I married Toor Pekai when I was twenty-four. She is still unclear about when she was born because, being a girl, nothing was noted on paper, but we think she is roughly the same age as me. We were engaged for three long years—I was in agony. Her honor meant that I could not hold her photograph next to my heart while I was away at college, studying first for my bachelor’s degree and then my master’s, so I took instead a photograph of the famous singer and film star Selma Agha, who I thought looked like Toor Pekai. I would pull out the picture to remind me that she was waiting for me in Karshat.
In marriage, we were perfectly in tune. She believed so passionately in all the things I did, even then in the beginning: helping people, serving my community, education for girls.
My wife was strong, funny, wise, and yet social norms had made her illiterate. And to think I’d singled her out as a match based on her looks alone. And then when Malala arrived, I felt in my heart, “These precious females in my life!” The love I felt for them was enough to move mountains. H2O equals two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen. It is the same formula for a drop of water as it is for an entire ocean. I tell people now that when I applied the basic principle of gender equality to my one family, it changed my life. It changed my wife’s life. It changed my daughter’s life. It changed my sons’ lives, and I can say with absolute honesty, as my father grew old and approached his death in 2007, it changed his life, too. We Yousafzais together drowned patriarchy in the river Swat and it brought us all such happiness.
A Second Chance
All my father needed to change his view of girls was an inspiration, a spark to ignite the goodness and purity within him, and that inspiration was Malala. Now I say to Malala, “Jani, you are a lucky girl. You have had this charisma from day one.”
When Malala was born on July 12, 1997, ten years before my father died, Toor Pekai and I were living in Mingora, the biggest city in Swat.
Our families knew that Toor Pekai and I had started to live our lives in a different way. Among all the relatives, we were the couple who were the most liberal, progressive, and enlightened. Toor Pekai enjoyed a freedom moving around Mingora alone that we did not see anywhere else in our extended family. I was criticized for that, and so was she. However, in time, my father began to accept the way we lived and Toor Pekai’s family did, too. In the beginning, nobody could understand why I encouraged Toor Pekai to walk out and about on her own. She went to and from places like the hospital, the doctor’s, the bazaar, and she never had a male chaperone. When my male friends came to our home, I did not expect or want her to cover the majority of her face. This relaxation of purdah was not normal or acceptable behavior for our families. But I remained firm. In time, when Malala began to have more of a public profile in Pakistan, these aspects of our new way of living actually made our family and friends respect us more, but it was a gradual journey. I am proud of the way that we did not give in to the pressure.
My own attempt to be a new kind of man was well under way when Malala was born. Pekai had helped with this. So it was all the more shocking when my father did not celebrate Malala’s birth. We had no money at that time, and because she was a girl, he refused to pay for the Woma, the celebration for relatives when a baby is born that requires meat from a goat and rice. I was a struggling teacher and had barely enough money to feed us, so Malala went without her celebration. As far as my father was concerned, it was the curse of our autumn house again—same problem, just different generation, different location. But Malala was to bring about a great change in him.
Even as an infant, Malala had what I call her magnetic field. Neighbors fought to hold her, and when Toor Pekai took her back to Karshat, her village, Malala’s great-grandmother and her great-aunts would sit transfixed by Malala sitting in Toor Pekai’s lap. “This girl, she seems to be a special girl, Pekai.” “What is she doing with her fingers? It looks like she is counting?” Old female relatives fought to hold Malala.
My father was no different. He could not avoid Malala’s power, he simply had to yield to it. I like to think that even as an infant, this was Malala’s first act as an influential being, that as a girl baby she was too powerful to be ignored by the many people who had been raised to look away from her. I do believe that social norms are like shackles that enslave us. We are content in that slavery, and then when we break the shackles, the first feeling of liberation might be shocking at first, but as we begin to feel the freedom we sense in our souls how rewarding it is.
This is what happened to my father. As a family—three initially, Toor Pekai, Malala, and me—and then four with Khushal, and then towards the end of my father’s life, finally five with Atal, we used to visit my father and second mother in Barkana by the brightly colored Flying Coach for the Eid holidays, dressed in our best clothes, laden with bags and gifts. While we were there, Malala and Toor Pekai were confined to the women’s quarters while we men and boys were served food and drink by the women, just as I always remembered it. But it was when my father and mother (I called my second mother Khaista Bibi from the start) came to visit us in Mingora that we saw a real change in him. It was a case of my house, my rules. He submitted to our new way of doing things readily. I genuinely believe that he saw how wonderful it was that we were all together, eating together, walking together, enjoying one another. He saw that loving in this manner brought benefits, that it is truly rewarding because it brings joy. I often want to say to men who live in ways that do not value women, “Have you any idea how much greater joy and happiness you will have in your hearts if you make this change?”
