by Fawzia Koofi
Losing Her
{ November 1993 }
THE FIRST TIME I saw the man I would marry, my mother was dying.
In the previous three months, she had gotten progressively worse and now she was barely able to breathe and too weak to move. She had been admitted to hospital, but everyone could see she didn’t have long to live.
I had heard rumours that a man called Hamid from a district called Khawhan, which is near to our home village in Badakhshan, wanted to send a marriage proposal to me. I had never met him and knew little about him, except that he was an intellectual type and a teacher.
One night, I was sitting by my mother’s bed when several Badakhshani men came to pay their respects to her. Hamid was among them. I was embarrassed, because it is not culturally allowed for a woman to meet a man who is interested in marrying her until an engagement has been agreed. And I was still only seventeen. 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 was Hamid. He was young, with a lean body and a face that was both handsome and intelligent. Not bookish, but with an expression of curiosity and empathy. He was someone you instantly warmed to.
I was secretly pleased that my suitor was physically attractive. I tried very hard not to look at him directly; that would have been very bad. But in the close confines of the hospital, I couldn’t avoid glancing at him.
My mother was sitting in a wheelchair, so weak she could barely speak. But she still tried to play the gracious hostess, the role that 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 blanket 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, rearranging 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 shining 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 was growing frailer by the minute.
I was sleeping at the hospital, refusing to leave my mother’s side, and the next day I heard that Hamid had sent a proposal. In the traditional manner of asking 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 with us that night. A proposal can be made only in person, so it wasn’t to be.
The following morning, the hospital doctor, a warm lady with grey 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 understood 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 must be hope, something they could do . . . The doctor hugged me and shook her head silently. It was over.
We took her home and tried to make her as comfortable as possible. Typically, she refused to rest or sit still and insisted on attempting to carry out chores. Once, my brother told her, with tongue in cheek, that if she didn’t rest, he would 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 school just as I had always done. She told me how proud she was of me, about her amazement that the daughter of an illiterate woman like her had become educated. And she jokingly reminded me that I might still one day be president.
Normally, I loved it when she talked like this, buoyed by her dreams and her belief in me. But on that day, I couldn’t see anything but a gaping black hole, the emptiness of the inevitable fate 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 dragged her back to bed in the living room. She felt like a tiny bird in my arms. That sight of her is a memory seared in pain across my brain. It was terrible to see a woman like that, a woman of such strength and dignity, who had endured so much in her life—beatings, death, tragedy, the loss of her husband and son—too weak to even take herself to the bathroom.
As she lay back to sleep, her breath started to rattle a little. Then I took her to her bedroom and placed her on the mattress on the floor. 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 a 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 shaking. 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 Koran 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 neighbouring 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 forty 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 really not in a fit mental state for at least six months after that. I didn’t want to talk to anybody or go anywhere, and 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 had a special bond.
All my life, I had shared a bedroom with my mother. I couldn’t sleep unless she was lying 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 as if I were 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 me was a return to education. Mother had died in the autumn, and now it was spring again. A new term 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 t
o live for.
At the time my mother had fallen sick, I had been due to take my high school leaving exams. I’d been too upset to take them, but the teachers arranged for me to take them now. If I didn’t do so, I’d automatically fail. So I had to go. And of course it helped. Slowly, I entered the world again.
My nineteenth birthday was approaching. I admitted myself to the university exam preparation classes; I had decided I wanted to study medicine 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 over and park it at the end of the street. He thought 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. There were no cellphones in those days, and the land lines were not working as all the power lines had been damaged by the fighting. We obeyed the cultural rules, which we both respected. But these little moments with him were enough for me: even if he spoke only three words to me, I would live off the memory all week and replay it over and over in my head. Hamid’s smile eased some of the grief for my mother. I would remember her words: “This man is enough for us, Fawzia jan.”
