The Favored Daughter (7 page)

After staying with them for two weeks my mother was restless, confused about what to do and where to go. We heard contradictory news about our house, including that the mujahideen had burned it down and killed my sister and sister-in-law, who were still living there. Happily, the news was not accurate and the girls had survived.

My two elder brothers, Jamalshah and Mirshakay, had already moved to Faizabad before the attacks began. The elder one was a chief of police and the younger one a student. When news of what had happened to us finally reached them, they chartered a flight to Koof to pick us all up.

When the helicopter landed my mother was sobbing with relief. It was the first time I'd ever flown, and I remember running toward the helicopter ahead of the two boys and my big sister. Inside the helicopter there were two big wooden chairs; I put myself in the corner of one of the chairs, and my mother and sister sat in the other. Ennayat and Muqim had no chair, and I remember looking at them and smiling smugly because I had a chair and they did not.

In Faizabad my brother had rented us a house. He couldn't afford much on his policeman's salary, and it was a basic two-room mud shack. Local people gave my mother the basics: plates, pots, etc. The fancy imported china she was used to serving food on in the hooli was a thing of the past. She joked we were living in a dollhouse, it was so tiny, but she did her best to turn it into a home for us, putting hangings and tapestries on the walls to brighten it up.

By now I was seven. I still looked like a typical village girl, dirty hair and face, wearing baggy kameez trousers, a long scarf that trailed in the mud, and a pair of red wellington boots. I was so out of place in the big town.

From the dollhouse, I watched as the young girls went to school. These girls looked so smart and bright, and I yearned to be like them. But no girl child in my family had ever been educated; my father didn't see the need. But he was no longer here. So I asked my mother if I could go. She looked at me for a long, long time—it felt like hours—beamed a big smile, and said yes. “Yes Fawzia jan, you can go to school.”

Everyone else was against it, particularly my older brothers. But my mother held fast and insisted. I was to go with Muqim to school the next day to ask permission to join. We went into the headmaster's office. I remember the office being smart and clean with padded chairs, and I felt so tiny and so very dirty. My nose was full of snot and my face was covered with dirty marks, and feeling suddenly embarrassed, I used my scarf to wipe my nose loudly.

The headmaster frowned and peered at me. How was it a dirty little village girl like me was here in Faizabad asking to be educated? “Who are your people?” he asked me. When I answered I was the daughter of Wakil Abdul Rahman he raised his eyebrows in surprise. This was how far down the social scale our family had fallen since his death. But the kindly man admitted me to school and told me to start the next day. I remember running home to tell my mother, my scarf trailing in the mud and tripping me. My little heart was so full of excitement that I forgot everything else—my father's death, the loss of our home, our life of poverty.

I, Fawzia Koofi, was going to school!

I was so determined to make the most of every moment of school it didn't take me long to catch up with the other girls, and soon I was regularly achieving second and first place in class. Nothing has ever brought me such joy as studying for an exam and receiving a top grade.

Our education was fairly basic: general studies half the day at Kockcha high school, and study of the Holy Quran the other half of the day from the mullah iman at the local mosque. My mother—herself totally illiterate—was very interested in the Quranic studies.

At night I slept alongside my brother Muqim in our mother's bed. Our routine was always the same. She would ask us what we had studied, and we had to tell her what we remembered and recite the Quran to her, and she would make verbal corrections of our readings. It was her way of being involved in our education, and she loved it.

By the time I got to Pamir high school, the first high school in Faizabad, I was a confident child. I cut my hair short in order to look like the other girls. My brothers were furious, but again my mother calmed them down and, I believe, secretly enjoyed my newfound confidence and development.

Sometimes we'd have access to television and I would hear about Margaret Thatcher in the UK or Indira Gandhi, the prime minister of India, who remains a heroine of mine to this day.

I would watch them with my mouth open and think to myself, How is it possible that a woman stands in front of all those people? How can a simple woman lead them? And where does she find the power to speak to the all those people?

Other times, my friends and I would climb on the roof of my school to play. Slowly my horizons were broadening. When I was a toddler, I used to stand in the kitchen of the hooli looking up at the sky and thinking my whole existence was there. Now I stared from the roof at the streets surrounding the school. I believed then that the whole sky stood on the mountains around Faizabad, and all the world, my world, was in that city and its surrounding areas.

I was extremely happy there until the age of 11, when my brother Jamalshah got a promotion within the police force and was posted to Kabul. We were to go with him. I think the day we moved was one of the most exciting days of my life. Not only was I thrilled to be moving to the exciting capital city, a place I had only seen on TV, but I was transferring to a big high school there. I was fit to burst.

Kabul was exactly as I had dreamed it would be—noisy, exciting, and loud. I marveled at the yellow taxi cabs with black stripes down the sides, the blue Millie buses with female drivers in smart uniforms (the Millie was Kabul's electric bus system, one of the few electric bus system in the world at the time), the glitzy shops with all the latest fashions, and the smell of delicious barbequed meat floating from the hundreds of restaurants. The city embraced me, and I loved it back with all my heart.

