Letters to My Daughters

by Fawzia Koofi

When Shaharzad was just six months old, life took another unwanted twist. I got that familiar nauseous feeling again. I was pregnant. I was devastated. I didn’t want another child so soon. My school was running successfully; I had my friends and my life. I didn’t want a baby.

  Hamid gave me permission to have an abortion. Abortion was not legal (and is still illegal in Afghanistan today), but back then there were doctors at the hospital willing to carry out the procedure. I went to see them and was shown all sorts of suction machines that they used to carry it out. I was afraid of what the machines might do to my insides. So the doctor suggested giving me an injection to induce miscarriage. I don’t know what it contained but I allowed them to inject the needle into my arm. No sooner had they done so than I panicked. I had changed my mind. I jumped up shouting, “No, no, I can’t do this. I want my baby.”

  I was terrified it was too late and that the injection would work. I clutched my stomach and talked to the tiny embryo inside me, willing it to live, telling it I was sorry. Just like my mother before me I had wanted a child to die, only to realize later that I would do anything to keep it alive.

  Hamid stayed at home, battling the issue out with my sisters. They had been truly horrified by my desire to abort a child. They screamed at us, telling us we were breaking God’s code, that it was against Islam. And they were right to say that. When I look back now, I admit I cannot defend my initial decision to do it, other than to say that I really didn’t think I could cope with another baby at that time. Hamid understood this, and that was why he had supported me.

  I came back from the hospital still pregnant. My eldest sister was still there with Hamid. She was overjoyed I hadn’t aborted the child but was so disgusted I’d even considered it she could barely look at me. Hamid just held me in his arms and whispered that it was going to be okay. I wasn’t sure he was right. But I also knew now that it was not my unborn child’s fault that we were where we were. My duty was to her as a mother.

  My daughter Shuhra knows the whole story. My sister told her about it all when she was about six. Sometimes she uses it to tease me. If I’m telling her off or asking her to tidy her room, she places her hands on her hips and looks at me squarely with a mischievous glint in her eye. “Mother, you wanted to kill me, remember?” Of course, she knows full well that saying that will leave me racked with guilt and she’ll get away with not cleaning her room.

  The pregnancy continued, but it was hard. I was breastfeeding Shaharzad, which tired me, as did standing in the classroom from 8 A.M. until 5 P.M. Also, the Taliban were encroaching. They took control of Kisham, the border town of Badakhshan. We were terrified they would get as far as Faizabad. If they did so, Hamid and I decided we would try to flee to the mountains and make our way back to my father’s village in Koof district.

  At one point, Taliban fighters were only twenty-five kilometres away. I stood outside my school listening to the familiar sound of heavy artillery and watching as the men of the city boarded trucks, volunteering to go fight the Taliban alongside the Mujahideen army, which was loyal to the Rabbani government. Part of me wanted Hamid to join them, but I told him not to go. He was a teacher, not a soldier—he didn’t even know how to fire a gun. Besides, he was too weak to fight anyone. Many of the young men who got onto trucks and went into battle that day never came back. But they were successful in keeping the Taliban out of Faizabad and managed to push them back.

  In the middle of all this, Shuhra decided to make her entrance. I had a terrible labour that lasted for three days. My sister and a female doctor friend were with me. Hamid stood waiting outside. This time, he wanted a boy. I had already given him a girl, so now I really was supposed to produce a boy. His family, my family, our neighbours, our entire culture of boys before girls expected it thus.

  But I failed to deliver them the son they wanted. Instead, my second daughter, Shuhra, came kicking and screaming into the world. She was tiny and red faced, just 2.5 kilos, a dangerously low weight. When I saw her, I was reminded of how I might have looked when I was born. I was the baby that was described as ugly as a mouse. The same description could be applied to Shuhra. She was wrinkled and bald and red and screaming non-stop. But as I looked at her, my heart filled with so much love that I thought it might burst into hundreds of pieces. Here she was. This little girl who was almost not born, whom I had shamefully almost killed, here she was alive and screaming and looking just like I had.