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 the various factions in control of different areas, but they had started negotiations with each other and begun drafting a new government constitution. Most people saw this as a sign that the war was behind us. Soldiers no longer patrolled the streets, and it was safe not to wear a burka. I always covered my head with a scarf, of course, but I also proudly wore jeans and fashionable long embroidered tunics in bright colours.
The sense of relief on the streets was palpable. Cinemas that had closed because of the fighting sprang back into life, showing the latest Indian films, and children returned to play in parks that had formerly been home to snipers. The bustling streets around the centre of Kabul once more smelled of kabab as street vendors and their customers felt safe to be out. The indomitable spirit of Kabul city surged back once more.
My life was also beginning to take on a regular pattern again. But I was still deeply traumatized. One of my favourite possessions was a beautiful doll, who sat in a cart and carried a stuffed dog with her. I was too old to be playing with dolls, but I needed security and comfort, and the doll seemed to give me that. I would spend hours brushing her hair and putting nice clothes on her, obsessively arranging 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 brothers would never have forced me to marry against my will. I had to agree to the match. The more I compared these men with Hamid, the more I knew it was him I wanted to marry. I didn’t want to be the wife of a soldier; I wanted to be the wife of the intellectual with kind eyes.
Hamid was a trained engineer but he ran a small finance company, a kind of money exchange. He also taught chemistry part-time at the university. The idea of being married to a lecturer with his own business was a far more romantic notion to me than being married to someone who carried a gun for a living.
His family came several times to talk to my brothers and send the proposal, but each time my family said no. My brothers’ biggest fear was that Hamid’s family were not as rich as we were and that there would be too great a difference in our lifestyles. Hamid relied on his salary to make ends meet and had no other sources of income. 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 was 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 opposing the match. “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 will come from.”
But my brother’s concerns didn’t worry me. I had always wanted to work too. My education had given me career prospects. We would both work and contribute to the household. We would be a team, real partners. I wanted a life in which I could make the decisions along with my husband. Unfortunately, this was not something I could explain to my brother. Culturally, I could not tell him I liked Hamid or how we spoke to each other outside the university. That would never have been allowed. But my silence and the clear expression of pain on my face when my brother spoke negatively about him 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 too were opposed to my marrying Hamid. They all wanted the best for me—and in their eyes, a life of wealth and status was best. They told me stories of wedding parties they had attended with thousands of guests where the bride was given her weight in gold jewellery. 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? I wanted the gift of freedom. In the life they wanted for me, I would have felt like a bird trapped in a gilded cage.
I came from a family in which polygamy was the norm, but I knew I didn’t want it for myself. My father had seven wives, and my two elder brothers each had two, 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 would never have coped with the lack of independence that came with that situation. I think I might even have killed myself after a week of a life like that.
The next winter came. By now, I had a diploma in English and 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’ faces 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 two thousand afghanis, the equivalent of forty dollars. They were my first-ever earnings. I was so proud I almost cried. I didn’t spend the money but 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 in the medical school. 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. 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.
The
se 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 almost like self-styled vigilantes, but for people who had been too scared to open their shops for fear of looting or to send their children to school these vigilantes started to make individual neighbourhoods 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 no longer in this world with me. I’m a politician now. But sometimes I’m just a silly girl who makes mistakes. When I do, 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 in your burka, prodding me in the back until I reach the front door.
I still wish I could sleep curled next to you, as I did until the last days of your life. I want to lie next to you with my fingers in your hair and listen as you tell me stories about your life. Stories about your good times, your bad times, your sufferings, your patience and your 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 the class, or I saw my classmate’s father coming to pick up my friend from school with his nice car, or when my girlfriend Nooria talked about her father. At those times, I would feel very sad about the loss of my own father, and a great sorrow would take over my heart. At those times, I thought that I was the weakest and poorest girl in the world—but whenever I remembered your stories, I grew stronger. How could I be weak when you told me how you had married when you were sixteen years old? How so often you endured 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?