Letters to My Daughters (4 page)

When my mother heard this story, she cried tears of joy. To her, it was my father's way of telling her he still loved her and of reassuring her that she should not feel like a failure for providing him with a last daughter instead of a son. She told that story often. I must have heard it hundreds of times.

But by then my father was a distant man. In those days, politics in Afghanistan was becoming a very dangerous game. The regime had recently changed. Mohammed Dawoud Khan had removed Zahir Shah in a peaceful coup d'état while the king was abroad in 1973, declaring himself the first president of Afghanistan. He suspended the constitution and abolished the parliament.

Soon afterwards, my father was imprisoned for disobeying the president. He was vocal in his criticisms of the new regime, putting pressure on Dawoud to restore the previous constitution and parliament. Rumblings of political discontent were heard across the country. Unemployment was rising, social problems were on the increase and Afghanistan's neighbours, particularly Pakistan and the USSR, were once more beginning to play out their political strategies on our soil.

My father was mostly away in Kabul and was rarely home. When he was absent, our house was relaxed and children's laughter rang throughout the rooms. But when he was home, the women of our household hurried nervously along corridors, feverishly preparing meals for his guests and trying to keep the children silent so as not to disturb him.

My friends and I were generally happy when my father was home because we could be as naughty as we liked, filching chocolate from the kitchen stores safe in the knowledge that my mother was too preoccupied with him to stop us.

I have few real memories of my father. I remember him walking around, wearing a white
shalwar kameez
with a smart brown wool waistcoat on top and a sheepskin hat, his hands clasped firmly behind his back. The
hooli
had a long, flat roof, and in those days he would walk on it for hours on end. He would start pacing restlessly back and forth in the afternoon and carry on until evening without stopping—just walking and thinking, always in the same position with his hands behind his back.

I had a sense even then that my father was a great man. That whatever the stresses and troubles he brought home to us and however frightening the beatings, they were all due in part to the multiple pressures he was under: the pressure of maintaining a home and extended family as large as ours, the pressure of political life, the pressure of representing some of the poorest people in Afghanistan. He barely had any time to himself. When he was home, our guest house, a single-storey dwelling at the back of the
hooli
, was always full of visitors: some sought his advice or wisdom; others wanted him to resolve a family dispute; still others brought news of errant tribes or violence in the mountains; and some were simply needy and desperate for his help. His door was closed to none, and he had no time for light relief or relaxation. How, then, could he be blamed for demanding great things from his family?

Of course, I don't condone my father for beating my mother, but in those times it was the norm. In other ways, he was a good husband to her, as far as tradition would allow. Perhaps today I understand him more than I ever have because I understand his workload. I understand the pressure of political life, the feeling of never having any time alone, free from duty and the burden of responsibility. I think my mother understood too, and that was why she endured so much.

Under the sharia law system my father espoused, a man is supposed to treat all his wives equally, sharing himself without favour among them. I too believe in sharia justice. In theory, and in its purest form, it is a fair system based on Islamic ethical values. But affairs of the human heart do not follow theoretical principles, and in polygamous marriages such equality cannot exist. How could a man help it if his heart preferred some wives over others?

My father's suite of rooms was called the Paris suite and was decorated with hand-painted murals by an artist who had been brought especially from Kabul. The room had two windows looking out over an apricot garden, and in summertime a fresh apricot-scented breeze wafted into it. No modern air conditioning could ever compete with that delicate scent.

When he was home, a different wife would share his bed each night. The exception was his first wife, the Khalifa. In order to take more wives than the sharia-allowed maximum of four, my father had divorced two of his original wives and made his first wife what is known as a Khalifa. Under this agreement, a woman retains the title of wife and is cared for financially but loses the intimacy that comes with marriage and never sleeps with her husband again. I remember the sadness in this woman's eyes, the power and status that should have come from being first wife totally destroyed by her forced sexless status. Instead, my mother, the second wife, became head wife. The Khalifa never showed my mother any anger or disrespect, but I wonder if she too had felt devastated and hurt when my father first brought my mother home or when she was given the head wife status. How was it for the poor Khalifa to be usurped by a teenage girl?

I like to think my father looked forward most to the nights he spent with my mother. She recalled how after the necessary marital intimacies, they would lie there together until the early hours just talking. He would tell her stories of his work, sharing with her the strains of his political life in Kabul, and give instructions on how she was to handle the land, the latest wheat harvest or the sale of some cattle in his absence. She was so authoritative when he wasn't there that she earned the local nickname of Deputy Wakil sahib, or deputy representative boss.

The harder things were for him politically, the more he relied on my mother. As long as his home was harmonious and ran like clockwork, he could deal with all the machinations of parliament. It was she who ran the farms and business, who kept order in the house when he was away and who solved disputes between the wives. She needed a large amount of her own political skill to negotiate such matters.

Certain wives, particularly the third one, Niaz bibi, resented my mother's status and tried to turn my father against her. This woman was intelligent and frustrated by her life of drudgery, so it is easy to understand why she would be jealous of the few freedoms and small powers my mother enjoyed. But her attempts to win my father's favour in this way always failed, not only because my father didn't like to believe ill of my mother, but also because my mother could foresee a difficult situation arising and take evasive action.

Her strategy was kindness. She could have beaten the younger wives and made them do the hardest work, but instead she tried to create a happy house in which all the children were loved equally and where wives could work together as sisters and friends. When one of the younger wives was caught stealing from the household food store, a large locked cellar at the back of the kitchen, my mother didn't tell my father, knowing that he would give the miscreant a vicious beating. Instead she dealt with the matter in secret. This strategy slowly earned her the others' gratitude and loyalty.