  I was overjoyed, but Hamid was not. This is Afghanistan, and sadly even the most liberal, modern-thinking man cannot be untouched by hundreds of years of culture. And that culture dictated that I had failed in my biggest duty as a wife by not giving him a son. This time, the cruel gossip and innuendo got to him. I think somebody made a joke to him about the twenty-thousand–dollar girl being bad value for money. Perhaps he had heard these jokes at his expense so many times over the years that something just snapped inside him.

  He didn’t come into my room to see me for almost nine hours. I lay back on the pillows with Shuhra in my arms, waiting for him, unable to understand where he was. She was so tiny she almost disappeared into her swaddling clothes, and I could hardly hold onto her.

  When he finally came in, Shuhra was asleep in a crib next to me. He refused to look at me. When Shaharzad was born, he had burst into the room excitedly, stroking my hair and cheek as he gazed in wonderment at his child; this time he offered his wife no tender touch or reassuring words. His angry face said it all. He looked into the crib and at least managed a wan smile at his sleeping baby daughter, another of Afghanistan’s “poor girls.”

  In the weeks that followed, I found it difficult to forgive Hamid for how he had treated me the day she was born. I knew he was only behaving like countless other Afghan men, but I had not expected it from him. He had always been so supportive, taking pride in his ability to fly in the face of the gossips and the patriarchy. Perhaps I had expected too much from him. But I felt disappointed and badly let down. His coughing kept me and the baby awake at night, so he moved into a separate room. That marked the end of our physical relationship.

  But despite being upset with him over this, I was aware of how lucky I was that he was such a wonderful, tender father to his girls. He loved both of them openly and deeply, and if he was still angry at not having a son he never once let that show to his daughters. For that, at least, I was truly grateful.

  By now, he was barely strong enough to teach, cutting down his days at the university to just two a week. The rest of the time he stayed at home and looked after Shaharzad. She has wonderful memories of a father who sang, played games and dress-up, even allowing her to make him up as a bride and put ribbons in his hair.

  Hamid was everything to me and he was an extraordinary Afghan man. In many ways, he was very ahead of his time. We were in love when we married, deeply in love. But I suppose the years together, the trials and tribulations of his imprisonment and his illness meant that over time we just grew apart. The casual intimacy, the laughter, the joy of being in the same room and sharing secret glances had gone. I think it’s probably a sad truth that over time that happens to couples all over the world, wherever and whoever they are. We forget to take a moment to listen to what our partner is trying to say to us, we jump too easily to harsh words and impatience and we fail to make the special little efforts that we used to. Then, one day, we wake up and our intimacy and love is gone.

  Up until she was about six months old, I was desperately worried that Shuhra would not survive. She was so tiny and frail that I was scared that even washing her might give her a fever. I was also terrified and tormented with guilt that the injection I had taken to try to abort her had somehow affected her development. If she had died, I don’t think I would have ever forgiven myself. As my mother had experienced before me, my initial rejection of my child gave me an even greater debt of duty to her now.

  Gradually, she grew stronger and put on weight, growing ever funnier and more clever as she did so. Today, she is the
brightest, cheekiest and sometimes naughtiest little girl that ever lived. I see much of myself and both of my parents in her. She has my father’s wisdom and my mother’s wit and strength. She is also immersed in politics and says she would like to be president of Afghanistan when she grows up. Thankfully, she is far removed from the image of a “poor girl.”

  A couple of weeks after she was born, I received a part-time job offer to manage a small orphanage. I didn’t want to return to work so quickly, but with Hamid sick we needed the money. I left Shaharzad with her father and wrapped baby Shuhra in a big scarf I tied around me. She would lie quietly against my breast, hidden under the burka. I would attend meetings with my baby hidden this way, and people wouldn’t even realize she was there. She didn’t complain and rarely even made a noise. I think she was just happy to be alive and to be snuggled so close to her mother. I carried her at work like this until she was five months old and she became too heavy. I think it’s one of the reasons she’s so secure and confident as a child today.

