The Favored Daughter

by Fawzia Koofi

  EIGHT

  LOSING HER

  The first time I saw the man I would marry was as my mother was dying.

  In the past three months she had gotten progressively worse, and now she was barely able to breathe and too weak to move. She’d been admitted to a hospital, but everyone could see she didn’t have long to go.

  I had heard from rumors that a man called Hamid from a village near ours in Badakhshan wanted to send a marriage proposal to me.

  One night I was sitting by my mother’s bed when several Badakhshani men came to pay their last respects to her. Hamid was among them.

  I was embarrassed because it’s not culturally allowed to meet a man who wants to marry you until an engagement has been agreed upon. And I was still only 17. I wasn’t sure I even wanted to get married.

  There was a group of ten men and although I’d never seen him before, I knew instantly which one Hamid was. He was young, with a lean body and a face that was both handsome and intellectual. Not bookish as such, but with an expression of curiosity and empathy. He was someone you warmed to instantly.

  I was secretly pleased my suitor was physically attractive. But I tried very hard not to look at him directly; that would have looked very bad on my part. But in the close confines of the hospital I couldn’t avoid glancing at him.

  My mother was sitting in a wheelchair, and she was so weak she could barely speak. But she still tried to play the gracious hostess as came so naturally to her, fussing over her guests and asking if they were comfortable. The sight of her broke my heart. At one point she asked me to remove the blankets covering her knees and to wheel her into the sunlight. Hamid leapt up and leaned over to help remove the blanket. He was so gentle with her. He rearranged a pillow behind her head with such tenderness and care, that I was taken aback. In a flash I realized this was a rare Afghan man and a man who might treat me with tenderness, too.

  My mother must have had the same thought, because when the men left, she took my hand in hers and looked into my eyes. “Fawzia jan. I want you to be happy in your marriage. I like this man. I think he is enough for us. When I recover we will both go to live with him.” Her eyes searched mine for a reaction, and when I smiled and nodded she beamed. Her spirit and strength still shone strong through her watery, pale eyes. I turned away, biting back tears. I wanted so much for my mother to come and live with me and this kind man, and for me to be able to look after her as she had looked after me. But she grew frailer by the minute.

  I was sleeping at the hospital; I refused to leave my mother’s side. But I heard that the following night Hamid sent a proposal. As is the traditional way to ask for a lady’s hand, male members of his family came to our house to speak with my brother. But my brother was also at the hospital that night. A proposal can only be passed in person, so it wasn’t to be.

  The following morning the hospital doctor, a warm lady with gray hair and green eyes, asked to speak to me in private. She wanted to impart the news she had already told my brother the night before. “Fawzia,” she said gently, “All trees blossom and all trees wither. It’s the nature of life. It is time to take your mother home.”

  I knew what she meant. My mother was dying, there was no hope. I screamed and pleaded, and begged for her to stay in the hospital. They could try new medicine, there was hope. The doctor hugged me and shook her head silently. It was over.

  We took her home and tried to make her feel as comfortable as possible. My mother she refused to rest or sit still and insisted on attempting to carry out chores as usual. My brother jokingly told her if she didn’t rest he’d have to physically restrain her. For a while I lay on the bed with her. I stroked her hair and told her stories about my life at the university, just like I had always done. She told me how proud she was of me, her disbelief that the daughter of an illiterate woman like herself had become educated. And she jokingly reminded me that I may still one day be president. Normally I’d love it when she talked like this, buoyed by her dreams and belief in me. But this day I couldn’t see anything but a gaping black hole, an emptiness of the inevitability that was about to come. I fell asleep. At about 2 a.m. I heard her calling for me. I found her outside the bathroom, where she’d collapsed. She hadn’t wanted to wake anyone and had attempted to go to the bathroom herself. I half picked her up, half carried her back to bed. She felt like a tiny bird in my arms. The sight of her like that is a memory seared in pain across my brain. To see a woman like that, a woman of such strength, such dignity, a woman who had endured so much in her life, beatings, death, tragedy, the loss of her husband, to see her too weak to even take herself to the bathroom was just awful.

  I took her to her bedroom and placed her on the mattress on the floor. As she lay back to sleep, her breath started to rattle a little.

  Unlike in the days of her marriage when she was expected to either share her husband’s bed or sleep on the kitchen floor, she now had a bed of her own. But she was too weak to climb in and out of it, so she slept on the mattress. I also think she secretly preferred the floor, having grown so accustomed to it over the years.

  Usually when she slept there, she liked to have one of her grandchildren, my brother’s children, with her. That night, she had my six-month-old niece, Katayoun, sleeping next to her. I smiled when I saw the baby’s little fingers curled around my mother’s hair. I had also done that as a child. I waited until I was sure she was asleep, then I crawled into her proper bed and went to sleep. That night, I had a very unusual dream in which I saw nothing but fear and blackness. I was trying to run away from it.

  I woke up with a start. I looked over at my mother on the mattress and realized that her blanket was not moving. There was no sign of breathing. I lifted up the blanket and could see she was almost gone, her breathing so weak it was imperceptible. My screams woke up the rest of the family. My brother had been about to start his morning prayers. He ran into the room clutching his Quran so he could read her some verses as a last goodbye. I screamed at him to stop. I didn’t want to believe my mother was taking her last breaths.

