Let Her Fly
Page 3
“Untie the Knot of My Tongue”
There was a reason why it was me accompanying my mother and Fazli Hakeem up the mountain and not my sisters. For once in our lives, it had nothing to do with the patriarchy that ruled our house. My sisters had one huge advantage over my brother and me. My father might have disfavored them in every way, but nature had compensated. My five sisters all had flowing tongues, whereas both my brother and I had developed a stammer around the age of four. I do not know if my brother had been encouraged to overcome his speech impediment. For me, it was important to my parents that this imperfection be mastered. How could I be a rich doctor if my words clogged my mouth, refusing to fly off my tongue?
Stammering is thought to be partly genetic, partly psychological. Boys develop stammers more than girls. In our case, one each of my maternal and paternal uncles were stammerers. Perhaps my sisters were spared a speech impediment because they were girls. Perhaps it was nature that had given my brother and me a stammer. But also, there was an environment where our stammer thrived. Our father took notice of us, of what we had to say, and so therefore he took notice, too, of what we could not say. We were boys so all eyes were on us. Nobody took notice of the girls with their perfect tongues. You could see our stammering as the only strike against the patriarchy in our home.
My father’s unpredictable moods did not help my stammer. I was so desperate to impress him, to make him proud, but I was not a relaxed child in his presence.
Still, when I became stuck on words, choking and stuttering, he never once shouted, “Stop it, Ziauddin!” or “Get it out!” He did not blame me. He was not a cruel man. He was kind at heart. Perhaps this is why he sought help for me from a saint.
My mother and I and Fazli Hakeem began our journey by bus from Barkana. My mother told me we were going to Mian Kaley, a small village high up in the mountains to see the saint who lived there. “He will treat you for the stammering,” my mother said softly. When he was younger, the saint had been very active in the communities, helping to build mosques and create pathways in the mountains. On such occasions, he would give blessings and there would always be more men beating sticks on drums, as an encouragement to the workers.
Mian Kaley was not accessible by bus, so after an hour’s journey during which I suffered such terrible sickness, we got off the bus and began the walk up the mountain of Shalmano. The sun’s rays were already beating down on us, and as we twisted and turned through the evergreens and sturdier-trunked trees than were on the flat parts where we lived, I quickly lost heart and wanted to stop. Fazli Hakeem pulled me onto his shoulders, and I wrapped my hands around the sides of his face, my fingertips resting under his chin. Tired from the early start, the traumatic bus ride, and the heat of the sun, I repeatedly nodded off, each time lunging forward so that Fazli Hakeem was forced to readjust to keep his footing. “Ziauddin! Ziauddin! Wake up. Keep talking. Keep talking to me.”
When we got to the top, my mother made her way to the saint’s mud house, and as we drew closer there was a pungent smell of the mutton and rice that was cooked and distributed to visitors and the poor. The Holy Man, properly known as Peer Sahib or Lewano Peer, was a man of great generosity, this I knew. And I also knew that if you went to him and he prayed for you, your prayers and your wishes would be addressed by God.
After our meal of rice and mutton, my mother and I were led to him in a separate room. There were rooms for the women and rooms for the men, and I could see that this saint had at least three or four wives of his own.
He sat before me. I had never seen a man so old and so hairy. His hair was long and white but there was more white hair that seemed to sprout from other places, especially his ears. This scary ear hair was so long that in my child’s eye I saw it flowing out of his lobes like a waterfall. He was also blind, and his long thin fingers seemed to feel around him with not much precision. “Ziauddin, the eyes of his heart are open,” my mother whispered to me.
My mother must have already told him or a helper my problem. He murmured a few words from the Holy Quran and then he blew on me. He then pulled a ball of gurr from his pocket. It is a type of hardened sugar that we use in Pakistan. Rather than handing it to my mother as I expected, he put the sweet ball whole in his mouth. I watched him suck on it for a couple of seconds, and then he cupped his hand under his hairy mouth and spat it out. I was horrified to see that he handed this wet slippery ball to my mother. She broke off a bit and gave it to me. I was revolted by the slimy fragment, despite the miracle it was supposed to contain, but I put it into my mouth and chewed and then swallowed it. The ball came home with us and each night the routine was repeated. Even though the ball hardened, I saw it always covered in the saint’s saliva.
I wish I could say that this saint cured me, but my stammer got worse. When I went to school, my stammer felt like a curse. Given that my sisters and other girls went uneducated, it feels ungrateful to complain about the misery my stammer made my early education, but I was badly teased. The boys would mimic me.
The curse of the stammer was compounded by two other things. The first was that we were not rich and the second was that my father was a maulana. Pakistan is a country of caste systems, and forty years ago the teachers openly favored the rich boys, especially the sons of the tribal lords. This made me so sad. I was a clever boy who tried hard. I needed my education.
