Letters to My Daughters (33 page)

He was chatting with them, and as I watched I noticed how very handsome and fresh-faced he looked. It was as if the illness had lifted from his face, and suddenly he was the old Hamid again. “Hamid, my love,” I joked, “you are kidding me, aren't you? I think you're teasing me—you aren't sick. How can you look this good?” He laughed, but as he did so his breath caught and he started gasping for air.

We carried him to his room, and I had to turn my head away so he wouldn't see me cry. It was late, and I lay down in the other room with the women for a while, but I couldn't settle. I went into Hamid's room and lay down next to him. I took his hand and we both started to cry. I was thinking back to the first week of our marriage when we were so happy, when we were planning our future together. We hadn't asked for much, yet all we had been given was sadness and sickness.

The girls came into the room. They'd dressed up like little Kuchi girls and started to sing a song for their father. It was their childish attempt to cheer us all up. It was beautiful and it was heartbreaking. They twirled and spun veils over their heads singing, “I'm a little Kuchi girl, look at me dance.” After the song, they asked Hamid to kiss them but he refused because he was scared of the risk of transmission. He wanted so much to kiss his little girls goodbye but he couldn't.

I was still trying to force food down him, begging him, “Please have this mulberry, please just try a little more soup. Just swallow one spoonful.” After this vain attempt, I started to nod off. I was exhausted. My sister came into the room and told me to go and rest. I didn't want to leave Hamid, but he insisted. He was still joking with me. “Fawzia, your other supervisor will look after me. She will make sure I keep eating my food and my fruit and keep breathing. Go rest for a little while, please.”

I went and lay down with the girls on their bed, holding them tight, wondering how these little creatures would live without the love of their father. About an hour later, I heard a scream. I will never forget it. It was my sister screaming Hamid's name. I ran into the room just in time to see him take his last breaths.

I shouted in terror, “Hamid, no. Please don't go yet.” When he heard me, he opened his eyes to look at me. Just for a second our eyes met, mine full of fear, his calm and resigned. Then he closed them again. He was gone.

Dear Shuhra and Shaharzad,

When your father died, Shuhra was exactly the age that I was when I lost my father. A bitter irony that I wish fate had not repeated across the generations.

In the first days after your father died, I blamed myself. From a fatherless mother came fatherless daughters.

I had tasted the bitterness of not having a father. I knew how difficult it would be for you in our society. I knew that you would suffer not only by not having a father but also by not having a brother.

But just as my mother helped me find strength and encouraged me with enough passion for two parents, so I have had to do the same for you.

You have only me. But know that I love you with the might of a hundred parents.

And know your father would be so proud of you today if he could see you growing up into the beautiful young women you are.

When I listen to you talk about your futures, my heart bursts with pride. Shaharzad wants to be a rocket scientist and Shuhra wants to be president of Afghanistan. That's this week, anyway. Next week you will probably change your minds again. But I know that what will never change is how high you are both aiming. And you are right to aim high, my darlings. Aim for the stars. That way, if you fall, you land on the tops of the trees. If you don't aim high then all you see is the bottom of the branches.

I can't give you your father back. But I can give you ambition, decent values and confidence. And these are the most precious gifts from a mother to a daughter.

With love,
Your mother

· · EIGHTEEN · ·
A New Purpose

{
2003
}

HAMID DIED IN 2003 in July, the same month we had married.

My life now felt empty, bereft, all love and laughter stolen from it. For the next two years, I worked like an automaton in my UN role, but mentally I was lost. Aside from looking after my daughters, I felt purposeless. I didn't socialize. Weddings, parties, picnics: none of the things I used to love interested me anymore. My days followed the same routine of waking up, going to work, taking the girls home for dinner, playing with them, bathing them, putting them to bed and then getting back onto the computer and working until midnight.

I lived for my daughters, but as much as I loved them I needed more from life. I needed a sense of being. Remarrying was out of the question. Despite my family gently suggesting it to me, I had no desire for it. Hamid was, and remains to this day, the only man I have ever wanted to marry. To remarry would be to betray his memory. I still feel this as strongly now as I felt it in the weeks after he died.

But politics became a husband of a different kind. Politics was in my blood, and I believe it was my destiny. God wanted me to live for a purpose, and what greater purpose can there be but to improve the lot of the poor and bring pride to a nation torn apart by war?

In 2004, Afghanistan held its first-ever democratic elections. Back in the 1970s, when my father was an MP, Zahir Shah had promised to bring more democracy, and there had been similar elections for local MPs, but that process was derailed by the Russian invasion and then the war. Now, thirty years later, it was in motion again, and the country was elated.

Hamid Karzai had been interim president since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. He was still a popular figure and was elected in a landslide victory. There had been fears that this election day would be marred by violence, but it passed relatively peacefully.

It was a chilly autumn day with a thick grey fog swirling in the streets. Hundreds of thousands of people came out to vote. In some polling stations, a sea of women in blue burkas queued to vote from 4 o'clock in the morning. It was an extraordinary moment for Afghanistan, and despite my grief the significance of it was not lost on me. I think that was the first day since Hamid's death that I had allowed myself to feel emotion.

Back then, President Karzai had promised women's rights, civil society, all the things I believed in. Since his initial victory, his attitude has changed and he has become much more focused on appeasing the hard-liners, but in those days he was like a breath of fresh air. Sadly, the resounding victory he secured in 2005 was not repeated in 2009. He won that election too but amid allegations of widespread fraud. It was another reminder that in my country everything can change for the worse, in just four short years.

