Letters to My Daughters (3 page)

A row of servants and brothers would pass the piping-hot pots along from the kitchen to the entrance of the guest house next door, where my father entertained visitors. Women were not allowed to enter these exclusively male areas. In our culture, a married woman should not be seen by a man who is not her relative, so on these occasions my brothers, who would never otherwise be expected to do any housework, had to help.

At such dinners, my father required everything to be perfect. The rice had to be fluffy, and each grain had to separate perfectly. If it met his standards, he would smile with satisfaction at his good fortune and his most excellent choice of wife. If he found a few grains stuck together, his face would darken and he would politely excuse himself from his guests, walk into the kitchen and, without saying a word, grab my mother by the hair, wrench the metal ladle from her hands and beat her across the head with it. Her hands—already scarred and misshapen from previous beatings—would fly to her head in an attempt to protect herself. Sometimes she would be knocked unconscious, only to get up again and, ignoring the servants' frightened stares, rub hot ash into her scalp to stop the bleeding before again taking charge and ensuring that the grains fell apart perfectly in the next batch of rice.

She endured this because, in her world, beatings meant love. “If a man does not beat his wife then he does not love her,” she explained to me. “He has expectations from me and he beats me only when I fail him.” This may sound strange to modern ears, but it was what she truly believed. And this belief sustained her.

She was determined to carry out my father's wishes not only out of a sense of duty or fear but also out of love. She truly and utterly adored him.

So it was with sadness that my mother watched the wedding procession winding its way through the village on the day that wife number seven came home. She was standing on the terrace next to a servant woman who was grinding flour with a pestle in a giant stone mortar. Fighting back tears, my mother grabbed the pestle and ground it into the mortar stone furiously, even though, as the lady of the house, she would not normally take on this task.

But self-pity, even on this day, was not a luxury she was allowed. She was responsible for cooking the feast and had to ensure that the first meal his new bride took in Abdul Rahman's home would include the finest delicacies and treats befitting his status. If she didn't prepare a delicious banquet for her new love rival, he would be angry.

One part of the ceremony, however, was just for her. As head wife, she was to greet the party and place her fist firmly on top of the new bride's head to denote her own superiority and the latter's submission to her as a wife lower down the scale. She looked on as three women—the bride, her mother and her sister—were helped to dismount, once they were safely inside the
hooli
gates. They removed their burkas, and the beauty of the two young women was revealed for all to see. Both had long raven-black hair down to their waists. One stared directly at my mother with confident green eyes and pouty lips. My mother put her fist down firmly and calmly on the woman's head. The woman looked aghast, my father coughed and laughed and the other girl turned scarlet with embarrassment. My mother had picked the wrong woman, placing her fist on the sister's head. Her hands flew to her mouth in consternation, but it was too late; the wedding party had moved inside to begin the feast. Her one chance to show this young woman publicly just who was in charge of managing the house had passed.

Now, thirteen months later, my mother was giving birth in a remote mountain shack. Bereft at the loss of favour of the man she loved, she was alone and wretched. Three months earlier, the young wife had given birth to a son, a bouncing rosy-cheeked baby named Ennayat who had beautiful eyes as large as chocolate saucers. My mother hadn't wanted any more children and knew this one would be her last. For the entire pregnancy, she was sick, pale and exhausted, her body simply giving in to the strain of having borne so many children. Ennayat's mother, meanwhile, was more beautiful than ever, glowing with the joy of a first pregnancy, her breasts firm and her cheeks flushed.

Six months pregnant herself, my mother helped deliver Ennayat into the world. As his lungs filled with his first breath and he screamed his arrival into the world, Bibi jan held her hands to her stomach and prayed silently that she too would give birth to a boy, thus giving her a chance of winning back my father's favour. Girl children in our village culture were considered worthless. Even today, women pray for sons because only a son gives them status and keeps their husbands happy.