  I shouted at my family to bring a doctor. Someone ran next door to a neighboring house where we knew a doctor lived. They were back within minutes, but the doctor simply repeated what everyone knew. She was passing out of this life, and there was nothing we could do. I heard his words, but I couldn’t take them in. “I’m sorry,” he kept saying. “I’m sorry. She’s almost gone.” I felt like throwing myself out of the fifth-floor window. The lights had gone out. The stars had fallen out of the sky, and I wanted to follow them. I did not see how I could live without her.

  For 40 days after her death I slipped in and out of consciousness. The shock and trauma had sent my body into almost total shutdown.

  I was not in a fit mental state for at least six months after that. I didn’t want to talk to anybody, I didn’t want to go anywhere, no one could get through to me. I am not even sure I wanted to live. My family was incredibly supportive. No one forced me to try to move faster; they let me take my grief at my own pace. They were grieving, too, but they all knew my mother and I had a special bond.

  It was the first time in a long time that I hadn’t shared a bed with her. I couldn’t sleep unless she was laying next to me, my fingers curled in her hair. I lay awake at night and tried to imagine her there. I cried and cried for her. I wailed for my mother like I was a newborn baby.

  After six months of watching me grieve like this, my family feared I’d never improve. They had a family conference and decided the only thing that might help was my return to education. My mother had died in the autumn months and now it was spring again. Term time was beginning and my brother suggested I go back to study English and also take a computer class. By now, even those brothers opposed to my education knew it was the only thing I might choose to live for.

  At the time my mother had fallen sick I was due to take my high school graduation exams. I’d been too upset to take them, but the teachers arranged for me to take them now. If I didn�
��t, I’d fail automatically. So I had to go. And of course it helped. Slowly I entered the world again.

  It was coming up to my eighteenth birthday. I admitted myself to the university exam preparation classes. I had decided I wanted to study medicine at the university and become a doctor. Hamid knew that I was in this class. Sometimes, even though he wasn’t supposed to, he would drive his car and park it at the end of the street. He thought that I couldn’t see him. But I recognized the car and the man inside. I never approached him or waved. To do so would have been culturally indecent of me.

  After a couple of weeks of this he grew braver and would walk over to greet me as I left class. It was very formal and we never discussed anything personal or our feelings for one another. He’d ask how my family was, I would reply politely, and that was that. In Afghan culture there can be no courtship or dating. We were not even allowed to speak on the telephone. We both respected that and obeyed the rules. But these little moments with him were enough for me; even if he only spoke three words to me I would live off the memory all week and replay it over and over in my head. Hamid’s smile made me forget some of the pain I was in and eased my grief for my mother. I would remember her words: “This man is enough for us.”

  By now the fighting was beginning to calm down. The different mujahideen factions had begun to broker agreements with each other. Kabul was still a divided city, with different factions in control of different areas. But they had started negotiations with each other and began drafting a new government constitution. As the civil war drew to a close, Burhanuddin Rabbani was nominated to be president. Most people saw this as a good sign, that the war was behind us. Soldiers no longer patrolled the streets and it was safe not to wear a burqa. Although I always covered my head with a scarf, of course, I was now also proudly able to wear jeans and fashionable long tunics. The sense of relief on the streets was palpable. Cinemas that had been closed because of fighting sprang back to life, showing the latest Indian films, and children went back to play in parks that had formerly been home to snipers. The bustling streets around the center of Kabul once more smelled of kabobs as street vendors and their customers felt safe to be out after dark. The spirit of Kabul crackled and sizzled back into life.

  My life was also beginning to take a regular pattern again. But I was still deeply traumatized. One of my favorite possessions was a beautiful doll. She sat in her own cart and carried a stuffed dog. I was too old to be playing with such things, really, but I needed security and comfort, and the doll seemed to give me that. I spent hours brushing her hair and putting nice clothes on her. I obsessively arranged a vase of flowers next to her cart.

  Hamid wasn’t the only person trying to propose to me at this time. Various mujahideen commanders also came to see my brothers to ask for my hand. Fortunately my brother would never have forced me to marry against my will. I had to agree to it. And I would not. The more I compared these men with Hamid the more I knew it was him I wanted to marry. I didn’t want a soldier; I wanted the intellectual with kindness in his eyes.

  Hamid ran a small finance company, a kind of money exchange. And he also taught finance part time at the university. The idea of being married to a teacher was a far more romantic notion than being married to someone who carried a gun.

  His family came several times to talk to my brother and send the proposal, but each time my brother said no. My brother’s biggest fear was that Hamid’s family was not as rich as ours, and that there would be a big difference in how we could live and in our social life. Hamid relied on his academic salary to make ends meet. My brothers also wanted me to continue the family tradition of expanding our political networks by marrying someone from a politically useful family. Hamid’s family were not that.

  My brother Mirshakay discussed it with me honestly. He told me he knew I liked this man but that he was trying to protect me by saying no. “Fawzia jan, how will you cope if he loses his job? You’ve grown up in a family where no one had to rely on a monthly salary to live. Imagine the stress each month of having to pay for rent and food and not knowing where the money is coming from.”