My father had never eaten with a woman at his table, but we Swat Yousafzais ate our meals together. Toor Pekai was still deeply respectful of him, separating his fish from the bones to spare him the task. “I will pray for you,” he told her, so full of gratitude.
When I became politically active in Mingora, sometimes I would not even be there at mealtimes and my father would eat and talk with the women on his own.
As Malala grew older, her personality shone through—bright and vocal and articulate. She began to really excel in her schoolwork. My father reveled in her academic success. His small granddaughter was so good at everything. She excelled in her Islamic education and her knowledge of the Holy Quran, and he would sing, “Here is Malala / She is like Malalai of Maiwand / But she is the happiest girl in the world.”
My father saw the special qualities in Malala, saw how much we respected her and valued her, and because of this he discovered that a girl is just as worthy as a boy.
When Malala came in second in a speech competition at school, he would ask, “Why has not this brilliant girl stood first?” He had aspirations and expectations for Malala in ways that were completely new for him, the father of five girls from whom he had expected nothing. And because he loved Malala and showed her kindness, Malala loved him so much in return, enriching his life with her love.
In the last decade of his life, my father enjoyed this cycle of goodness. When he visited us in Mingora, we would picnic on the banks of the river Swat, which I regard as one of the most beautiful rivers I have ever seen. It crawls from upper Swat to lower Swat and the water is crystal clear, white and blue mixed together. In the distance, the peaks of the Hindu Kush disappear into the clouds, and beside the river, there are lush green fields lined with trees, wildflowers, and rock carvings of ancient gods, the only remains of the second-century Buddhist monasteries that once lined the banks. If I close my eyes, I can take myself back to that riverbank and all its happiness, the air rich with the smell of rice crops planted in the nearby fields.
The riverbank would be full of families like us, released from work for the weekend. It was only two miles or so from our home, but with three generations of us, the walk was not possible. Instead we would take a rickshaw or a small bus, armed with pots of chicken, fish, and rice from home. We seven—my family of five and my mother and father—would cross the river by a lift car to the other side, where the grass was green and
lush. Malala and the boys would splash in the river Swat or play ball, and my father would sit on the grass beside us, sometimes using his prayer mat for prayers and other times praying without it. We would stay for hours, and the sun would fall behind the mountains on the horizon and turn the sky crimson. It was so sublime, so romantic, and I used to feel as if I were the luckiest man alive, like we were living in this very special and blessed part of Mother Earth, being loved by one another and by nature, living in the lap of beauty. Before the Taliban came, at first in a gentle way and then more violently in 2007, the year of my father’s death, and threatened our beautiful land, I would stand on the riverbank and cry, “Oh, the world is so beautiful!”
There was no difference between any of us on the banks of the river Swat. Moving to Mingora allowed me to grow socially, culturally, and intellectually. When I think of it now, I think of all of us there together. I think of Malala, the first female to open my father’s mind to the power of a girl. As he watched Malala grow, I think it dawned on him that supporting a girl brought its own rewards, because it brought him on our new journey. My father saw me dreaming for my daughter, and he joined me in those dreams so that by the end of his life, my father and I dreamed our dreams together.
Sons
The Kite Fighters
WHEN KHUSHAL AND ATAL were young boys living in Mingora, they would climb onto the roof of our rented house and fly their kites. There would be many boys up there with them, running and shouting and catching the wind, their hands expertly steering the kite lines so that our patch of sky, with the many mountains in the distance, was a beautiful flapping quilt of color.
Kite flying provided a bond between Malala’s brothers, as it does between many boys in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India. Looking back now, from a different land where kite flying is not a national sport, I imagine the freedom my small boys must have felt, standing on the top of the building as the sun began to sink on the horizon and the wind picked up. They were always trying to get the best wind up there on the roof. The strength of the wind and how far it would take their kites was their only concern.
They often worked as a pair. Atal might hold the kite for Khushal while Khushal moved as far away as he could with the string, and then give his brother the crucial instruction to release the kite into air. And then Khushal would run, reducing the distance between them so that the kite could get picked up by the wind.
What they loved most were kite fights, where they worked as a team against other pairs of boys in the neighborhood, each team trying to cut a rival’s kite out of the sky by an expert maneuver involving the tangling and slicing of strings.
Our kites are not like European kites—the strings are not cotton but are coated with crushed glass or metal so that they can cut another line with ease. Pakistan used to be full of organized kite-fighting competitions, which were later banned for safety reasons after stories appeared on the news of treacherous strings falling and injuring those below.
For the boys, it was an innocent sport but intensely competitive. I rarely flew kites in my childhood, so I could not grasp the expertise involved in these kite fights, but Khushal loved them. He would often be on the roof for hours, trying to get his kite higher than his friend’s or trying to bring other kites out of the sky completely. The sun would turn his skin a dark chocolate brown, and Toor Pekai would always worry that he was getting dehydrated. But no health worries or grumbles about their neglected bookwork could bring the boys down from the roof.