For thirty hours, my mother writhed in agony during my birth; semi-conscious by the time I was delivered, she had barely enough energy to express her dismay at the news I was a girl. When I was shown to her, she turned away, refusing to hold me. I was mottled blue and tiny—I could not have been more different from Ennayat, the bundle of health. My mother was on the verge of death after my birth. No one cared if the new girl child lived or died, so while they focused on saving my mother's life I was wrapped in cotton muslin swaddling cloth and placed outside in the baking sun.

I lay there for almost a day, screaming my little lungs out. No one came. They fully expected that nature would take its course and I would die. My tiny face was so badly burned by the sun that in adolescence I still bore the scars on my cheeks.

By the time they took pity on me and brought me back inside, my mother was feeling much better. Amazed that I had lived and horrified at the state of my burnt face, she gasped in horror as her initial coldness melted into maternal instinct. She took me in her arms and held me. When I finally stopped crying she began to weep silently, promising herself that no harm would ever come to me again. She knew that for some reason God had wanted me to live and that she should love me.

I don't know why God spared me that day. Or why he has spared me on the several occasions I could have died since then. But I do know he has a purpose for me. I also know he truly blessed me by making me Bibi jan's favourite child from that moment on, forging a permanently unbreakable bond between mother and daughter.

Dear Shuhra and Shaharzad,

Early in my life, I learned how difficult it is to be a girl child in Afghanistan. The first words a newborn daughter often hears are the commiserations given to her mother. “It's just a girl, a poor girl.” That is not much of a welcome to the world.

Then, when a girl reaches school age, she does not know whether she will get permission to go to school. Will her family be brave or rich enough to send her? When a brother grows up, he will represent the family and his salary will help feed them, so everyone wants sons to be educated, but usually the only future for girls in our society is marriage. They make no financial contribution to the family, and so in many people's eyes there is little point in educating them.

When a girl reaches the age of twelve, relatives and neighbours may start to gossip about why she isn't married yet. “Has someone asked her for her hand?” “Is anyone ready to marry her?” If no proposals are in the offing, gossipmongers will mutter that it is because she is a bad girl.

If family members ignore this chatter and let the girl reach sixteen, the legal age for marriage, before finding a partner for her and if they allow her to marry someone of her choice or at the very least allow her to disagree with her parents' choice, then she stands a chance of experiencing some happiness in her life. If, however, the family is under financial pressure or swayed by gossip, they will marry off their daughter before she reaches the age of fifteen. The little girl who heard “just a girl” at her birth will become a mother herself; if she delivers a girl child, the first words her baby will hear will also be “just a girl.” And so it goes on, generation after generation.

This was my beginning. “Just a girl” born of an illiterate woman.

“Just a girl” would have been my life story, and probably yours too. But the bravery of my mother, your grandmother, changed our path. She is the heroine of my dreams.

With love,
Your mother

· · TWO · ·
Stories of Old

{
1977
}

THE EARLY PART of my childhood was as golden as the mountain dawn—the light that tumbled directly from the sun across the Pamir mountain range and down through the valley onto the roofs of the mud houses in our village. My memories of that time are hazy, like images from a film. They are bathed in the colours of orange summer sun and white winter snow and suffused with the smells of the apple and plum trees outside our house and the scent of my mother's long, dark plaited hair, all lit brighter by her radiant smiles.

The Koof Valley, where we lived, is known as the Switzerland of Afghanistan. It is lush and fertile, banked with trees of rich greens and yellows—colours I have never seen anywhere else. Our house looked out onto a sparkling blue river, and pine and elm trees grew tall along the grassy banks that rose steeply into the mountains.

The noises I recall from my early childhood are of a donkey braying, the sound of hay swishing as it was cut, the trickling of river water and the peals of children laughing. Even today, my village sounds just the same. Koof remains the only place in the world where I can close my eyes and fall into blissful, peaceful sleep within seconds.