In 2005, it was announced that parliamentary elections would be held to select the members of parliament who would represent the various districts and provinces of Afghanistan. My family decided the Koofis should reaffirm their political history and be part of this new generation. One of us had to stand for election. There was much negotiation within the family as to who should run. My brother Nadir Shah, the son of Dawlat bibi, one of the two wives my father had divorced, wanted to stand. Nadir had been a respected Mujahideen commander. Later, he had become the first of us children to enter the family business of politics and held an important political post at the local level. He had the position of district manager in Koof district in Badakhshan. So understandably he believed he was the person best placed to represent the family.

But I disagreed. I thought I was the best and most experienced person for the job. Although I didn't yet have the local political experience Nadir had, my years with the UN had taught me much. I had contacts, both nationally and internationally, and experience in organizing and mobilizing volunteers as well as providing local services and running projects. I knew I would make a good MP. But I didn't know if any of my brothers would even consider allowing it.

First, I called my brother Mirshakay. As a child, Mirshakay had been one of my father's favourite sons. He had been made an arbab (community leader) at a young age. My father used to lift him up on his horse and allow him to sit at the front of the saddle. Mirshakay would look down at me from the horse with a snooty, proud expression. I hated him then and I was torn up with jealousy. I so wanted to be allowed to ride my father's horse too, but a daughter would never have been given that treat. But as we grew older, Mirshakay became one of my biggest supporters. We had shared our life together during Taliban rule, constantly moving. And it was he who had finally allowed me to marry Hamid and who was there on my wedding day at the emotional moment I left the family home for my husband's home.

After leaving Afghanistan for Pakistan, he had eventually gone to Europe, settling in Denmark with one of his wives. But he and I remained close, and to this day we still speak at least once a week on the phone. He listened quietly as I made my case and told him why I was the best Koofi to be an MP. He hung up the phone promising me he would talk to the others.

The family was split, and the debate raged for a few weeks; it was almost like an internal election within the family. But to my surprise, by the end of it most relatives supported me and Nadir was persuaded not to stand. The family decision was that only one person could stand for election, because to have two siblings stand against each other would have created too much disharmony among us all.

I wished my mother had been there to see it. I suspect she wouldn't have believed it was happening. In my childhood, my father didn't even speak directly to his daughters, and no one bothered to celebrate the girls' birthdays; that's how far down the scale we girls were. But here we were, only a generation later, electing a woman as the political leader of the clan.

I don't think my family is alone in accepting rapid change like this. Many Afghan families have gone through similar processes as more and more women have had to go out to work simply due to economics. The same thing has happened in many other countries. Once women become an economic force, they become emancipated. I believe that change in gender attitudes cannot be forced on a country from the outside, however well-meaning such forces may be. Where outsiders have tried to force change on people it usually only makes them dig in their heels deeper. Change can come only from within a country and it begins with individual families. I am living proof of this.

Several of my brothers and half brothers didn't believe I stood a chance of winning. My father had married all but one of his wives for their political usefulness. In doing so, he had created a local empire of allies, networks and connections. But my brothers thought these old networks had been too badly dismembered during the war and Taliban years, and that no one would remember the Koofis anymore. I had travelled to the villages in my work with the UN and knew that wasn't true. Many people I had met remembered my father, and the respect for our family was most definitely still there.

Furthermore, I was confident about my own networks. In the four years I had spent living in Faizabad with Hamid, I had volunteered for women's groups, taught over four hundred students English, visited internally displaced people camps and set up sanitation and school projects. People knew me there. My friends were civil society leaders, teachers, doctors and human rights activists. This was the new Afghanistan that I was part of and felt I could represent. I was still only twenty-nine, but I had also lived through Soviet occupation, civil war and the Taliban.

And my concerns went much wider than just gender and women's issues. Men suffer just as much as women from poverty and illiteracy. I wanted to promote social justice for all and education for all, tackle poverty and its root causes, and in doing so move Afghanistan out of the Dark Ages and into its rightful role in the world. It didn't matter if those prepared to join me in that struggle were male or female. I am the child of my mother, who was the epitome of the suffering and endurance of so many Afghan women. But I am also the child of my father, who was the very model of a committed and dedicated politician. Both of my parents have been equally major influences on my life. And both of them have led me to this great calling.

I went to Badakhshan to start campaigning. Within a couple of days, the news had spread that I was to run. I set up an office in the centre of Faizabad and I was thrilled when I began receiving phone calls from hundreds of young people, both male and female, volunteering to campaign for me. The youth wanted change and they saw me as the candidate to bring change. My office was buzzing with vitality and optimism.

The campaign was gruelling. We didn't have much time; we had very limited funds and a massive geographical area to cover. My days began at 5 A.M., more often than not to face a five or six-hour journey across dirt roads to reach a remote village or town before nightfall. Then back again to Faizabad the following day and a different town the day after.

I was exhausted but determined. And I was elated at the reception I received. In one village, women came out to greet me, singing and playing a daira, an instrument similar to a tambourine and made of goatskin. They sang and clapped and threw flowers and sweets at me. I already knew for sure I would win the women's vote because I spoke a lot about the issues that mattered to them: maternal mortality, lack of access to education, child health. In some areas of Badakhshan, women work just as hard as men and are out in the fields from dawn to dusk. Yet they still don't have the right to own property. If their husband dies, then the house is often passed to another male relative instead of to the wife. To me, that's wrong.