My Name Is Parvana

by Deborah Ellis

  Parts of school were easy. Reading books from the library shelves? Easy. Already her English had improved hugely, just from reading all the English books that had been donated. She loved the first-aid lessons, because she could clearly see a use for everything she was being taught. She liked knowing where everything was in the school and how to get things done. She loved it when students came and asked her questions, and she knew how to answer them.

  But she hated being an ordinary student.

  And she hated sitting still.

  How could she be expected to sit at a table for hours, staring down at a bunch of numbers? She was used to doing things. She was used to working and scrounging, dodging and surviving.

  Not sitting and staring.

  Parvana looked down at her messed-up math assignment. Multiplying fractions. Why would anybody do such a thing? She couldn’t understand it and she was tired of trying. Mother had explained it. Nooria had explained it. Even the other teachers had explained it. She still could not understand how to multiply one-third by one-fifth, or why anybody would ever want to.

  She could not stay in that room any longer. She couldn’t stand the thought of spending two more hours sitting with the Smirking Girls. Everything was closing in on her.

  She had to get out.

  So, she left.

  She walked right out of the dining hall, past Mrs. Weera’s face on the Wall of Achievement, out of the school and through the gate, not stopping when Mr. Fahir called after her.

  Parvana walked hard, needing to move her muscles and feel her heart pound. She walked without looking around, muttering under her breath about useless fractions and her mother’s unfairness.

  She walked down a gravel road with fields on each side. Some of the fields were planted with opium poppies, which turned the valley green and pink when the flowers were in bloom. Rocky hills surrounded the area like the sides of a bowl.

  Parvana stomped her way down the road to the village. By the time she reached the first of the shops and houses, her anger had been stomped out.

  People had set up camp on the edge of the village. Some had tents. Most just had tarps stretched across boards or bags full of straw or sand. A few goats rooted through the garbage. Children in grubby clothes sat in the dirt or kicked around an old tin can.

  It was a smaller version of the camp for internal refugees where Parvana had finally found her family. The remnants of that camp were not far away, but Parvana had no desire to go back there. Living that way was very hard.

  After the tents came the mud houses — low square buildings made from mud bricks. Dung patties had been pressed by hand against the walls to dry in the sun. They would be used as fuel to cook meals and heat the houses. Some of the huts had little shops operating out of a window — glass cases with gum, candies, crackers and soap.

  Parvana passed a baker and smelled the nan fresh from the oven. She passed a butcher, with a skinned headless goat carcass hanging on a hook and a row of goat heads on a tray in front. Next came the fruit merchants, with oranges, onions and tomatoes piled up in pyramids. Bowls of spices and stacks of nuts were sold in the stalls around the fruit next to shops of hardware and household goods.

  Parvana had grown up in Kabul and spent a lot of time working in the market there. This village had a smaller, quieter version.

  Maybe I could find a job here, she thought. I know enough arithmetic to count the money I earn and to figure out how much things cost. I don’t need stupid fractions for that.

  It would be nice to have money in her pocket again. Since the school project started, Mother handled all the money the family had, which wasn’t much.

  Once, Parvana asked her for some. She felt like wandering into the village to buy some dried apricots or something for a little treat.

  “You don’t need any money,” her mother had stated. “Everything is provided for you. Besides, you’re not going out in the market. You’ve done far too much running around the past few years. It will do you good to start settling down.”

  That’s what I wanted, Parvana thought, as she walked by a peddler with a cart full of plastic sandals. All she had wanted, all those years, was a normal life. She wanted to sit in a school room, in clean clothes, and have her family with her.

  And now that she had all that, all she could do was complain.

  “What’s wrong with me?” she asked out loud.

  Parvana walked clear through the village and out the other side. Once more she was in barren hills, scrub grass and big sky. She knew how easy it was to get lost in the Afghan countryside, that all the hills could very quickly start to look alike.

  She climbed up the nearest hill and stopped at the top. After checking to make sure there were no scorpions or camel spiders, she sat down and leaned her back against a big rock. From here she could see the whole village and, beyond it, her new school.

  Her legs ached and felt good. They did exercises every day at school, but all the push-ups and jumping jacks could not make up for her need to wander, to move through the world and see it go by.

  What’s wrong with me? she asked herself again.

  War planes zoomed up from a valley behind her and screamed across the sky. Parvana didn’t even blink. They were as common as crows. So was the sight of smoke from an explosion rising in the distance.

  Someone was tasting dirt, having their eardrums explode and seeing their world torn apart.

  “But not me,” she said out loud. “Not today. I’ve had my share. It’s someone else’s turn.”

  The ground beneath her was hard but comfortable. She knew how to sleep outside. Back at the school she shared a toshak with her sisters at night. She was always squished in the middle — between Nooria, who figured she had the right to the most space, and Maryam, who never stopped squirming, not even when she was sleeping. Many nights, Parvana just gave up and slept on the floor.