In front of our house was a garden, organized with great efficiency by my mother. We grew everything we needed: fruits of all kinds, peppers, olives, mulberries, peaches, apricots, apples and huge yellow pumpkins. We even cultivated silk for weaving carpets. My father took great delight in importing trees and seeds from abroad, and our garden housed one of the few black cherry trees in all of Afghanistan. I remember the day it arrived and the sense of importance and occasion as the seedling was planted.

During the warmer months, the women would come and sit among the mulberry trees for half an hour or so in the late afternoon—the only time of day they could relax. Each would bring a small dish of something to eat, and they would sit gossiping and chatting while the children played around them.

In those days, many villagers used to wear wooden shoes, because getting to Faizabad to buy conventional shoes was so difficult. An old man in the village used to make them; they looked like carved Venetian gondolas and were very strong. He would hammer nails into the base of the shoe so it would stick to the ice when the women went outside to fetch water in winter. My greatest dream was to own a pair of these shoes, though they were tough to wear and not made for children. When women came to visit, leaving their shoes at the door, I would put them on and go out to play. Once, I was wearing a beautiful embroidered dress a friend of my mother's had made for me. I wasn't supposed to go out in it, but I didn't want to take it off, so I put on some wooden shoes and went to play with my friends near the spring. Inevitably, I fell over in my big shoes, ripping the dress.

But my world began with the
hooli
kitchen, a mud-plastered room with three large wood-fired ovens at one end, a deep bread oven called a
tanur
in the centre and a tiny high window at the other end.

LIKE MOST Afghan village women of her generation, my mother spent more than half her life in the kitchen, sleeping, cooking and taking care of the little children. In this room, she reigned supreme.

The women baked bread three times a day, sometimes making as many as fifty or sixty loaves, and the room was always full of smoke from the fires. Between batches, they had to prepare lunch and dinner. If my father had guests, the heat from the wood burning in all four ovens became unbearable. On those occasions, we would all feel excited, and I would boost my popularity by bringing friends into the kitchen to eat the leftovers. Most of the villagers were much poorer than our family, and the chance to taste strange delicacies was too good to pass up. We children were never allowed anywhere near the guest house, and if we ever thought to risk a peep inside, a mere glance from one of my father's security men guarding the doorway was enough to send us scattering for cover.

Away from the eyes of the men of the house, the kitchen was a place of laughter and women's chatter, where children were guaranteed treats from the many pots of dried fruit and sweets lining the shelves. On cold winter nights, after the bread was baked, we would sit with our feet beside the dying embers of the
tanur
, a carpet over our legs to keep us warm.

At night, we would unroll our mattresses onto the kitchen floor and sleep there. The wives and daughters did not have their own bedrooms, only their own mattresses. When the boy children were smaller, they would also live and sleep in this female world. As they grew older, the boys went on to share a bedroom. Mother would tell us stories. First, she would recount tales close to home. She talked to us openly about her marriage, how she had felt when she first met my father and how hard it was for her to leave her childhood behind to become a wife, with all the duties that entailed. Then she would regale us with stories of faraway queens, kings and castles and warriors who gave everything for honour. She told us love stories and tales about big wolves that made us scream in terror. I would listen and look out the window at the moon and stars. I was certain I could see the entire sky.

I had no idea the rest of the world lay beyond the big mountain at the end of the valley and I didn't care. My mother loved me and I loved her; we were inseparable. It was as if she somehow gathered up all the love she had lost from my father in those later years and gave it to me twice over. She had recovered from her initial disappointment at my being a girl after hearing a story recounted by my aunt Gada, my father's eldest sister. Informing him of my birth upon his return to the village, my aunt had declared, “Abdul Rahman, your wife has given birth to a mouse, a tiny red mouse.” He laughed and demanded to see me, the first time he'd ever asked to see a newborn girl child. Looking at my scarred face and the third-degree burns caused by the sun, he threw his head back and laughed uncharacteristically. “Don't worry, my sister,” he told my aunt. “Her mother has good genes. And I know one day this little mouse will grow to be as beautiful as her mother.”