula. A mother of three girls and living in a remote ethnic Pushtun region of Afghanistan with her family. National Geographic is keeping her exact location secret to protect her privacy. When she met McCurry, she recognized him immediately. She remembered the holes on the head covering, which she was wearing in the photograph. She said that the holes were due to a cooking fire in the camp.

Sharbat agreed to have her picture taken for the second time after 17 years and came out of her veil to tell her story. She wanted the people around the world who knew her face to know that she had survived the refugee camp in Pakistan.

She must have been six when her parents were killed in a soviet bombing, she recalls. Shepherded by their grandmother, Sharbat along with her brother and three sisters walked to Pakistan. They moved through the freezing mountains covered in snow, begging for blankets to keep warm. The journey that began with the loss of their parents and a trek across mountains by foot ended in a refugee camp tent living with strangers. This is the camp where McCurry took the world famous picture, without know what the 13-year-old girl had been through.

She lost one of her daughters in infancy. She lives in obscurity, according to the customs and traditions of her culture and religion. A member of the Pashtun ethnic group in Afghanistan, Sharbat fared relatively well under Taliban rule, which, she feels, provided a measure of stability after the chaos and terror of the Soviet war.

When McCurry told her about how famous her portrait had become, she did not seem to be very interested in her personal fame but was pleased to know that she stood as a symbol of recognition and dignity of the Afghan people in general.

McCurry will be helping Sharbat Gula in providing education to her children and to fulfill her dream of going to Mecca for a pilgrimage.

Sharbat Gula's eyes have retained all their fire and intensity but she's still quite beautiful despite all the hardship she to endure. Sharbat stands not just for the Afghan refugees but also for the entire group of refugees in the world. She has helped in educating people about her culture through her mysterious and haunting face known to all of us as the "face of the Afghan girl".

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Parveen Batra

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