Boys made fun of my father’s position, so that I, too, began to feel pinched by it. Through prayer, my father provided a service to the community. My father wanted more than this for me. He could have said to me, “Ziauddin! You will be a maulana like I am, learning Islamic education only in seminary.” But he did not say this. My father was an intellectual, who had received his own education beyond Shangla, in Karachi and Delhi, depending on the kindness and charity of the local communities, moving around with his begging bowl for food, as all Islamic scholars did at that time. He wanted a modern education for me, which was a rare thing and for which I will always thank him. But this big dream for me was focused on only one outcome: that I would be a well-paid doctor, bringing wealth and status to our family. It was another aspect of our social setup.
“The world is an open book, Ziauddin,” he would say. “It is there for learning.”
The message was clear: If you want these big dreams for yourself, you need to acquire an education. To be a doctor was the pinnacle.
But the problem was, I was not doctor material.
When I heard the azaan (call to prayer) during the day, I preferred running to the village’s higher mosque, with its surrounding trees and insects buzzing in and out of its walls and a spring running through its middle, than the lower mosque at the other end of the village, near the bazaar, where my father would be in a special place at the front. There were no stereo speakers carrying the azaan over the village rooftops like there are today. During my childhood, men shouted the azaan from a patch of grass or from an elevated rock.
Even though I had a bad speech impediment I was determined to become an orator like my father. Perhaps this was the spark, the strength of character, that my parents had seen. It is true I was defiant when faced with my own weakness. I was defiant when I saw the rich boys and how much special treatment they got from the teachers. If I am to sum up my father’s key gift to me, it is this: he helped me turn my weakness into a strength.
As I moved through the school grades, it became clear that I was one of the abler students. The teachers could not ignore it. If the rich boys got the attention for their family name, I won my share through hard work. But I was still my father’s stutterer-son.
After the almonds, I’d spent a period of time eating raisins, which my mother soaked in milk each night. Each morning, the raisins were fat and juicy with the liquid and they were so tasty.
When I was thirteen years old and had moved to become a student in the high school in the next village where my father taught, words still refused to fly off my tongue. But I announced to my father that I was going
to enter a speaking competition.
Although he was initially shocked and, I could tell, not at all happy with the idea of me struggling on the stage, he did something very important: he did not forbid me. Far from it. With his own adjustment, he then began to encourage me. He believed in me, and with his support, I felt stronger. School life in Pakistan is full of speaking and recitation competitions. My father agreed to write a speech for me.
I would practice it alone, hour after hour, my stammer mysteriously gone. But when I practiced it in my father’s company, the same stutterer-son was back.
My father showed such patience. He might have lost his temper inside the house at petty things, but out in the world he was my patron. He stood beside me in support.
As an aid to my speaking, he taught me a famous prayer from the Holy Quran, which is the prayer of the Prophet Moses (AS), a stammerer, too, according to our holy book: “My Lord! Expand for me my breast [with assurance] and ease for me my task and untie the knot of my tongue that they may understand my speech” (Ta Ha 25–28).
Even today, with my stammer almost under control, I recite these lines before I am about to speak.
I delivered that first speech perfectly, in Urdu, our country’s national language. I cannot say what happened, but it was exhilarating. Afterwards, my math teacher, Ahmed Kahn, approached me and said, “Shaheen, you spread the fire.” Shaheen means falcon, and for a while my father said I should sign my name Shaheen. This success brought me closer to my father. It gave flight to his dreams for me, and it gave me confidence. I started to see myself in a different way, not as an ugly boy with dark skin and a big nose who had a stammer but as a boy who had come first in a debate and who could overcome weakness. I think confidence creates more confidence.
Competitions took place all over the region and we would travel everywhere together on the bus. On one occasion, I looked like a particularly poor candidate. On a long journey over the potholed roads, I suffered terrible travel sickness again. My face was pale and my skin was covered in sweat. Other contestants were also on the bus, and I could see that one of the boys’ escort was looking at me with a kind of laughter. “You, will you be giving a speech?” I nodded. “No, you won’t,” he said, laughing. I could see I was joke to him. Nobody believed this sickly child would stand on the stage. But the next day, I beat not only that boy on the bus but the whole district. In that stammering tongue there was a great speaker. My success was the best answer to the escort’s mockery. I call it positive revenge. It is a principle that underpins my whole life. It is a way of righting wrongs without hatred.
I wish I could say that this public eloquence was my stammer’s cure. It was not. It would be many years before it got better in everyday life. It happened almost by accident, when I left Shangla to go to Swat to study science and English. It is still with me, but as I became older and was increasingly appreciated, my self-confidence grew and I was happier to accept that stammering was part of who I was. I met a very good doctor, a physiotherapist—I was never to be a doctor myself—who told me about Demosthenes, the Greek orator, and how he put pebbles under his tongue to cure his stammer. Demosthenes ran along the beach orating loudly over the sound of the waves. I used pebbles, too, and would roll words around my mouth in new exercises. But another part of my self-help was to choose different words from those I knew would get me stuck, so if I were to choose between “moon” and “sun,” I’d choose “sun.” If I knew I’d stammer on “woman,” I instinctively chose “lady.” It obstructed my fluency and sometimes I felt I did not have the best words under my control, but I was able to express my views. It was an equation: little word, more fluency, over stronger word and less fluency. It goes on even today.