  As Shuhra and Shaharzad blossomed and grew, Hamid was dying before my eyes. He was losing weight almost daily. The skin on his once-handsome face had turned dark, as though coated with a translucent layer of black. His eyes were bloodshot and he coughed almost constantly; by now he was beginning to cough up little drops of blood.

  When Shuhra was three months old, I was asked to take part in a provincial medical survey for an aid agency. This meant joining a team of sixty nurses, doctors and support staff to travel across twelve remote districts assessing the medical and nutritional needs of the people. It was an incredible offer and the type of community outreach work I had dreamed of doing when I had wanted to be a doctor. Despite the bad timing of a new baby and a terminally ill husband, I couldn’t turn it down. Hamid understood this and gave me his blessing to go.

  I almost didn’t, though. It was a gruelling trip for anyone, let alone a mother with a tiny baby. It would be hard to find clean water or proper washing facilities, and we would be travelling across remote and barely accessible mountain tracks. The journey was to take in many of the country’s Ismaili communities—devotees of Shia, Islam’s second-largest sect. In Afghanistan, they predominantly live near the Tajikistan border. Our trip would also take us to the wild and rarely visited Wakhan Corridor, a finger of land that connects Afghanistan with China. It was created during the so-called Great Game—the period in the nineteenth century when the Russian and British Empires were wrestling for control of central Asia—when it had served as a buffer between the military ambitions of the British Lion and the Russian Bear.

  Despite my reservations, I knew I’d regret it if I didn’t go. Good opportunities rarely present themselves at the perfect moment; that’s just a fact of life. And I felt I could play a real part in the success of the survey.

  As we set off in a convoy, I was reminded of the trips my mother used to make each year, driving my father’s cattle herd out to graze the spring pasture. She would sit proudly on her horse, still wearing her burka, and go off on her annual adventures complete with a caravan of donkeys, horses and servants. I remember sitting on the horse in front of her, feeling so small against the huge mountains but so important in our mission. As we set off across rugged tracks on our survey I felt similar emotion, only this time it was me with the baby on my lap. The trip was to change my life. We visited some of the most remote places in the region—places I have never been able to visit again. The levels of extreme poverty we found crystallized once and for all my political awakening. I knew my calling was to help.

  We began the survey in January. It was so cold that people were actually using fresh animal dung to keep their babies warm while they slept. Their biggest fear was that their children would freeze to death; they had no idea that the dung could cause disease or infection. Hygiene was non-existent, with children going barefoot in the snow, most of them malnourished.

  By night, we would eat and take shelter in the religious leader’s home. Usually the largest house in the village, it would typically have running water and a drop toilet, literally a large, deep hole in the ground. This was similar to the house I had grown up in, and although the western doctors on our survey team found it hard I found it reassuringly familiar. But, community leaders aside, the villagers lived in a level of poverty I had never seen before, not even as a child. Often we would find a one-room house with an entire family living inside, the animals in one corner and a toilet in the other. And when I say toilet, I don’t mean even a bucket, just a corner of the room with feces piled high and babies crawling around all over the room. It was shocking. I tried to explain to the patriarchs of these families the dangers such poor hygiene posed, but digging a latrine—even one that might save children’s lives—a safe distance from the house is sadly often more than these uneducated village men can bear, and they will not lower themselves by doing it.

  I tried a different approach: “Doesn’t your good Muslim wife deserve to have her dignity preserved when she performs her bodily functions?” But sadly, the indignity suffered by a woman defecating in the corner of the living room, or outside in full view of her neighbours, is outweighed by the male indignity of providing a facility that would give her some privacy. Seeing such things helped me understand why Badakhshan province has the world’s highest infant and maternal mortality rate.

