Despite my own grief, I did not think, “Oh, my mother is gone and now my father is remarrying.” Instead I thought, “He needs a companion to survive. I will have a second mother.”
It was settled. My father was to marry a middle-aged widow. Soon, she was occupying all the places and parts of our family life that had been my mother’s. I missed my mother so much, but I did not want to celebrate my mother or remember her in front of my second mother because I did not want to hurt her. Before the marriage, a villager told my father, “You are going to marry another woman, but you must keep in mind one thing: never praise your old wife, your previous wife, in front of your new wife. The jealousy of the two wives of one husband has no match. Not even among cousins are the jealousies so strong! It is the worst jealousy in the world.”
When it came to our two Eid holidays, little Eid and big Eid, I would go to the graveyard to visit my departed mother and I would never discuss it with my new mother. Why should I hurt my new mother, who was a living soul with feelings? If knowing my loss hurt her feelings and the telling of it didn’t benefit me in any way, there was no point.
My second mother is still alive. When Malala was shot by the Taliban in October 2012, my second mother was at our home in Mingora. It was her prayers Toor Pekai wanted the most “because God is so respectful of the old, of the gray of hair.”
From early on, my second mother said of Malala, “May you be the Benazir Bhutto of your age, but may your life be long.”
The unequal lives of my sisters and my mother had a great impact on me over the years. But even as a ten-year-old, I remember I was beginning to really enjoy serving women in the village. I was too young at that point for it to have been a kind of protest, but I remember the pleasure I felt in helping them. These women were mothers who were illiterate and whose sons were away working in the Gulf states. When the sons sent their families letters, it was often the case that the person who missed them most could not read and enjoy their news. I do not know how I came to understand this at such a young age, but I began reading sons’ letters to mothers, and after that, I acted as a scribe. I would write letters for the women, putting their thoughts and feelings on the page exactly as they wanted so that they could communicate directly with the sons whom they missed and cherished, just like my mother cherished me.
In Barkana, it was my own cousin’s fate that actively contributed to my change. It showed me that inequality can mean brutal violence, too. I will call my cousin Noor Bibi to protect her identity, but this is not her real name. She is four years older than me and she is still in contact with me, living a new life now in another part of Pakistan. Like me, she lost her mother, but her loss came when she was two and a half years old, so that she had no memories of happiness with her mother to treasure. Her father found a new wife, but this woman was not kind or affectionate, so my cousin often imagined what her life might have been like had her mother still been alive. At fourteen, my cousin was married off to a family of a higher status. It was considered a good match, but the man was mentally unstable. On their wedding night, he was brutal with her, and this continued. My cousin wept a river of tears. Years later, the river of tears was still flowing. “Ziauddin, what will I do? What will I do?” By the time of my own mother’s death, I had become a very romantic boy. Because of the poetry I read, I was already full of ideas of pure and eternal love, the kind that rushes over you and raises you up to the clouds.
My reaction to my cousin’s dreadful reality was against this backdrop of my high ideals about love. I hated her distress. I could not bear the profound injustice of her life. Marriage, while always arranged with the involvement of families, still meant a life of love for me. I aspired to a loving union, but my cousin’s marriage was shaped by disrespect and unhappiness.
When I was sixteen, my cousin was already twenty. She had tolerated a few months of marriage as a teenage bride and then run home to her father. When he died, she went to live with one of her brothers. Patriarchy forces women to become a burden, and this was the case with my cousin. She went from father to husband, back to father, and then to brother, with no means of supporting herself or living independently.
There began a process over years to free my cousin from the marriage that had been arranged for her. Her brother filed a petition in the courts for divorce, but the family was put under strong social pressure by the opposing family. The shame of this failed marriage ran deep and my cousin cried so much. I became among her closest friends, as there was nobody else to help her. Her struggle was to contribute to my change.
Failing to find any formal help, she recited special verses to God at midnight, holding her hands out to him and literally begging for mercy and salvation. I saw that our society was not built to protect her, that the law-enforcement agencies were not interested.
In desperation, my cousin also began visiting so-called miracle makers, cheaters, and con men who played tricks with her heart, promising to reverse her bad fortune.
“Ziauddin,” she said to me one afternoon, “please come to the graveyard with me.” Even as a teenage boy, I found the graveyard a frightening place, but my cousin had been given an amulet and had been told to find the oldest grave possible in which to bury it. Its metaphysical power would reverse her fortunes. She was desperate and hopeful, so I agreed. We went at midday. My cousin paced the graveyard as if she were almost mad. When she found an old grave, she began digging with her hands, chanting and praying.
Two years later my cousin was shot in the leg by an unknown assassin armed with a Kalashnikov. She was taken to the hospital with a 4 cm bullet wound to her leg and remained there for four and a half months before being released. Today, she still walks with a limp. I was eighteen and no longer living under my father’s roof in Barkana when I began visiting her in the hospital. I was reading many new ideas and meeting more people, and as my ideas about life slowly began to inch away from the community in which I had grown up, I vowed that if I had a girl child, I would never let her endure the kind of life forced on my cousin. It took eight more years after my cousin was shot and two more unhappy marriages before she finally found happiness in her fourth marriage.
