by Fawzia Koofi
In those days, the only contact Badakhshanis had with the outside world was through radio. My father had inherited from my grandfather the only radio in our village, a chunky wooden Russian wireless with brass controls. On the day of my father’s first address to the parliament in Kabul, all the villagers gathered at our house in Koof to listen to the broadcast.
No one except my elder brother Jamalshah knew how to turn on the radio or even increase the volume. Bursting with pride that her husband was a member of parliament, my mother threw open the gates of the hooli to allow the public in to hear the speech and called for Jamalshah to turn on the radio for her.
My brother, however, was not at home. In panic, she ran through the village calling him, but he was nowhere to be found. The speech was about to start, and back at the hooli a crowd was gathering: cousins, village elders, women, children. Some had never heard a radio before, and all wanted to hear their new representative address parliament. She could not let my father down but had not the faintest idea how the contraption worked.
She went up to the radio and tried all the knobs, to no avail. As the crowd watched her in anticipation, she felt a wave of rising panic and fear and started to cry. Her husband was going to be humiliated, and it would be her fault. If only Jamalshah were there. Where was the boy? In frustration, she brought her fist down hard on the top of the radio—and, amazingly, the thing spluttered and crackled into life.
She couldn’t quite believe her luck, but still no one could hear it, as the volume was too low. She didn’t have a clue what to do. One friend, my father’s fourth wife, suggested bringing the loudspeaker. The women had no idea what it did or how it worked but had seen the men use it before. They carried it over and placed it next to the radio, doing what they could to connect it. It worked. The entire village heard my father’s speech in the live parliamentary proceedings. My mother beamed with joy and satisfaction. She was a woman who lived through her husband, and she later described this to me as one of the happiest days of her life.
My father soon gained a reputation as one of the hardest-working members in the king’s parliament. Although Badakhshan remained desperately poor, these were good days for Afghanistan overall; national security, the economy and society were generally stable. This, however, was not a state of affairs that our neighbours could easily accept. There is a saying in Afghanistan that our location and geography—between the great powers of Europe, China, Iran and Russia—is bad for Afghanistan but good for the world. It is true. Ask anyone who plays Risk, the board game in which players aim to take over the world, and he or she will tell you that if you win Afghanistan, you win a gateway to the rest of the globe. This has always been true. Back then it was the height of the Cold War, and my country’s strategic and geographical importance was already shaping the tragic fate that would later befall it.
My father was outspoken, straightforward and hard-working, respected not only in Badakhshan but throughout the country for his generosity, honesty, faith and fierce belief in traditional Islamic values. He was also unpopular with some in the king’s court for his refusal to kowtow to the elite or to play the political power games beloved by so many of his peers. Above all else, he was an old-fashioned politician who believed in the nobility of public service and in helping the poor.
He spent long months in Kabul advocating for roads, hospitals and schools and was successful in getting funds to complete some projects, though not all. The Kabul-based rulers did not see our province as particularly important, and it was hard for him to get central funding. This constantly angered him.
My mother recalled how she would start getting ready for his arrival a month before the annual parliamentary recess—preparing different kinds of sweetmeats and dried fruits for him, cleaning the house and sending the servants to the mountains to collect wood for all the cooking his arrival would inevitably involve. In the evenings, a long queue of donkeys loaded with wood would enter the hooli gates, and my mother would direct them into the wood store in the corner of the garden. In her own way, she worked as hard as my father did, never accepting second best and always seeking perfection. But my father barely thanked her for it. At home he could be a terrifying tyrant; my mother’s bruises were testament to that.
Six out of my father’s seven wives were political matches. By marrying the favoured daughter of a nearby tribal leader or powerful elder, he strategically consolidated and secured the power base of his own local empire. My mother’s father was an important elder from the next district, a district that had previously fought with my father’s village. In marrying my mother, he essentially secured a peace treaty.
A few of his wives he loved; two he divorced; most he ignored. Over his lifetime, he took a total of seven wives. My mother was without doubt his favourite. She was petite, with a pretty, oval-shaped face, pale skin, big brown eyes, long shiny black hair and neat eyebrows.
It was she he trusted the most and she who kept the keys to the safe and the food stores. He entrusted her with the coordination of the cooking for his huge political dinners. It was she who took charge of the servants and other wives as they cooked endless supplies of scented pilau rice, gosht and fresh hot naan bread in the hooli kitchen.
A row of servants and brothers would pass the piping-hot pots along from the kitchen to the entrance of the guest house next door, where my father entertained visitors. Women were not allowed to enter these exclusively male areas. In our culture, a married woman should not be seen by a man who is not her relative, so on these occasions my brothers, who would never otherwise be expected to do any housework, had to help.
At such dinners, my father required everything to be perfect. The rice had to be fluffy, and each grain had to separate perfectly. If it met his standards, he would smile with satisfaction at his good fortune and his most excellent choice of wife. If he found a few grains stuck together, his face would darken and he would politely excuse himself from his guests, walk into the kitchen and, without saying a word, grab my mother by the hair, wrench the metal ladle from her hands and beat her across the head with it. Her hands—already scarred and misshapen from previous beatings—would fly to her head in an attempt to protect herself. Sometimes she would be knocked unconscious, only to get up again and, ignoring the servants’ frightened stares, rub hot ash into her scalp to stop the bleeding before again taking charge and ensuring that the grains fell apart perfectly in the next batch of rice.
