“She does not like doing house chores. What will happen to her when she grows up?” Ammi would ask.
“What will happen? Nothing at all,” Aba said. “My daughter won’t have to do any of these chores. When she is older, she will be a leader, and others will do her chores.” This would instantly make me smile.
Ammi enrolled me in a mosque on our street that was for female students only and run by women. I proudly called myself a talib (student), part of a taliban (group of students). Back at the haveli, some cute boys would come at noon every day to ask for food. They would knock on the door, and you would ask who was there, and a small, cute voice would say, “Talib!” It was more like they sang it to you, and everyone would aww over them. My aunts would pour a ladleful of that day’s meal onto their plate, which already had food from the other neighbors. Always modest, some would make potatoes, some lentils, some would just boil a few vegetables. We often made the same, except for Thursdays, when Bhalla Aba would bring meat.
This woman-led mosque in Hyderabad was where I learned about the many beauties of Islam: the four most important prophets (Muhammad P.B.U.H. [peace be upon him], Moses, Jesus, and David, peace be upon them all), the angels, the presence of God, and the freedom that religion provides. Beginning with the first grades at school, we learned how to be Muslims and live a virtuous life. We learned that Islam says no one should hold anger, greed, or dishonesty and distrust in the heart, because the heart is the house of God and should not be polluted by such thoughts. Whenever we feel such emotions, it means Satan has taken over us and is impairing our judgment, and we must recite this special verse, La hawla wala quwwata illa billah, “There is no power, no strength, greater than Allah,” to rid ourselves of this unholy influence.
I was fascinated! I shared everything I learned with everyone: my cousins, who were never able to attend school; my friends, some of whom were given off into marriage at young ages; and my aunts, who behind closed doors read the Holy Quran in Arabic by sounding the letters aloud, having no idea what the words meant. When I repeated what I had learned about Satan grasping our hearts, the women told me that the most obvious times Satan grasps our hearts is when we have feelings of romance or love for a boy. If I ever felt like a certain boy looked nice or if I wanted to talk to him, I should quickly recite the verse I had learned in order to eradicate Satan. It could be dangerous to fall in love.
The next year, when we were in Kotri for the Eid celebration, I was playing with Kalsoom in the unfinished room at the end of the haveli. I had just made a clay doll that was drying in the sun. Kalsoom went out for something, and her sister Khadija came into the room. We were alone. “Khalida,” she whispered, “what is it you were saying that people recite when Satan takes you over?” In my childish innocence, I mindlessly repeated the verse I had been taught: “There is no power, no strength, greater than Allah.” I was too naïve to think about why she was asking me, and I went on cheerfully playing with my doll. I later saw this innocent moment as a turning point for me and my family, and knowing that it could have unfolded differently, I would regret it for the rest of my life.
BALOCHISTAN WAS WHERE MY SPIRIT belonged. Whenever I knew we were going back to our haveli there, for summer or winter breaks, I couldn’t sleep out of anticipation and happiness. It took us many days to prepare for this trip, which would take about twelve hours. We put old clothes and shoes in a gunny sack to take to the poor. We washed and laid out our own clothes and wrapped them in a dupatta (headscarf) or a plastic bag. I put on my favorite dress, even though it would be filthy by the time we arrived.
First we took a bus from Hyderabad to Karachi, where we would transfer to another for the journey to Khuzdar in Balochistan. The first ride lasted about three hours, and it was dark by the time we reached Karachi. My sister Fatima and I were groggy, our hair frizzy, but our chests throbbed with excitement, knowing that we would soon see our beautiful mountains. In Karachi we bought chips, juice, and chole chaat (spicy chickpeas with onions and spices in a small plastic bag), for the long trip ahead.
I loved the hustle and clamor of the bus. The luggage was tied up top, and when there was no more room on the roof, things would come inside: sacks of rice and lentils, or a basket with five chickens in it. Sometimes a goat was allowed to walk to and fro in the aisle. Men smoked cigarettes and women fussed over children. Eighties Bollywood music blared at top volume. When the bus started moving, my mother would say a prayer loudly, Bismillah (Begin in the name of Allah), and hold her veil up to her face. We were off to the part of the world I loved most.
When we arrived in Khuzdar, we took a donkey cart from the station to the haveli of my mother’s family. The tall mountains, the dry land, the multicolored rocks and boulders of this province made my heart sing. The family haveli was a single-story compound made of hand-caked mud and cow dung that often dissolved in heavy rains. Many times I watched my uncles working on a new room. They would make big, perfectly round bricks of wet clay and arrange them in a straight line on top of one another to make walls.
During the summers in Balochistan, Fatima and I would hear the bell of the chole cart, and our ears would perk up. The man tinkling the bell was walking slowly down the street, pushing his wooden cart with a big steaming pot of chole, calling, “Chole wala! Chole wala!” For a rupee, he would give chole in a small clear plastic bag, tied with a thread. You had to make a hole in the corner to eat it from the side. The warm spicy chole had rich flavors that you wanted to savor. We would take about an hour to finish one plastic bag full of chole.