When I think of what Malala has achieved, I also think about the other women in my life whom I have loved, women like my cousin and my sisters, whom I could not protect from society’s cruelty and unfairness. It took my witnessing the unfairness of their lives to vow that my own family would follow a different path These other women, Malala’s aunts and second cousins and her grandmothers, spent their lives dreaming other people’s dreams and obeying other people’s wishes. I think of all the power they carried inside them. But that power was unexplored, undiscovered, underestimated. Nobody wanted to believe in it.
When the stories and the lives of people around us are like this, they bring a change in us. I began rethinking the cultural ideas of my father and his father and all the fathers in Pakistan before that.
A Song of Liberation
I was such an obedient boy. If my father raged about richer cousins or chastised my mother about something small, I never once made any public or open protest to him. Where I come from, a son obeys a father, whatever he says. But when the results of my exams became known when I was sixteen, shortly after my mother’s death, it was very clear that I was not going to fulfill my father’s dream of my becoming a doctor. He lost interest in my education.
I had secured for myself a place at Jehanzeb College, the best in Swat, but my father was only prepared to pay partly towards my living expenses. Jehanzeb College was many miles away, in Saidu Sharif, a twin town to Mingora. While the tuition was free, it was impossible to attend Jehanzeb College without moving from Barkana. We had no family near the college, and so where would I stay? My father had received his higher religious education like a traditional Talib, living in mosques, with all food and clothing provided for free by the community. He did not understand why he should have to pay for these things, especially as there seemed to be little ch
ance that I would become a doctor. I wanted to leave Shangla, for all its beauty, to pursue a bigger life, to learn for learning’s sake.
But to my father this was a waste of money. He had encouraged Ziauddin the Falcon with strong wings, but I would not fly in the direction he wanted. I remember so clearly wandering the mountains, my cheeks wet with tears. My future felt so desperate. It felt lost. I saw myself marshaling buffaloes and teaching nothing but the most basic facts to the boys who lived high in the mountains.
At the very point when all seemed to be lost a miracle occurred. I had begun helping out in the school in the mountain village of Sewoor, where my brother taught. It was considered a very unprestigious school because it was an hour and a half’s climb up in the mountains from Barkana, and it was full of the sons of peasants. Teachers did not like working there and most had little respect for the students, whose families lived in poverty. “Let them stay illiterate,” people often said. But my brother was committed, and I began helping out there. The school did not even have a building. They used the mosque instead. One of my aunts had married a man in this village, and while I was teaching at the school they happened to be visited by a relative of my sister’s husband. He was called Nasir Pacha, and he lived with his wife, Bakht Mina Jajai, in a village called Spal Bandai, within a short distance of Jehanzeb College. Nasir Pacha was impressed with my teaching at the hilltop school. I had given up hope of attending Jehanzeb College, and while I had told him that I’d been offered a place, I had not revealed I needed help to take it up. To my utter astonishment he said, “Come and live with us.” As the bus drove me away from Barkana towards that beautiful village, I felt like my life was opening up. It was truly a blessing from God because it meant freedom. It was freedom of thought, freedom to make my life my own. My student life was not easy, as I was poor, but it was intellectually rich and I became known as a powerful student speaker and advocate. Throughout my college education, I subsisted on tiny bits of money here and there, occasionally from my father, sometimes from my brother. I did not dwell on my father’s lack of financial support. Sometimes I wept in frustration, but I accepted circumstances for what they were because I knew that my father could not help the way he was.
My father had such high ideals. He talked all the time of Gandhi and Iqbal, but once I went to college I began to see that the high ideals of his pronouncements were not always matched by his day-to-day life. I suppose once I moved away and my ideas started to re-form, I began to see that he was flawed. We are all flawed, but it is a powerful moment when you realize this about your parents. Still, I loved him no less for it. I know I have flaws, and my children are free to realize this and make their own corrections.
I draw from my experience a handful of conclusions about parents. The first is that it is human nature that we go through our lives keeping an account of the relationships we have, good and bad. Has this brother or sister been good to me? Has that friend supported me in a time of need? Was so-and-so there for me at a point when I needed them the most? And was I there for them in return? It’s a kind of tit for tat in all relationships, and I think it is very human. When somebody treats us well, we try to repay it. When somebody lets us down, we remember it. Ideally, we should be good to all those people who are good to us. And ideally, if they are bad to us, we must try to respond with goodness. But I feel our relationships with our parents must sit beyond all this. To cast it in terms of obedience implies we have to do as they wish. I do not mean this, but I do think respect is important. If change in our parents is needed, then that change can be encouraged respectfully and in a positive way. Respect is a matter of both respecting their views and doing your own thing. In my relationship with my late father, I will not take account and weigh the good and bad. I will always be kind to my father, and will always love him. Sometimes it is hard to love somebody when they disappoint you, or make you weep tears of frustration. But by focusing on what my father gave me, rather than what he did not, I can see myself built on all the best parts of him.