She endured this because, in her world, beatings meant love. “If a man does not beat his wife then he does not love her,” she explained to me. “He has expectations from me and he beats me only when I fail him.” This may sound strange to modern ears, but it was what she truly believed. And this belief sustained her.
She was determined to carry out my father’s wishes not only out of a sense of duty or fear but also out of love. She truly and utterly adored him.
So it was with sadness that my mother watched the wedding procession winding its way through the village on the day that wife number seven came home. She was standing on the terrace next to a servant woman who was grinding flour with a pestle in a giant stone mortar. Fighting back tears, my mother grabbed the pestle and ground it into the mortar stone furiously, even though, as the lady of the house, she would not normally take on this task.
But self-pity, even on this day, was not a luxury she was allowed. She was responsible for cooking the feast and had to ensure that the first meal his new bride took in Abdul Rahman’s home would include the finest delicacies and treats befitting his status. If she didn’t prepare a delicious banquet for her new love rival, he would be angry.
One part of the ceremony, however, was just for her. As head wife, she was to greet the party and place her fist firmly on top of the new bride’s head to denote her own superiority and the latter’s submission to her as a wife lower down the scale. She looked on as three women—the bride, her mother and her sister—were helped to dismount, once they were safely inside the hooli gates. They r
emoved their burkas, and the beauty of the two young women was revealed for all to see. Both had long raven-black hair down to their waists. One stared directly at my mother with confident green eyes and pouty lips. My mother put her fist down firmly and calmly on the woman’s head. The woman looked aghast, my father coughed and laughed and the other girl turned scarlet with embarrassment. My mother had picked the wrong woman, placing her fist on the sister’s head. Her hands flew to her mouth in consternation, but it was too late; the wedding party had moved inside to begin the feast. Her one chance to show this young woman publicly just who was in charge of managing the house had passed.
Now, thirteen months later, my mother was giving birth in a remote mountain shack. Bereft at the loss of favour of the man she loved, she was alone and wretched. Three months earlier, the young wife had given birth to a son, a bouncing rosy-cheeked baby named Ennayat who had beautiful eyes as large as chocolate saucers. My mother hadn’t wanted any more children and knew this one would be her last. For the entire pregnancy, she was sick, pale and exhausted, her body simply giving in to the strain of having borne so many children. Ennayat’s mother, meanwhile, was more beautiful than ever, glowing with the joy of a first pregnancy, her breasts firm and her cheeks flushed.
Six months pregnant herself, my mother helped deliver Ennayat into the world. As his lungs filled with his first breath and he screamed his arrival into the world, Bibi jan held her hands to her stomach and prayed silently that she too would give birth to a boy, thus giving her a chance of winning back my father’s favour. Girl children in our village culture were considered worthless. Even today, women pray for sons because only a son gives them status and keeps their husbands happy.
For thirty hours, my mother writhed in agony during my birth; semi-conscious by the time I was delivered, she had barely enough energy to express her dismay at the news I was a girl. When I was shown to her, she turned away, refusing to hold me. I was mottled blue and tiny—I could not have been more different from Ennayat, the bundle of health. My mother was on the verge of death after my birth. No one cared if the new girl child lived or died, so while they focused on saving my mother’s life I was wrapped in cotton muslin swaddling cloth and placed outside in the baking sun.
I lay there for almost a day, screaming my little lungs out. No one came. They fully expected that nature would take its course and I would die. My tiny face was so badly burned by the sun that in adolescence I still bore the scars on my cheeks.
By the time they took pity on me and brought me back inside, my mother was feeling much better. Amazed that I had lived and horrified at the state of my burnt face, she gasped in horror as her initial coldness melted into maternal instinct. She took me in her arms and held me. When I finally stopped crying she began to weep silently, promising herself that no harm would ever come to me again. She knew that for some reason God had wanted me to live and that she should love me.
I don’t know why God spared me that day. Or why he has spared me on the several occasions I could have died since then. But I do know he has a purpose for me. I also know he truly blessed me by making me Bibi jan’s favourite child from that moment on, forging a permanently unbreakable bond between mother and daughter.
Dear Shuhra and Shaharzad,
Early in my life, I learned how difficult it is to be a girl child in Afghanistan. The first words a newborn daughter often hears are the commiserations given to her mother. “It’s just a girl, a poor girl.” That is not much of a welcome to the world.
Then, when a girl reaches school age, she does not know whether she will get permission to go to school. Will her family be brave or rich enough to send her? When a brother grows up, he will represent the family and his salary will help feed them, so everyone wants sons to be educated, but usually the only future for girls in our society is marriage. They make no financial contribution to the family, and so in many people’s eyes there is little point in educating them.
When a girl reaches the age of twelve, relatives and neighbours may start to gossip about why she isn’t married yet. “Has someone asked her for her hand?” “Is anyone ready to marry her?” If no proposals are in the offing, gossipmongers will mutter that it is because she is a bad girl.