Only one wife, number six, was chosen not for her political usefulness but for her practical homemaking skills. She was a stunningly beautiful Mongolian woman selected for her ability to weave the most beautiful rugs and carpets. She taught my mother this art, and I would watch as they sat together in comfortable silence for hours, their hands rhythmically spinning and threading the richly coloured yarn.

But my mother's best friend was wife number four, Khal bibi. She called my mother Apa, elder sister. Once, my mother became sick with a serious eye infection, and in the absence of doctors in the village a female elder suggested that if someone were to put their tongue on the eye and lick it clean each morning, the natural antibiotic in the saliva would heal it. Such was their closeness that Khal bibi volunteered without hesitation. Each day for eight weeks, she licked my mother's swollen, pus-filled eye until, just as the elderly lady had promised, it healed.

My mother did not have such a relationship with wife number three, Niaz bibi, with whom she could never get along. One day, as the women sat on the floor eating naan for breakfast, the two began quarrelling. Although I was only about eighteen months old, I somehow sensed the enmity between them. I toddled over to Niaz bibi and yanked down hard on her braids. She gasped with shock and began laughing, taking me in her arms and cuddling me. She and my mother forgot their quarrel and both laughed out loud. “This one is a very clever girl, Bibi jan, just like her mother,” laughed her enemy, showering my face with kisses.

Even at that early age, I had a sense of injustice about the position of women in our culture. I remember the quiet despair of the wives who weren't loved or noticed by my father and the trials of those who were. I recall watching in horror once as my father chased my mother along the corridor and began beating her. I flew at him, kicking him and trying to protect her. He flung me aside with one arm.

Once, my father viciously tore out a chunk of her hair during a beating. Her brother visited a week later and, as was the custom, he spent time with the men of the family so my mother was unable to talk privately to him about what had happened. Before he left, my mother prepared his lunch for his long journey home across the mountains on horseback. She cleverly hid the locks of her torn hair in the wrapping. After a full morning's riding, he stopped in a clearing for lunch, unwrapped his food and found his sister's hair. He understood the message immediately, mounted his horse and galloped straight back to our house, challenging my father and telling my mother her family would ensure she would be granted a divorce if she wanted it.

This family support was unusual. Most women were encouraged not to complain about beatings and to endure them in silence. Girls who fled to a family home to escape a violent marriage would often be returned by their father to the very husband who had brutalized them. Beating was a normal part of marriage. Girls grew up knowing it had happened to their mothers and grandmothers and expecting it to happen to them.

But Bibi jan was close with her parents, whom she visited every year, and her brothers loved her. Her brother sat with her in the
hooli
garden and told her she was free to leave with him, that he would take her home right there and then if that was what she wanted. She was at a point of despair, constantly depressed and suffering splitting headaches and crippled hands from the beatings with the metal ladle. She was also tired of the humiliation that came with each new wife. She had had enough and seriously considered divorce.

But she knew that leaving my father would also mean losing her beloved children. In Afghanistan, as in most Islamic cultures, after divorce children stay with their fathers rather than their mothers. She asked to see her children and looked into their eyes and faces. She said nothing at the time but told me years later that she could see herself reflected in her children's eyes. She couldn't leave them. Giving up her children was too great a price to pay for bringing an end to her own sufferings.

So she told her brother that she would stay with her husband and children and that he should go home alone. Reluctantly, he got back onto his horse and left. I have no idea how my father reacted after the brother left. Did he beat my mother again for her insolence? Or was he tender, kind and regretful, realizing just how close he had come to losing the woman he needed? Probably both.

I REMEMBER my sisters being married off one by one. The first sister to be married had a trousseau brought especially from Saudi Arabia. Caskets of fine cloth and gold jewels befitting the wedding of a daughter of Abdul Rahman were brought to the
hooli
and unpacked with care as we all oohed and aahed. On that day, she became an important commodity, a jewel to be traded. It would be the only time in her life she was treated with such importance.

I also recall the day my sister-in-law arrived. She had been married to my elder brother at the age of twelve—the age my daughter Shaharzad is today. He was seventeen, and they were expected to begin a full sexual relationship immediately. It is unthinkable to me that my daughter should suffer a forced physical relationship at such a tender age. My sister-in-law was still such a child that my mother had to help her bathe and dress in the mornings. I wonder what my mother felt on seeing the injuries inflicted on this poor girl by her own son. Did she recoil in horror at the injustice of it all? Yet this was the life and the fate of women. A girl grew up expecting to get married as soon as a suitable suitor came along; not doing so brought shame on the entire family. So perhaps all my mother could do was try to comfort the girl, give her the lighter chores and know that just as the elder women had done, the girl would grow to accept her fate without complaint. It was a cultural conspiracy that bound them all together in silence and acquiescence. None of them could challenge or change it.

Yet without even being aware I was doing so, I broke boundaries and challenged these norms. This was partly because of my close friendship with Ennayat, the son of the seventh wife, who was born just a few months before me. Despite the initial rivalries surrounding our births, he and I were instant best friends, enjoying a special sibling love that has lasted to this day. He was naughty and mischievous, and I even more so. Knowing that as a girl I was more restricted, I was always challenging him into ever-greater naughtiness on our joint behalf. We were joined in our mischief by Muqim, my mother's son who had been born three years before me. We were the three little musketeers.