Throughout my joyous childhood, I was deeply conscious of the fact that I was privileged. I went to school, held books, and was able to read. The contrast between my urban world and this world of the mountain village sometimes bothered me, as my little cousins went about the house washing dishes and doing laundry. The distinction between childhood and adulthood was all but nonexistent for these families, and there was certainly no such thing as adolescence. My siblings and I were lucky enough to have parents who saw us as more than just another pair of hands. They made us work in the house but never expected us to earn money for the family.
Almost out of guilt, I would try to make it up to my cousins by gathering them together and reading aloud from my big book of Grimm’s fairy tales. I read the stories of Hansel and Gretel, of Tom Thumb and Rapunzel. In my child’s voice, I translated every sentence from English to Brahui, our indigenous language. It was uncommon for a girl like me to be able to read English, and I felt powerful and knowledgeable, grateful for the freedoms I enjoyed.
Playing with clay dolls was my favorite thing to do in Balochistan. A group of eight of us (including boy cousins) would imagine and enact wedding celebrations with them. But each year when I returned, I would find that one or more of the girls had been married at age ten or eleven. I didn’t understand most of it, but I could see they were not happy. They had to leave their mothers’ homes to go live in the mountains with their new husbands. In the summers their husbands would bring them to see their mothers, and I would visit with these girls. I saw their new grown-up attitudes, their sad faces, and their inability to play. They were now considered women, no longer just enjoying being children.
In the distant mountains of Kharzan, where some of my great-uncles lived, I had a best friend named Gudi. Each time we visited, she and I would go to our favorite place in the mountains—a small hill with a beautiful little pond, the remnant of flash floods, when the river receded and left water stranded in the rocks. We would jump into it. One summer Gudi tried to show me how to swim. I never fully learned (until my husband taught me years later) because I was afraid of the deep water and the slimy rocks beneath my feet. Gudi, however, would dunk herself in the water, telling me it was fine. While I lingered on the rocks, scared of even putting my feet in the water, she would laugh, and her laughter would echo through the canyon.
The next year when I returned,
Gudi was married off. She had been sent away to the mountains without any trace. I cried for days. People told me that she had respected her family’s decision by getting married at a young age, and hence she had raised the honor of the family and her father. It broke my heart and ate at my soul. When I returned to city life, my sadness still had not left me.
WHEN I WAS TEN, WE moved to Karachi, where my father had taken a job as a university researcher. It was a sprawling city, thronged with tens of millions of people. Cars, buses, motorcycles, and donkey carts all cramped together on the small roads, while vendors sold coloring books, pens, street food, and live goats. Women in burqas, in shalwar qameez (long shirts over loose pants, the traditional outfit for both women and men), or even in jeans strolled past beggars who stopped everyone for money in the name of God. Smoke came from the cars, from the barbecued chicken tikka on the carts, and from the waste burning on the roadsides.
The neighborhood of Gizri was much more congested than any place we’d ever lived, but somehow it felt like home. Kids played outside all day long. People spoke Brahui. Men sat on the street corners talking with laughter and warmth. Women walked to the markets. There was a sense of community and pride.
But one thing I soon discovered about Karachi was its modern conservatives. In the villages women went to fetch water and worked in the fields with men, but in the city, women and girls who lived in the lower middle class had much more restricted lives. Brothers and fathers took note of everywhere they went and what they did. They had to ask permission for everything—to visit a friend or even to walk across the street—and many times they were denied. Everything was about what other men would say if they saw this or heard that.
One afternoon my sister Fatima, my younger brother Sajjad, and I were outside throwing a ball around, shouting and happy. At one point Sajjad threw the ball toward me, and I ran for it, but it fell near three men who were talking at the end of the street. The men looked absorbed in their conversation. I picked up the ball.
But soon Ammi called me inside the house.
A neighbor woman had seen me pick up the ball near the men and had come over to our little house, draped in a long shawl. She introduced herself and said she had seen me “near the men.” Her tone made it seem ugly and criminal. A cloud of worry came over Ammi’s young face. She sat the woman down and made chai for her and told me to wash the dishes that were piled up in the corner. I frowned but picked up the water hose to fill a bucket. (Water was scarcer here than it had been in Hyderabad, and we had to use it sparingly.) Later that evening I saw Ammi talking to Aba.
I was confused. Why did my mother call me in from our game? Why is today different from any other day? It turned out, the woman had come to tell my mother that I was too old to play in the streets. At thirteen, I was almost a woman, and the men had been watching me. Suddenly my parents were worried. In struggling to educate their children and meet their basic needs, they had not thought about what young adulthood would mean, especially for their daughters. Suddenly they saw differences in me that they hadn’t seemed to notice before. The little rise on my chest, the flush on my cheeks. My few inches of greater height were suddenly disconcerting.
Soon after that Aba told me I had to sit differently on the motorcycle when I rode with him. I had to ride like a woman, dangling both legs on one side, instead of straddling the seat comfortably, as he did and as I had always done behind him, wrapping my arms around his waist. It was painful to watch him try to explain why I had to sit this new way. He was awkward in a way I’d never seen before, searching for the words.