If family members ignore this chatter and let the girl reach sixteen, the legal age for marriage, before finding a partner for her and if they allow her to marry someone of her choice or at the very least allow her to disagree with her parents’ choice, then she stands a chance of experiencing some happiness in her life. If, however, the family is under financial pressure or swayed by gossip, they will marry off their daughter before she reaches the age of fifteen. The little girl who heard “just a girl” at her birth will become a mother herself; if she delivers a girl child, the first words her baby will hear will also be “just a girl.” And so it goes on, generation after generation.
This was my beginning. “Just a girl” born of an illiterate woman.
“Just a girl” would have been my life story, and probably yours too. But the bravery of my mother, your grandmother, changed our path. She is the heroine of my dreams.
With love,
Your mother
· · TWO · ·
Stories of Old
{ 1977 }
THE EARLY PART of my childhood was as golden as the mountain dawn—the light that tumbled directly from the sun across the Pamir mountain range and down through the valley onto the roofs of the mud houses in our village. My memories of that time are hazy, like images from a film. They are bathed in the colours of orange summer sun and white winter snow and suffused with the smells of the apple and plum trees outside our house and the scent of my mother’s long, dark plaited hair, all lit brighter by her radiant smiles.
The Koof Valley, where we lived, is known as the Switzerland of Afghanistan. It is lush and fertile, banked with trees of rich greens and yellows—colours I have never seen anywhere else. Our house looked out onto a sparkling blue river, and pine and elm trees grew tall along the grassy banks that rose steeply into the mountains.
The noises I recall from my early childhood are of a donkey braying, the sound of hay swishing as it was cut, the trickling of river water and the peals of children laughing. Even today, my village sounds just the same. Koof remains the only place in the world where I can close my eyes and fall into blissful, peaceful sleep within seconds.
In front of our house was a garden, organized with great efficiency by my mother. We grew everything we needed: fruits of all kinds, peppers, olives, mulberries, peaches, apricots, apples and huge yellow pumpkins. We even cultivated silk for weaving carpets. My father took great delight in importing trees and seeds from abroad, and our garden housed one of the few black cherry trees in all of Afghanistan. I remember the day it arrived and the sense of importance and occasion as the seedling was planted.
During the warmer months, the women would come and sit among the mulberry trees for half an hour or so in the late afternoon—the only time of day they could relax. Each would bring a small dish of something to eat, and they would sit gossiping and chatting while the children played around them.
In those days, many villagers used to wear wooden shoes, because getting to Faizabad to buy conventional shoes was so difficult. An old man in the village used to make them; they looked like carved Venetian gondolas and were very strong. He would hammer nails into the base of the shoe so it would stick to the ice when the women went outside to fetch water in winter. My greatest dream was to own a pair of these shoes, though they were tough to wear and not made for children. When women came to visit, leaving their shoes at the door, I would put them on and go out to play. Once, I was wearing a beautiful embroidered dress a friend of my mother’s had made for me. I wasn’t supposed to go out in it, but I didn’t want to take it off, so I put on some wooden shoes and went to play with my friends near the spring. Inevitably, I fell over in my big shoes, ripping the dress.
But my world began with the hooli kitchen, a mud-plaster
ed room with three large wood-fired ovens at one end, a deep bread oven called a tanur in the centre and a tiny high window at the other end.
LIKE MOST Afghan village women of her generation, my mother spent more than half her life in the kitchen, sleeping, cooking and taking care of the little children. In this room, she reigned supreme.
The women baked bread three times a day, sometimes making as many as fifty or sixty loaves, and the room was always full of smoke from the fires. Between batches, they had to prepare lunch and dinner. If my father had guests, the heat from the wood burning in all four ovens became unbearable. On those occasions, we would all feel excited, and I would boost my popularity by bringing friends into the kitchen to eat the leftovers. Most of the villagers were much poorer than our family, and the chance to taste strange delicacies was too good to pass up. We children were never allowed anywhere near the guest house, and if we ever thought to risk a peep inside, a mere glance from one of my father’s security men guarding the doorway was enough to send us scattering for cover.
Away from the eyes of the men of the house, the kitchen was a place of laughter and women’s chatter, where children were guaranteed treats from the many pots of dried fruit and sweets lining the shelves. On cold winter nights, after the bread was baked, we would sit with our feet beside the dying embers of the tanur, a carpet over our legs to keep us warm.
At night, we would unroll our mattresses onto the kitchen floor and sleep there. The wives and daughters did not have their own bedrooms, only their own mattresses. When the boy children were smaller, they would also live and sleep in this female world. As they grew older, the boys went on to share a bedroom. Mother would tell us stories. First, she would recount tales close to home. She talked to us openly about her marriage, how she had felt when she first met my father and how hard it was for her to leave her childhood behind to become a wife, with all the duties that entailed. Then she would regale us with stories of faraway queens, kings and castles and warriors who gave everything for honour. She told us love stories and tales about big wolves that made us scream in terror. I would listen and look out the window at the moon and stars. I was certain I could see the entire sky.