  But my brother’s concerns didn’t worry me. I had always wanted to work, too. And I had this romantic notion of the life I could have with Hamid. My education had given me career prospects. We would both work, and we would both contribute to the household. We would be a team, real partners. I wanted a life where I could make the decisions along with my husband.

  But this wasn’t something I could explain to my brother.

  Culturally, I couldn’t tell him I liked Hamid, and I could never tell him that we spoke to each other outside the university. That would never have been allowed. But my silence when my brother spoke negatively about Hamid and the obvious look of pain on my face probably told him all he needed to know.

  I tried to get the support of my sisters, thinking they could help win my brother over, but they were opposed to the marriage, too. They all wanted what was best for me, and in their eyes a life of wealth and status was best. They told me stories of wedding parties they’d attended where there had been thousands of guests and the bride had been given showers of gold; they tried to enthuse me about the kind of wedding I might have if I married one of my richer suitors. But it meant nothing to me. What use was gold? In that life I would have felt like a bird trapped in a gilded cage. I wanted the gift of freedom.

  Also, because I came from a family where multimarriage was the norm, I knew I didn’t want it for myself. My father had eight wives and my brother had two wives, so I had seen too much of the pain and jealousy the women suffered. Many of the suitors who came for me were already married, and I’d have been wife number two or three. I didn’t want to destroy another woman’s life in the same way I had seen my father’s later wives destroy my mother. And I’d never have coped with that situation or the lack of independence that came with it. I think after even a week of a life like that I’d have killed myself.

  The next winter came and I turned 19. By now I had a diploma in English and I had started volunteering as an English teacher, teaching women of all ages. It was an amazing experience for me, watching the light go on in my pupils’ eyes when they understood something. I loved it.

  I didn’t ask for a salary, but one day the head of the course gave me about 2,000 Afghanis—the equivalent of 40 dollars. They were my first-ever earnings. I was so proud I almost cried. I didn’t spend the money. I kept it in my purse and just kept looking at it. I wanted to keep it there forever.

  As the snow started to fall I was finally feeling happy. I passed my university entrance exam and got a place at medical school to train to be a doctor. I was teaching and I had some independence. The raw, angry hole in my heart that was my mother’s absence was still there, but the pain had dulled to a manageable level.

  The fighting was becoming more and more sporadic those days. Rabbani’s government had finally achieved a degree of calm. In the summer of 1995, a peace agreement was brokered. Hekmatyar agreed to lay down his arms in return for the position of prime minister within the Rabbani government. The motive behind the peace agreement was the growing influence of the Taliban in the south. No one knew much about the Taliban, other than that they were religious students who had studied at the madrassas in the border regions between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Stories abounded about how these young men wore white clothes and called themselves the “angels of rescue.” Villagers living in the south, like people throughout Afghanistan, had grown tired of the civil war, the lack of rule of law and the weak central government. As the fighting raged in Kabul, people living in quieter provinces had felt ignored and neglected. Their overwhelming poverty had not disappeared but had only worsened in the chaos, and they were desperate for a proper government that could help them. These men who called themselves angels arrived in villages on the back of pickups and set about restoring order and security at the community level. They were like self-styled vigilantes, but for people who had been too scared to open their sho
ps for fear of looting or to send their children to school, these vigilantes started to make individual neighborhoods safe. That was enough to foster confidence in them.

  Ironically, the latest mujahideen peace treaty allowed the Rabbani government to function effectively for the first time. The civil war was over, and the mujahideen government was finally sharing power peacefully and doing a decent job of running the country. But it was all too little, too late to placate a desperate population. Calm had descended, but calm in Afghanistan is as fleeting and fragile as the life of a butterfly. The Afghan people were already looking for new heroes to believe in. The Taliban were on the ascent.

  PART TWO

  My dear mother,

  I still wait and hope that you will come back. Even now my breath catches in my throat when I remember that you are not in this world. I’m a politician now. But sometimes I’m just a silly girl and I make mistakes. When I do make a mistake, I imagine you’ll be there, gently chiding me and correcting me. If I arrive home later than usual, I still expect you to be waiting in the yard for me with your burqa.

  I still wish I could sleep curled next to you, like I used to sleep with you until the last days of your life.

  I want to lay next to you and listen again as you tell me stories of your life. Stories of your good times, bad times, sufferings, patience, and hopefulness.

  Mother, your stories taught me how to live.

  Those stories taught me that as a woman I should learn to suffer and be patient. I remember as a child when I was not happy during the day—when one of my brothers would tell me not to go to school, or my mind couldn’t concentrate properly in class, or I would see that my classmate’s father would come to pick up my friend from school with his nice car to take her home, or when my girlfriend Nooria would talk about her father and I would feel very sad and an unknown sorrow would take over my heart.

  At those times I thought that I was the weakest and the poorest girl in the world, but then I remembered your stories in the night— how you married when you were 16 years old, how so often you would witness a new woman marrying my father, and how despite your pain you stayed with my father and his other wives so that your children could have a good future—these stories gave me strength.