I Should Have Honor

by Khalida Brohi

  Forty minutes passed, and there was still no sign of the teacher. The chaos in the classroom intensified. Boys left their seats and walked around the room. My father remained sitting quietly, his face stern and his lips pressed together.

  Finally, the teacher rushed in, walked to the blackboard, and wrote down the chapter he would teach that day. The boys took their seats, picked up their books from the floor, and fixed their collars, preparing for the day’s studies.

  Then the teacher turned around. Blood was splattered all over his shirt.

  The terror of the scene my father had witnessed less than an hour before became real to him. The girl murdered on the road was the teacher’s niece, and that morning he had killed her, as well as the man who had been lying in the road, in the name of honor. Then he had walked to school to educate boys, as on any normal day at work.

  I was shocked when Aba told me this story. I can’t remember what I said to him when he finished, but I knew then that despite his opposition to my constant risk taking, he was secretly rooting for me because of the horror he had witnessed. This was why he had moved his family away from his tribe, despite the disapproval and scorn of his own father. This was why he refused to give me away in an exchange marriage before I was born. This was why he never truly stopped me, even though he could have.

  * * *

  —

  I HAD BEEN OFFERED a fellowship at the MIT Media Lab that fall to work with students on creating affordable technology solutions for rural women. (I had been planning to refuse it because I thought I would be planning a wedding.) But after talking with my father that morning, I decided to take it. Rehman was furious.

  I went anyway, with new determination. Aba’s story empowered and emboldened me to push further whatever the cost.

  As soon as I arrived at MIT, the Clinton Global Initiative invited me to speak at its annual meeting in New York, at the generous recommendation of Hillary Clinton.

  I was to appear on a panel with Sheryl Sandberg, Christine Lagarde, Bill Clinton, and Bono, whom I had never heard of. That morning while we were waiting in the green room, Rehman contacted me, telling me I was selfish and arrogant, and that he had no time for me or our impending marriage. My head was spinning. His words almost made me vomit. With all that was going on in my life, the worlds I had passed through, and the miles I had traveled, I felt misunderstood and disheartened.

  Sheryl, whose confidence and graceful leadership shone through the whole event, sensed my moment of doubt and came over to me.

  “This is your stage, Khalida,” she told me firmly. “Neither I, nor Christine, nor even that man over there”—she pointed to Bono, who was showing his snakeskin boots to Bill Clinton—“belong on this stage. You do. So go get your place.”

  Her words shook me and reminded me of my purpose. I did exactly as she said, and even though I later asked Bono who he was and what he did for a living, I crushed it!

  That October the University of San Diego asked me to give a speech to its students, and afterward I ended up in L.A. for a video shoot. David came to see me. He had kept in touch all these months, sending emails and contributing money to Sughar, even sending me an email after a major earthquake struck Balochistan, asking after me and my family. I never responded, but every time I received a message from him, it was like a stab in the heart of something I could not have.

  When I saw him again this time, I realized how different he was from any other man I knew. The way he made me feel my full, powerful self when I was around him; the way he cheered for my successes; and the way he showed immense kindness and empathy for the people I worked to serve—all allowed love to take root in my heart. He was the opposite of Rehman. Marriage to Rehman would have been a marriage of convenience, but nothing in my life could be convenient; my husband wouldn’t be either. David and I recognized that the love we saw in each other might be impossible, but we also decided to fight for it.

  THE POWER TO DEFEND OUR love came from our closeness to God. I believe that God gave us several signs that our love was right. The most significant one happened one afternoon at David’s mother’s house. He had brought flowers to her, as he often did, and while he was arranging them in a vase, one of the buds fell off. It was a tiny, tightly wound bud, the kind that would never bloom even if you put it in water, because it was too young. I picked it up and placed it on my Holy Quran, which is what we do in my culture with peacock feathers, roses, and beautiful leaves. Several days later, as the flowers in the vase were wilting, the bud on the Holy Quran began to bloom. Over the next few days, it continued to unfold, exposing its bright purple heart. And it stayed there, fresh and bold for all to see. We both felt that something higher than us was offering a blessing.

  David started a conversation with his mother about our marriage. First wary and now outraged, she thought her son was being blind to the risks that would come with marrying me. “Not only is she a tribal Pakistani girl, but she fights honor killings! I like the person she is, but not where she comes from” was her response.

  * * *

  —

  MEANWHILE DURING A BREAK in my MIT fellowship, I went back to Pakistan. David had written to my father asking for my hand in marriage. My family would surely ask me unending questions about his marriage proposal—and I was not ready to face my father. I worried he would say no. I would have to put up a fight, and I needed to feel grounded before I faced those discussions. So I decided to go to Balochistan first, to check in with my team there and find my solid ground.

  At home in the village, I cherished the familiarity of our mud haveli, the hugs of my loved ones, the valleys filled with mud homes, and the familiar scent of cow dung burning for chai. Everything was like a soothing balm poured over my restless heart. As exciting as my travels in America had been, the hectic nature of American life struck me as slightly hollow, almost lonely. That night, lying under the mosquito net, I felt as if I’d come back to myself. As the net moved up and down in the light wind, my calm heart whispered to me that it was incomplete. I had left half of it back in bustling Los Angeles.