He finally called to my mother, who came to the door. “Bibi,” he said, “don’t you think now our daughter should start sitting like this?” My mother immediately understood. It was inappropriate for girls to sit with their legs open on a bike, and it occurred to me that this was why no girls had bicycles or motorcycles. I did what was asked of me and started sitting like a woman, with only one hand on Aba’s shoulder. When the wind touched my face and hair, it no longer brought me the happy feeling of freedom that it once had.
That August, on Pakistan’s Independence Day, Fatima and I were about to leave for our school party. We were dressed up in the matching new light green lehengas (long skirts) that Ammi had sewn for us. I was standing outside combing my hair when I felt Aba nudge me. Frowning, he told me to go inside because the men working on the electricity tower could see me and my hair. I was shocked! I looked up toward the workers, who were staring at me with expressions that made me feel nauseous.
Another time one of my aunts came to visit and said to my mother, “Bibi! You must teach your daughter many things now. Look at her, she is almost a woman!” My aunt stared right at my chest. From that day forward, Ammi made me wear my scarf so that it covered my chest at all times, down to my elbows.
The year I was thirteen, I got my period. When I first saw the blood, I was terrified. As a child, I had seen an aunt give birth, and at this time I thought just being in the same room as a boy could get you pregnant, so I believed I was giving birth. Living as we did far from our tribe, nobody had explained things to me. I was an experiment, a source of weird wisdom for my parents that sometimes made them second-guess things. Looking back, I think they were so afraid of making a mistake, so afraid I might act in a way that would cause the tribe to question the freedom they had given to me and my sisters that they kept me in the dark about many things.
I panicked. How challenging it was to be a woman! How difficult life was when you were unable to speak openly! So I kept quiet, convinced I had brought shame upon my family. I went to the bathroom several times a day to clean up, but one day a silk shirt I loved was stained red. Ammi came running from the kitchen and took me into a room. I assumed she was angry and that I was facing punishment. I thought I could be killed for the serious dishonor of having a baby without a husband. But as she explained, “It happens to all the women, it’s natural,” relief washed over me.
As I recovered my senses, my mother tried to look into my eyes. Her crooked smile couldn’t hide the fear that filled them. In her experience, when a mother finds out that her daughter is menstruating, the next day the family is supposed to look for a husband for her if she is not already betrothed. If my parents had honored the stipulations of the wata sata exchange, and if my father had not moved out of the village when he did, I would soon be married to another man to bring my uncle Liaqat a wife.
In my tribe’s world, when Muhammad P.B.U.H. said, “Fulfill your duties to your children when they are baligh [mature],” it meant marrying the daughters off the moment they bled. But by baligh, Muhammad P.B.U.H. really meant the age when children are capable of fulfilling their duties and responsibilities as grown adults.
In that instant, my heart went out to my mother. I could not blame her for her fears. I understood the difficulties we had yet to face. Daughters are a blessing from God, but they are a tough gift to cherish. Everyone wants a piece of them. Always.
AROUND THE TIME THAT I showed physical signs of crossing the threshold from girlhood into womanhood, something happened to the cousin I loved dearly, something that turned my world upside down and set me on my path to effect change in my culture.
On one of our trips to Kotri, I noticed that Khadija was nowhere to be found. The house was as dark as night inside, the air thick and musty. We sat out in the courtyard under flickering stars; the dim light of the yellow bulb hanging from a ragged cord glowed against the brick wall. Women spoke in whispers. Some men were sleeping on cots, while others just stared straight ahead. Then two of my childhood friends and the daughters of my second uncle snuggled up with me on one khat (wooden jute bed) with blankets. To our right was the children’s khat with the younger kids under the rilis. They poked their heads out from beneath the colorful patterns and whispered to one another, giggling sometimes.
I worked up the nerve to ask what had happened, what was eating e
veryone alive. My friends on the khat would tell me nothing. When I asked, they looked at each other, perhaps thinking I was a fragile city girl who couldn’t handle the hard truths of rural, tribal life. I wondered: Had Khadija been married off? But then why the silence? Perhaps she had fallen ill, and they had hidden her away for the traditional forty days. Or had she died of some extreme illness?
Two kids on the khat next to ours heard my questions. The younger one, who had night blindness, came toward me, her arms stretched out in front of her into the darkness.
“They have killed her,” she said, in a voice that was hoarse and adult-like. “Because she did something bad, they killed her.”
My world stood still in that moment. The soft sounds, shadows, and lights disappeared, making way for a thick darkness as I tried to grasp what I had just heard. I don’t remember falling asleep that night, but I do remember the feeling that everything was happening very quickly. It was as if ghosts descended upon me in my safe and known world. Although I had known of honor killings before, they had always been at a remove, never touching me directly. This moment of registering Khadija’s death marked the end of my innocence, and it raised questions I would struggle with for the rest of my life.
* * *
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IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, I began to piece together Khadija’s story, but it would take many years to learn the full truth. One insidious thing about honor killings is that their purpose is to destroy not just the body but also the soul, so that by forgetting her, the family can hope to restore the dignity they have lost because of her. Often after a girl is murdered, her belongings are buried or burned; friends and family are not to speak of her ever again; her name is never mentioned aloud. It is supposed to be as if she never lived.
I Should Have Honor Page 5