Sometimes, they would burst through the door, shouting and laughing with a rival kite in their hands. Claiming a rival kite, and then chasing it through the Mingora streets, catching it, and finally bringing it into your house as a trophy, was the ultimate triumph.
If Malala’s competitiveness was about beating her clever school friends, for the boys it was about kites.
Mingora made the boys as happy as it made me. As a young man beginning to form my own ideas about how I wanted to live my life, the Swat Valley, in all its beauty, had given me so much. But more important than anything, it had helped me become myself. I had discovered first in Spal Bandai and then, after marriage, in Mingora with Toor Pekai, people with whom I could talk politics and write poetry.
When Toor Pekai and I began to have a family, the beauty of our world mirrored the love inside our walls.
I do feel that all families are, in their own way, institutions, undeclared informal institutions. We all have values, however much they differ from family to family. These values are not like charts on the wall, with bullet points. They are both spoken and unspoken and they fill the house. As parents, we hope they are adopted and practiced by every member of the family.
As I became the father of sons as well as a daughter, I defined my family as one that believed first and foremost in equality. We did not write on the walls of our house, “All women and men are equal, all have freedom of speech,” but our lives together echoed those values.
Though the boys’ births were celebrated by our extended family and the community in the way that Malala’s was not, I was determined not to treat them any differently than her.
I was determined to raise a family in which all three children saw no preference between genders.
I also wanted a family that believed in freedom of expression. I had learned from my father not to be demanding of a child who had something to express, whatever it was, from either their mind or their heart.
But how was I to maintain these new values, living deep in a patriarchal society, when all around my boys were other boys and men who were schooled in the old ways?
The way I thought about it was that if my sons saw me behaving a certain way, they would think that way was normal. If they saw that their mother could walk to the bazaar alone, that her voice was as valid as mine, that I respected her and loved her for who she was rather than for the roles and duties she performed for me, that there were no limits on their sister’s future, then surely this would set them on a different road themselves.
I believe that all children learn from what we do, not from what we teach. For our children, the role models had to be Toor Pekai and me. If Khushal and Atal could see me treating their mother and their sister with respect and a sense of equality, then that would help groom them to be the kind of men who would practice the same respect for the next generation. That is how I believe social change comes about. It starts with you.
But to have constantly said to the boys with the fervor that I felt in my heart, “You are all human beings. There is no difference, no superiority. We are all equals,” when all they really wanted to be doing was flying their kites, could have been counterproductive.
So I never told them that they were supposed to treat Malala equally. I just did it myself. I acted upon the things I believed in. It is such a good starting point.
“Ziauddin,” I told myself, “you do not need to give the boys lectures. Just live your normal life. Have love. Have love.”
And love is what? Love is freedom. Love is respect. Love is equality. Love is justice. “So,” I told myself, “love your wife and be loved by her, and your children will learn from that.” I clung to this when the Taliban invaded our valley and filled our world with hatred and fear.
The Stolen Cup
As a family, we had a decade of undisturbed happiness after Malala’s birth in 1997, followed by those of Khushal in 2000 and Atal in 2004. This was the period when we would picnic with my father by the river Swat and laugh and tease one another, with Toor Pekai amusing us all with her mimicry of this person or that. She was an excellent mimic even as a small child and, growing up, had been considered one of the most entertaining, lively children in Karshat. Her dry, sharp humor and the blunt way in which she expressed herself were undiminished and, for the children, she was an excellent contrast to me. I continued to enjoy poetry and see the world in ways that were perhaps less practical than the lens through which Toor Pekai did.
I was busy running my school, the Khush
al School. It was financially stable by then and full of girls whom, like Malala, I aspired to motivate towards achievement and self-belief. How I loved going from class to class, talking to the children about poetry, listening to them when they told me about the state of their lives and whether their parents were supporting them. I was very active in the community, with various councils and political groups. Life was good.
Khushal and Atal were different from Malala from the start. Malala was a studious child, always running in and out of the classrooms of my school as an infant and working so hard once she became a student herself, surrounded by her books.
Academically, she was a hard act to follow. She was determined to win cups and prizes whenever she could. The education system in Pakistan is all about such things, placing pupil against pupil in the spirit of competition, even small children. It can be very stressful for them, as I remembered from my own childhood.
I never aspired for my children to be the best, although I will admit I enjoyed it. I did not put pressure on them in that way. All I wanted was that they work hard, so I told them, “It doesn’t matter if you come first, second, third, whatever. It does not matter, as long as you have tried.”
Let Her Fly Page 5