In patriarchal societies, children as well as women are seen as possessions of their parents. This becomes a problem for children like me who do not want to be a possession. I wanted to find a different way, to be myself, to open new avenues and live a different life from the one my father wanted for me. But I did not want to reject him. What I did instead was try to make him proud by achieving the dreams I dreamed for myself. In the end, I hope I showed my father that I followed and fulfilled my own dreams in a way that could make him a hundred times prouder than if I’d simply followed a path laid out by him.
I have thought a lot about change. When you stand against state corruption, or against racism or dictatorships or brutal regimes like the Taliban, sometimes a sudden shout, a sudden cry, a sudden angry protest, is needed, like the powerful rallies of Martin Luther King Jr., the strong female voices of the #MeToo campaign, or Malala’s voice in her campaign for girls’ education. But at that time, for the social change I wanted in my life—to treat women as equal—I believed the most important change began with me.
Once I had made that change in my life, which became easier once I was living in Spal Bandai, where women seemed freer in their movements, I felt I could begin to invite others to join me by example rather than force. I think I knew instinctively that I’d change nothing if I went back to Barkana and challenged the community all of a sudden, if I stood in the muddy house where my sisters and cousins were still rinsing the rice and delivered long impassioned speeches on female emancipation and the hatefulness of the patriarchy. I never once thought of bringing a sudden social change to my community. I wanted a different life from that of my tribe—and ultimately for it as well—but I did not want to spark a revolution.
The change in me was not sudden, either, but gradual. The attack on my cousin was not the only act of violence against women I saw in my community. There was an honor killing in our village, in which a young girl was poisoned and strangled by the male members of her family for her love of an unchosen boy. When her mother sought comfort under her dead daughter’s favorite tree, the men of the family cut down that tree, the strength of its trunk and branches too much a reminder of the girl’s life and defiance. Can you imagine losing your daughter and then watching the only thing left that brought you solace be taken away, too?
Set against this, I was discovering love, through marriage and fatherhood.
My first memory of my wife, Toor Pekai, is around the age of sixteen. Her father was my uncle’s best friend, and they lived in Karshat, a neighboring village to Barkana. I was not allowed to speak to Toor Pekai, but whenever she visited my uncle’s home, I found her beautiful, with fine features and green eyes and pale skin, an attribute of beauty in Pashtuns. The attraction was mutual although she gave no hint of that then. That would have brought a great shame on her family as marriages were arranged by the elders, not set in motion by a potential bride and groom.
I still thought of myself as an ugly boy, but I was known in my village for being clever and hardworking. Pekai—everybody called her Pekai—told me later that she valued my education more than how I looked. At the age of six, she started and then left school, having sold her books for nine annas, which she used to buy some boiled sweets. She had been the only girl and missed her friends so much that she quickly left to join them. By the time she got to her teenage years, it was far too late to return. She flicked ink over her clothes to give the impression that she was still a student.
What Pekai felt she lacked—education—she found in me. What I felt I lacked—beauty—I found in her. Almost immediately after our marriage I was to discover that her beauty went way beyond the physical.
I remember one afternoon walking home, after lying in the fields with my books, seeing a large group of laughing girls approaching. It was like a shoal of beautiful multicolored fish coming towards me, their scarves covering them almost entirely. I instinctively knew that Pekai would be among them and my heart began to race. I was with th
e old man who helped my brother with the buffaloes. “Quick,” I said to him. “Give me a mirror!” He handed me his snuff box and using the mirrored lid I smoothed down my hair. As she passed, Pekai lifted her eyes and greeted me. “Pakhair raghlay,” she said. I was in the skies. Such a greeting from girl to boy was risky. She told me years later that as they approached she had been saying to her friends, “I’m going to do it. I’m going to greet him,” and that they had said, “No, no, Pekai. You must not. It is not honorable.”
I think these small things in retrospect marked Pekai out as different even then, but within this there were constraints. Once, some time later, I sent her my picture and she sent it straight back. The message was clear: I’d overstepped a mark. She could not risk carrying around a boy’s picture. Our mutual attraction had to be made clear in more subtle ways. I tutored her nephew, for example, and sometimes I would open his book and see Pekai had made a small note or mark. Who did that? I would ask him, and when he said, “Toor Pekai,” my heart would thud in my chest. I knew she had wanted me to see it. Sometimes, feeling so desperate for not being able to talk to her, I would sit in the fields and talk to the stones, in a kind of pretense that it was she whom I could tell how deeply I felt about her.
Just before my mother’s death, my mother saw in me this kind of lovesickness when it came to Toor Pekai. I remember her smiling.
Marriages in our society need setting up and they need the respective families to agree. This is often more important than the bride agreeing. For my generation in northern Pakistan, it would take a brave girl to stand up to the will of her father and brothers. This was not the case for Toor Pekai and me. Our marriage was arranged by our families but we regard it as a love match, because we very much wanted to be together. Malala makes us laugh on this subject of marriage arrangement. “Yes, Aba,” she says. “I will have an arranged marriage, but I will be arranging it myself.” I think in spirit, at least, Pekai was like this, too. As a young teenager, if news spread that a man’s wife had died and that he was looking for a new bride—much as my own father had—she would rush home quickly to make her feelings known before her family had a chance to even contemplate marrying her off to an old man.
Let Her Fly Page 4