  As the wind blew stronger that night and the sweet scent of the dirt of my homeland teased my senses, I understood for the first time the distance between the land where I had left my heart and the land where I was: thousands of miles of oceans and decisions, of cultures and fates. I wasn’t the same person I had been before; love had changed me. I had grown up living indigenously, a village girl in a simple life. But now my fate was intertwined with a man from the other side of the world, a member of that culture we called the West.

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT MORNING I received a call from the U.S. consulate and was asked to go to Karachi immediately. When I arrived at the consulate the next morning, a man at a window asked for my passport. He picked up a stamp and returned my passport with a canceled visa.

  In just a matter of seconds, the doors to being with David were closed for me. The visa officer refused to give me any details—he just asked me to leave his office. I couldn’t understand—I had not misused my visa or overstayed it. I was still on my fellowship at MIT. It didn’t make sense.

  I walked out of the consulate in a daze, got a rickshaw, and only when I reached the door of our small apartment did I allow myself to weep. Then the reality of the situation fully hit me. I was a Pakistani village girl and David was an Italian-American man. The match was impossible, and the world wanted to make sure we knew it. How dare I let my heart wander where it didn’t belong? In my naïve and innocent love, I had refused to see the big borders that separated our countries.

  I decided that I couldn’t lose David because of these borders. He had taught me that I deserved the world. He had taught me to love and to be loved. He had changed my beliefs about marriage. I no longer saw it as the end of a career, but instead as the beginning of a new partnership. I had to strategize. I had to act.


  I wrote to the U.S. State Department. I wrote hundreds of emails to activists I’d met all over the world, asking them to help. Soon letters of support poured into the U.S. consulate in Karachi. The most powerful one came from an inspiring woman I had met in the United States, Tina Brown. She had believed in my vision and given me a platform to speak at an event she organized, the Women in the World Summit.

  Then the consulate called me again. They gave me back my visa. It had taken over a month, and they never really let me know what had happened in the first place.

  My parents had kept quiet during that month, seeing my grief, but they now erupted at me. Aba had told Ammi about the marriage proposal from David, and they were shocked. It seemed my troubles never ended. I was prepared for their outrage, and despite them trying to hide the matter from the children in the house, our conversations grew louder and hurtful. I told Aba that David was the person I truly loved and would spend the rest of my life with. Ammi cried for days, telling me I should give it up: “I’ve heard [Americans] divorce their wives instantly after marriage. They’re not faithful, Khalida!”

  Aba sensed my determination, though, and saw that nothing could change my mind. So he cleverly put a big challenge in front of me. “Fine,” he said. “If he is Muslim, you marry.” He knew he had set the bar impossibly high.

  Later that month, when David and I Skyped, he told me he had started to read the English translation of the Holy Quran that I had gifted him, the one with the miraculous bloom. Every time we talked, he asked me questions. As I introduced Islam to David, I felt as if I were reconnecting with my own faith all over again. He told me that he had seen too many signs. God had surprised him too many times and too improbably for it to be considered coincidence. He told me that if being Muslim meant submission to God, then his heart fully submitted.

  In Los Angeles a few months later, we found a mosque that would allow David to read the shahada (the ritual passage confirming that you witness the oneness of God). According to the religious scholar there, David would remain the person he had been all along but would have more clarity about what God meant to him. He would even keep his name, although lovingly I started calling him Dawood. That day David read the shahada in the presence of his mother, his neighbor Deryn, and hundreds of people praying jumma (Friday prayers). Loud cheers of God’s greatness filled the air. I stood stunned at the presence of God in our lives, at his whole plan.

  That evening I was able to tell my parents the good news.

  My father was unprepared. “Khali,” he said sternly, “be careful. I have been thinking this for some time.” He paused. “I really believe David has some connection to the CIA. No one goes around just converting to Islam, especially all these people in the West who have a misconception of our religion.”

  I was stunned but not shocked. That past December, David’s mother had suggested I was part of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (our equivalent to the CIA). And so the two were now even. It made me believe my father and David’s mother had a lot in common: sharp cynicism on the outside and tender hope inside. If only we could get them to meet somewhere, all the doubts would be washed away.

  I returned to America to speak at Women in the World, still in limbo about whether I would be able to marry the love of my life.

  THAT FALL I WAS TO speak at a conference in Venice, Italy, organized by Pilosio, an international construction-material manufacturing firm focused on creating sustainable living solutions in developing countries. It would be the perfect place to bring David’s and my parents together. I told the conference organizers about the situation; they sponsored the visas and travel for my parents. When my parents applied for the visas, they were refused, but after all kinds of documentation and an incredible amount of time and effort, they finally made their way to Venice. It was my parents’ first time traveling in an airplane together, and the first time my mother had had a passport. They arrived at Marco Polo Airport on September 11, 2014, and were interrogated heavily. When I finally saw them nervously walking out of the airport with their suitcase, I realized how far I had brought them from their village life.