  In Darwaz, one of the poorest districts, the women told me they had to go out at 4 o’clock in the morning in the snow to feed the animals. Sometimes, the snow can be as high as a metre. No one helps them, and when they get back in they have to cook the bread on an open fire and prepare food for the whole family. It is more than a life of domestic drudgery. It is a life of hard labour. The men too work hard, going out into the fields at 6 A.M., not returning until after dark, trying to grow enough crops in summer to last the family and the animals through the winter. It was a forceful reminder to me of how poor and marginalized people can be. Seeing their suffering triggered something of an epiphany about who I was, where I had come from and what my calling in life was to be.

  We were in an area called Kala Panja, one of the Ismaili communities. We had been invited to have dinner and stay the night at the house of the local leader. I had never met him, but he greeted me like an old friend. I was rather embarrassed, and my colleagues were beginning to laugh at me when he revealed the reason for his effusiveness. He had known my father. As we sat, he told tales that depicted my father as a hard-working, dedicated man who did all he could to bring changes to the poor. He smiled at me and said, “Now, Miss Koofi, I see you sitting here and I see you are the same as your father.”

  It was the first time that anyone had likened me to my father, and I flushed with pride. As I sat in the room surrounded by elders, doctors, villagers, all people coming together to try to make a difference, I was transported back in time—to a time when my mother ruled her kitchen, and servants and brothers stood in a line to hand out piping-hot pots of rice to that mysterious room where my father met with his guests. As a child, I had yearned to enter this mysterious secret room, to see what happened there and to hear its discussions.

  I smiled to myself as I realized the mystery had lifted now. Those meetings my father had were actually just like the one I was in now. They were simply dinners with delegations of aid workers, doctors, engineers and local elders. How many nights had he sat and dined and discussed plans and projects and ways to bring development to his people? How many meals had my mother cooked for visitors like this? I sat there barely engaging in the conversation, lost in my thoughts and feeling secretly thrilled to be here, finally understanding such a critical part of my father’s life.

  When we left in the morning, the man made me a gift of a sheep for baby Shuhra. Wakhan sheep are short and fat and famous for their tender meat. The other Afghans on the trip were jealous and teased him: “Where is our sheep? Why did you give it to Miss Koofi?”

  But the man just smiled and said, “It’s a gift for Miss Koofi’s father. I am hon
oured to have welcomed his daughter and his granddaughter into my home. And to see how his daughter has grown to work for good, just like him.” The words made me very proud.

  As we travelled the districts, I met more people who had known my father and gained a deeper understanding of the political role my family had held. I had been hired only as a translator on the medical survey, which was not a senior role. But people heard my name and thought I was somehow here representing my father, that the Koofi family was back in Badakhshan mobilizing communities.

  Villagers started to come and seek me out personally, presenting problems to me. I tried to explain that I hadn’t organized the survey but was just a low-level helper. But they kept coming, with issues unrelated to the survey such as salary problems or land disputes. I found it a little unnerving and overwhelming. But it also gave me a growing sense of purpose and determination. And of belonging. It was here, with my father’s political legacy and my mother’s personal values, my baby at my breast, that I realized I wanted to be a politician. I don’t even know if “want” is the right word. It was what I had to be. It was the role I was born for.

  The survey took six weeks. Shaharzad was only eighteen months old, and I missed her terribly while I was away. Hamid was more than happy to take care of her because I think he knew in his heart that his days were limited; those few weeks of bonding alone with his beloved elder daughter were precious to him.

  After the survey ended, I went back to my job at the orphanage. This further mobilized me. There were 120 students—sixty boys and sixty girls. Each child had a different story. They were terrible stories. Some had lost both parents, but not all were orphans. Some had a living mother who had remarried and a stepfather who refused to allow them in the house; others had been placed in the orphanage by parents too poor to feed them. It was heartbreaking, and I wished I could have taken every one of them home with me. I spent the first three months of the job interviewing children about their backgrounds and organizing their individual histories into a database.