When I was first asked to deliver an essay in front of the class at university and was tongue-tied yet again, my lecturer said, “Ziauddin, why don’t you let somebody else read that for you?”
“I will be reading it myself,” I told him. “By not letting me read it, you are taking away part of me.” My lecturer’s face was full of shame. He was horrified at his mistake. “You are quite right,” he said. “Go ahead.”
I read the piece of work. I was unable to switch the words around and I was slow and un-fluent, but I remember thinking, “This is me, this is who I am.”
Years later my speech would become my weapon against the Taliban. I might not have been fluent, but I spoke the truth. During those years when the Taliban invaded our valley and took away our life, I encountered so much verbal fluency, so much rhetoric, but in those free-flowing, easy speeches made by the commanders over FM radio and over our squares, there were lies beneath. My own voice might have stopped and started, but it was not silent and it spoke the truth about how the Taliban wanted us to live in a country of darkness.
The Legacy of My Beybey
My father might have instilled in me a love of education and a passion for oration, but it was my mother who provided unconditional kindness. In Islam, a man came to the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and said, “O Messenger of God! Who among the people is the most worthy of my good companionship?” The Prophet (PBUH) said, “Your mother.”
The man said, “Then who?” The Prophet (PBUH) said, “Then your mother.” The man asked further, “Then who?” The Prophet (PBUH) said, “Then your mother.” The man asked again, “Then who?” The Prophet (PBUH) said, “Then your father.”
These three mentions of “mother” remind me that when I published my first collection of Pashto poetry in 2000, I dedicated it to three women, all of whom were mothers to me in different ways—my first, real, mother; my second mother, who married my father after my mother died; and then my third “mother,” a kind woman who treated me like a son while I boarded at her house during my college years.
My birth mother was called Shahrukh, abbreviated to Sharo, and I loved her so much and I still do even though she is in the next world. She was so caring to me. She was kind to all her children but to me especially because fairly early in my childhood my older brother got married and was then looked after by his wife.
You could say I was my mother’s blue-eyed boy. Her stories about people in the neighborhood never stopped; how they were poor but still they were resilient; how they were hardworking; and of their struggles, too, through difficult times. And how despite their trials and tribulations, they were able to complete their education and to achieve a lot in their lives, to have good jobs, and if they were lucky, to become rich. I suppose you could say as a woman my mother gave me something beautiful. She was not educated herself, but she could see the value of education. She knew the only way I would live in a bungalow and enjoy the kind of life she did not have was through an education and a good job. Social norms meant she could not pass this knowledge on to her own daughters, but she could pass it on to me so that I, in turn, could hand it on to Malala.
My mother was beautiful, with off-white skin several shades lighter than my own. But she was not in strong health. When we went to the male doctor, he would write, “Mother of Ziauddin” or “Wife of Rohul Amin.” Sometimes, the doctor would visit her at our house, and I used to hold his box, carrying his stethoscope and thermometer, for him. In my own way, I saw this as serving my mother, but it was no match for what she did for me.
By the time I was in the final year of high school in the next village, where my father taught, approaching my exams at the age of sixteen, I had moved to a room in a little guesthouse built onto the front of our house. I would study there late into the night, lying on my cot bed surrounded by my books, with a kerosene lantern beside me. Every few hours I would see a ghostly shape pass by the window. It was like a mirage, and I would think, “Is that Beybey or some kind of ghost?”
One night, she woke me from a slumber. She was speaking so fast. The lamp had tipped over on my pillow, its flame dangerously close to igniting the bed.
I wish I had been able to save her in the same way. On May 5, 1985, my mother died. I was sixteen. I was sitting outside our house on
a small verandah with my sister and my mother. It was a stressful time because of my school exams, especially as I knew I would not get the grades I needed to become a doctor.
One of my elder sisters had come to stay with us, sleeping in the same room as my mother. I had not registered the significance of this, but I can see it now. As it got late, I lifted my mother into my arms. She was so frail, so light, and she could not walk. I carried her inside and she was laughing and joking with me, “Ziauddin, put me down! What are you doing? Where are you taking me?” I laid her in the bed of the small house and went to bed myself with my books and my lamp. The following morning, I heard my sisters wailing and screaming, “Oh, my Beybey—oh, my Bey, Bey-bey.” Mourning seemed to be everywhere. I ran into the main room of our mud house and I saw my mother lying in her bed, just as I had left her, but she was dead. Nobody had expected my mother to die. That same day, my sisters cleansed my mother’s body and she was buried. Only one sister, in Karachi, was missing. She arrived by bus three days later after a long journey. News of my mother’s funeral was shouted out across the village by the men who called azaan, so that everybody could attend. I could hardly believe this latest funeral announcement was for the person I loved most in the whole world.
My father had been very grieved, but after a few months he was thinking of marrying another woman. This quick replacement of lost wives is so normal in our society that I did not even question it. Men in our society do not live alone. I understood that my father needed a woman to perform all the basic functions that would keep him alive. My brother set about trying to find him a new wife from the pool of available women nearby. He was not looking for beauty or connections but a woman who could serve him in the same ways my mother had: washing his clothes, making his food, and caring for his children. Wife was a role, and without it a house could not survive.