For the next three years we stayed in Kabul, and they were some of the happiest years of my childhood. My mother loved the city, too. She found shopping in the big bazaars tremendously exciting and stimulating. It wasn't much, but these were levels of independence she could never have dreamed of when she was married to my father. The same was true for me. I experimented with fashion and talked about poetry and literature with my friends. We'd walk home from school along tree-lined boulevards, carrying our books with pride. These new school friends seemed so sophisticated and glamorous to me. Their families had houses with swimming pools; their mothers were chic with bobbed hairstyles, and their fathers indulgent and kind, trailing behind them the faint scent of aftershave and scotch whisky. Some of these girls even wore makeup and nail varnish. I was banned by my brothers from trying it, and I recall one day when I'd secretly put some on at a friends house. I also borrowed some of her clothes, long socks and a short skirt. My friend and I were casually sauntering around, pleased with how cool we thought we looked, when Jamalshah drove past in his car. He saw me and slowed down, staring out the open window. I didn't have time to hide, so I turned and faced the wall. My thinking was if he couldn't see me I couldn't see him. But of course he did. And he was waiting for me when I got home. He made like he was going to beat me so I ran away to hide. As I ran I heard him bellow with laughter, calling my mother to tell her the tale. She laughed too, and shamefaced I quietly snuck back in for dinner.

Those days in Kabul were free and light and fun.

But once again the wider world was about to collide with my little world.

 

FIVE

A VILLAGE GIRL AGAIN

It was the beginning of the 1990s. Apartheid in South Africa had ended. In Europe the Berlin Wall was coming down, the great Soviet empire was dismantling, and the cold war was reaching its final years.

The mujahideen fighters were seasoned veterans by now. They fought a successful war of attrition against the Russian invaders. And in 1989 they succeeded in sending the Soviet army retreating back to Moscow. Crowds cheered and clapped as the Red Army was forced to make a humiliating defeat. The fighters' morale had never been higher and many people saw them as heroes. The most popular of them all was Ahmed Shah Massoud, the man known as the Lion of Panjshir. He was seen as the most brilliant and clever of all the mujahideen warlords and the man who was the real strategist behind the Russian defeat. His image is still found on posters all over Afghanistan today.

But now, with the Red Army gone, the fighters were eager to seize full power over the government. They sent their armies sweeping toward Kabul. The mujahideen resented what they saw as a puppet government that, even though the Russian military presence had gone, still had very close links to Moscow. The government was led by President Mohammad Najibullah. For three years the Afghan army under his control fought to keep the mujahideen at bay, but eventually they were overwhelmed and his government collapsed.

People hoped this would bring stability and a new, purely Afghan-led government. But almost immediately after they defeated the government, the mujahideen began to fight among themselves. With the common enemy defeated, simmering ethnic tensions rose to the surface and they could not agree on how to share power. These battles between different commanders would eventually turn into the Afghan civil war, a bloody, brutal war that lasted more than a decade.

I was 16 years old when I heard the news on the radio that President Najibullah had been arrested by police while trying to flee Afghanistan. We were all shocked by what was happening and very worried for our country.

We had been living in Kabul, where I went to school. But the week it happened we were in our home province of Badakhshan. We were back in the city of Faizabad, visiting relatives on an extended holiday.

The day after the report of the president's arrest we could hear shooting coming from the mountains above Faizabad.

The Afghan army had set up positions on one side of the mountains that ringed the city, while on the other the mujahideen had also dug in. The two sides were exchanging fire with rifles and machine guns and occasionally artillery. It seemed to me that the mujahideen were firing a lot more than the army, who didn't seem to have as many guns or as much ammunition as their enemy.

The army soldiers just seemed to be defending their positions and weren't offering much resistance. Many Afghan soldiers had already deserted in large numbers. Many were unwilling to fight their countrymen, but the soldiers also knew exactly what the mujahideen were capable of doing. During earlier battles, Russian soldiers had been tortured and killed. The torture became more gruesomely creative as time went on. Sometimes they burned people alive. Other times they would ask a prisoner his age and then nail that number of nails into his skull. Still other times they would cut a prisoner's head off and pour boiling oil into the corpse. When the hot oil encountered the nerve endings, the decapitated body moved around for a few seconds as if it were dancing. This form of torture was aptly called the “dead man's dance.”

The Afghan army knew that it was the new enemy and couldn't expect any more mercy than the Russians had. Many soldiers simply slipped off their uniforms and returned to normal civilian life.

After two days of fighting, the mujahideen were declared the new government. Peace talks for the surrender and handover of power had already started at a conference in Geneva two years earlier, in 1989. So when the government in Kabul collapsed, few were surprised. Suddenly Faizabad was full of mujahideen fighters who had come down from their mountain positions. I remember watching them, thinking how interesting and grizzled their faces looked.

These were men who had been living in mountain camps, subsisting on scarce rations and fighting almost daily battles for several years. In my mind, soldiers wore smart uniforms, so it was very strange to see these casually dressed men in jeans and sneakers. I wondered how some of them could ever readjust to civilian and civilized life. And I was not alone in that thought. The government offices were suddenly full of these men, and they terrified the locals; many schools shut their doors because parents refused to send their daughters, fearing they might be raped by these ex-fighters who now stalked the city streets.

But overall, most people in Afghanistan were happy that the Russians were gone and still hoped that the mujahideen would settle their disputes and form a decent government.

For me, however, these political changes marked a very depressing period in my life. I was 16 years old, and suddenly, if I wanted to travel around the city, I had to wear a burqa for the first time in my life. The mujahideen were not religiously fundamental and they did not impose the wearing of the burqa. The need to wear it was more a matter of safety. With so many male soldiers around it just wasn't a good idea for a young girl to show her beauty on the streets.