  They wouldn’t miss me, she thought.

  Building the school had been fun. She’d had a project, a purpose. But actually going to school? No, she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t spend the rest of her life sitting across from those two awful girls, staring down at the same page of fractions.

  “I’ll hire myself out as a school builder,” she said to the sky. “I’ll walk around the country. Whenever I come to a village without a school, I’ll go to the elders and offer to design it. They’ll find me a kind old widow to stay with. I’ll fetch water for her and help her out in the mornings and read to her in the evenings. During the day I’ll draw up plans for the school and tell the men in the village what to do. ‘Put the window in so it faces the garden!’ I’ll say. ‘Make the playground bigger. And build more shelves for that library.’”

  She could see it all. The flat roof for playing, with a ledge tall enough that children couldn’t fall off, where they could fly kites during the spring festival and sleep out under the stars on hot nights. The giant vegetable garden with chicken coops at one end and a big tree to read under at the other. Any student who wanted could have a little piece of garden to grow flowers.

  “And they could sell the flowers in the market. Make a bit of money.”

  Parvana always felt more powerful with a bit of money in her pocket.

  At the school’s opening-day ceremony, the government man would make another long speech. This time, though, his speech would be all about Parvana, about her skills and talents, and how she was able to accomplish so very much without even knowing how to multiply fractions.

  Everyone would applaud and look for Parvana so they could give her a plaque, but she wouldn’t be there. She would have slipped away, and would be walking alone down the road, off to the next village, to build the next school.

  “Or maybe I’ll just cut my hair again,” she said. “Asif has an extra shalwar kameez that would fit me. I’ll take it from his room when he’s at supper. Mother has scissors i
n her desk. I’ll turn myself back into a boy, then go out into the world and get any job I can. I’ll save my money and …”

  She had nowhere to go with that thought. When she was dressed as a boy, when she was younger, there was a point to earning money. She had a family to feed and a father to get out of prison.

  Now what would she save for? She had a feeling that this time, simply surviving would not be satisfying. She needed a bigger dream.

  What she really wanted was to build things — things people could live in that would make them feel safe and happy and …

  Part of her brain was on the verge of admitting that to do that, she would probably need to know how to multiply fractions. And a whole lot of other things.

  She pushed that thought aside.

  “I’ll do what Shauzia did,” she decided. “I’ll earn money as a boy and then I’ll go to France. I’ll start building things there, and when we meet up at the top of the Eiffel Tower in …” — she paused to count — “sixteen years, I’ll be a successful architect.”

  That dream was enough to make her stand up, brush the dust from her clothes and head down the hill. She held that image in her head as she headed back through the market.

  All she needed to do was make a quick stop back at the school to pick up her father’s shoulder bag. It was all she had left of him, and it contained all the letters she had written to Shauzia — a record of her life over the past few years. There was no way she was leaving that behind for Nooria to paw over and laugh at.

  She headed down the hill and back through the village. She was deep into a daydream where she was pointing out all the design flaws in the Eiffel Tower when a man stepped in front of her and started to yell.

  “Cover your head!”

  Parvana stopped. “What?”

  She pulled her brain out of Paris and back into Afghanistan.

  “Cover your head!”

  Parvana had let her chador fall into a shawl around her shoulders. She liked the feeling of air around her head and ears.

  “The law says I don’t have to,” she said.

  “The foreigners say you don’t have to. We say you do!” His shouts drew the attention of other men.

  “She’s from that school,” another man said. “All those women together. Up to no good.”

  “You can’t just walk through our village like that,” a third man yelled. “Cover up and get out.”

  In a matter of moments, Parvana was surrounded by men. Shouting, cursing, angry men.

  “She’s come from seeing her boyfriend,” one of them said. “Brings her dishonor right into our village.”

  Parvana tried to move through them. They closed ranks. The circle of men was three, then four deep. All she could see when she looked down were sandals on big dusty feet. All she could see when she looked up were angry mouths and eyes.

  Someone thumped her in the back. More thumps landed on her shoulders and arms.

  They weren’t full on hitting her yet, but they were certainly warming up to it.

  She started to realize that she needed to be afraid.

  But before she became afraid, she decided to get angry.

  She took a deep breath, got herself ready, then yelled out, as loud as she could, “Get out of my way!”

  In the moment of shock that followed, Parvana saw a gap in the mob and pushed through it. Then she ran.

  They ran after her.

  Maybe if she had walked, they would have been shamed into leaving her alone. But she had too much adrenaline rushing through her body to be able to walk away with dignity. And that adrenaline pushed her through the village. She ran like the gazelles that used to dash across Afghanistan’s plains.

  She ran through the market, past the goat heads and past the tents of the refugee camp. She ran out along the open dirt road toward the school.

  The men chased after her.