  In Venice, David and I had strategically canceled the hotel rooms that the conference organizers had booked for us. Instead we booked a small Airbnb flat so the two families could mingle easily. David’s mother, Mary Ellen, and her best friend, Carol, a nurse who had helped care for Mary Ellen during her battle with cancer, arrived first. It had been an especially long journey for Mary Ellen, who was going through yet another round of chemotherapy. It had taken much of her hair and relegated her to frequent rests and wheelchairs where they were available.

  When I showed up with my parents, we immediately regretted getting such a small apartment. It felt as if everyone was sitting in one another’s laps in the tiny living room, and after the formal greetings, a silence overtook the cramped space. My mother got up to make chai in the kitchen. My father, relieved, followed her. I sat next to David’s mother, trying to smile, but nothing made the situation better.

  That is, until my mother emerged a few moments later carrying a tray of cups filled with golden hot chai. The aroma of cardamom filled the room as the teacups tinkled. As soon as people had chai in their hands, a kind of warmth suffused the room. The tea did its magic. Soon my father made a funny remark, and David’s mother responded with a chuckle. My father, encouraged, shared a story in full South Asian style, sitting back on the sofa, his cup of chai in hand. Soon the whole room was relieved, David and I most of all. This moment with the chai (and a few others) would later inspire us to use this magical drink to bring our two vastly different worlds together.

  The more our families learned about each other, the closer they became. Their misconceptions melted before our eyes, and soon the borders between their hearts did too. On the third day of the trip, David and I became officially engaged. We had a small celebration with gifts and hugs, while our two very different families bonded.

  Back in Pakistan a week later, Aba and Ammi called our relatives to share the news of my engagement to David. Aba did it carefully, making it sound almost as if it were an arranged marriage, and when people asked who the man was, my father responded with “A good Muslim man.” That day, as my parents had some of the most difficult conversations of their lives, I felt their love for me anew. I had changed our family dynamic, and my mother and father were handling it with dignity, while bursting with pride for their new son-in-law.

  A gathering was arranged in Karachi to officially celebrate my engagement, in the presence of my siblings, cousins, uncles, and aunts. During the celebration, we all danced, and the party went on until midnight. That day I felt like the strongest woman on earth. I was filled with feelings I never thought would live in my heart simultaneously: grief and pride, freedom and submission. I felt braver than ever, knowing that I was marrying a man who stands by me, helps me achieve all that I have dreamed, and reminds me to keep believing in the impossible. I decided I was brave enough to do something I had wanted to do for so many years.

  When my uncles, aunts, cousins, siblings, and parents went to sleep, I sat down with Kalsoom. The thick night hummed around us, and as we put henna on each other’s hands, I asked her the question that ate at my heart every day. “Kalsoom, where is Sajda?”

  She told me her sister had been in Quetta this whole time. Her husband initially took her to his family to receive their blessings, but since they knew the people hunting them down could easily find the boy’s family, they left to make a life in Quetta. They lived every day in fear of being found.

  Relief and pain washed over me at once. It seemed a hard life for Sajda—she was away from her siblings, her home, and her family, but she was alive. Kalsoom told me they would sometimes meet in far-off places, and Sajda would appear in a black veil. My heart skipped to my throat, imagining sweet Sajda, that thin little girl who laughed so much and wanted so much out of life, wea
ring a burqa, afraid for her life every day. I asked Kalsoom to call her, and after four long years, I heard the tiny voice of my cousin. I promised I would bring her back to the family. I didn’t know how, but I would.

  WITHIN A FEW WEEKS, DAVID called to let me know that my soon-to-be mother-in-law was in critical condition. In my culture, having a mother-in-law is a sign of good fortune; when a girl leaves her home, a new mother awaits her in the new home. I wasn’t one of those fortunate ones. Way before I could learn to cook her special dishes or go shopping with her, my mother-in-law was leaving me. I spent months at her bedside, praying or telling her stories of my village, and when the sadness broke David’s and my heart, I would play Bollywood songs and dance for her.

  In November 2014, two months before our wedding in Karachi, David’s mother left us. She was buried next to her husband, Louis, David’s father, which was her wish. That day, at the graveyard, I knew David was burying his childhood. It wasn’t just a chapter of his life that had closed but a whole volume. We were both devastated, but we knew the only way to heal was to strengthen our bond.

  That week I flew to Pakistan. As per my mother-in-law’s wish, we kept the date we had set before her health worsened. I had a month left to plan a five-hundred-person wedding. But once I landed in Pakistan, more shocking news awaited me: Uncle Liaqat had been diagnosed with Stage 4 stomach cancer. His body had gone into paralysis, and he hardly spoke or ate anything.

  Would the shocking incidents of my life never end? I could not imagine my fierce uncle facing such pain and illness. In spite of the trauma he had caused my family, I decided to visit him and pray for him. Since he had been living in Karachi, I had seen a change in him. I had seen him talk to Kalsoom and her siblings with love. I had seen him bring groceries to them, and when I visited, he would sit and talk with me about my work, asking me questions.