  But she outran them. They were angry but so was she, and she was young and used to moving fast.

  The men threw rocks. Some of them hit her back and bounced off into the dirt. Parvana just laughed.

  She turned around to show them she was laughing at them.

  “You are all living in the past!” she called out, almost at the school, waving her chador in her hand and feeling her hair tangle and toss in the wind. “I am the future! And I am leaving you far behind!”

  She laughed again as the men’s stones failed to hit her. Then she ran the rest of the way home.

  She ran right into her mother, who had been watching the spectacle from outside the gate.

  “Get inside.”

  Parvana waited until they were behind the school walls before saying to her mother, “I’m not a child.”

  “That’s exactly what you are,” Mother said. “You have just proved it.”

  Mother left her and went into the dining hall.

  Parvana’s joy and energy drained out of her like air from a slashed tire. She followed her mother meekly.

  The students were all at the tables, doing a review of the day’s work. They had no place to study at home, so they did homework at the school. They would be served tea, bread, fruit and nuts before they went home.

  “May I have your attention, please.”

  Mother was speaking.

  The girls put down their pens and lifted their eyes from their work. Parvana stood against the dining-hall wall, afraid of what was about to happen.

  “From now on, no one will leave the school grounds without permission,” Mother said. “No one will go out or come in without first checking with me or Mr. Fahir. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, Headmistress,” the girls all said.

  “No, Headmistress,” Parvana whispered.

  “Would everyone please turn around and look at the girl standing against the wall.”

  All heads turned and all eyes landed on Parvana.

  “That girl is not allowed to use the library for three weeks,” Mother declared. “If anyone sees her with a library book, report her to me. If anyone sees her and doesn’t report her, there will be trouble. Does everyone understand?”

  “Yes, Headmistress.”

  Parvana didn’t need to look at Hanifa and Sharifa to know they were smirking like earthquakes.

  She stayed against the wall while supper was brought in, then joined the end of the line of students winding past the nan and orange slices.

  As she reached for a piece of bread, her sheet of fractions was put into her hand instead.

  “Your mother says you have to do your work before you can eat,” the cook said. “I’m sorry.”

  Parvana didn’t hold it against the cook.

  “I ate in the village,” she said loudly, in case anyone was listening. “I won’t be hungry again for a long time.”

  She put the page of arithmetic on top of the platter of nan and left the dining hall.

  The sheet of fractions followed her around.

  When she went to the latrine, it appeared on the sink. She left it there.

  When she went to the room she slept in with her family, it was on top of the blankets in the cupboards.

  She crumpled it into a ball and tossed it into a corner of the room.

  Mother watched her do this. Then she retrieved the paper and smoothed it out.

  “You have to know this,” Mother said, handing it back to her. “Like it or not, you need to know how to do this. Your future depends on it. You give up on this, you will give up on the next difficult thing, and you are too smart and too strong to start giving up. So until you get it done, you don’t eat and you don’t sleep.”

  Mother folded the paper into a neat square and pressed it into Parvana’s hand, folding her daughter’s fingers around it.

  “Go,” Mother said. “Find a place to work. I have to get the young ones to bed.”


  She practically shoved Parvana out of the room. The door clicked shut behind her.

  Parvana’s first instinct was to toss the square of paper, maybe even toss it over the school wall where it would disappear forever. Then she thought of going to the kitchen, finding a match and setting the fractions on fire.

  But she knew her mother. Mother probably had a drawer full of fractions, and she would take great pleasure in tormenting her daughter with them until they were both old ladies, bent over and toothless.

  I’ll just leave, Parvana decided. I’m all done. I’ve tried to fit in, but now I’m all done.

  Asif had a cot in his workshop. Parvana went to the back of the yard, saw that his kerosene lamp was still lit and knocked on the door.

  “Come in,” he said.

  Parvana opened the door. Asif was at his workbench, surrounded by little bits of metal.

  “I’m fixing Hassan’s toy truck,” he said. “I promised him, so don’t bother me.”

  Parvana came right to the point.

  “I want you to give me your spare shalwar kameez.”

  “My new white one?”

  “No. Your other one.”

  “Why?”

  “None of your business.”

  He put down his wrench and looked at her.

  “You’re the biggest fool to ever walk the earth,” he said.

  “Shut up.”

  “You’re going to cut your hair off and put on my clothes, and you think then that you can just be free to do what you want.”

  Parvana pushed past him to where his spare shalwar kameez hung from a nail on the wall.

  “I’m taking this,” she said. “And keep your mouth shut. After all, you owe me.”

  “I owe you? For what?”

  “For saving your life. For finding you in that cave and for saving your life.”

  Asif folded his arms across his chest and looked at her.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I guess you’re right. I guess you saved my life. Okay. I’ll keep quiet. Have a good journey. I wish you every success. Good luck getting through the gate without waking Mr. Fahir.”