In the years before Khadija was murdered, she and her family had moved to a village in upper Sindh that was extremely poor, but more affordable than life in Kotri. Everyone worked in the fields to receive a daily wage. There were no schools, hospitals, or even electricity. Kalsoom, her sisters, and her mother worked in the fields all day.
Khadija hated this new life and kept herself removed. She stayed home and tried to educate her sisters, and when she wasn’t doing that, she would sit in the corner and compose poetry in Urdu, Pakistan’s national language.
Around this time Khadija fell in love with a Sindhi boy from the neighborhood. He made her feel that she had value, that her thoughts and her beliefs mattered. He made her feel like a queen, that she could be loved and cared for. I don’t know how or where they would meet. But one dark night, filled with romantic thoughts of a good life with her beloved, she put on her best dress and shoes and left home with the boy to get married. She thought they would live a happy life somewhere far away. Like many of my cousins, Khadija had been promised to a man when she was a young girl—in her case, to one of my cousins.
Quick as the blink of an eye, yet long enough to feel like decades, a roar of anger went up from the hundreds of relatives in our tribe. The gossip was so thick in the village that the family moved back to Kaka Liaqat’s haveli in Kotri. Liaqat, who had become the head of the family after my paternal grandfather’s death, immediately gathered a group of men who searched every road, every bus station, and every other place they could think of to find the couple.
It took less than a week to hunt them down.
Nobody talks about how and where they were found, so this part of the story I do not know. But the boy’s family arrived immediately, to make sure no harm came to him. And my cousin was brought back to Kotri.
Kalsoom created such chaos about the cruel way her sister was being treated like a criminal that the family decided to send her to stay at her grandmother’s house until a decision was made about Khadija. But Kalsoom demanded to see her sister once before she was taken there. The house where Khadija was being held was made of red brick with a dirt courtyard. In the room closest to the gate, where jute khats lined the wall, Khadija lay on a ragged rug. She was wrapped in blankets, staring silently at the wall. Among her five sisters, Khadija was closest to Kalsoom. Even with their three-year age difference, Khadija used to share her thoughts and worries with Kalsoom, and Kalsoom was always inspired by Khadija’s continuous struggle for education.
When Kalsoom arrived at the house, the aunts greeted her nervously and led her to Khadija. As Kalsoom held to the edge of the door, a figure came into her vision. Someone extremely thin was staring back at her from the corner of the room. There she was! Her sister, whom everyone in the world was calling a sinner, a bad woman, a kari (dishonored woman), the sister she loved with all her heart. “Khajo!” she called her by her nickname. Amid tears and unanswerable questions, Kalsoom and Khadija hugged and sobbed. Meanwhile in the kitchen the women in the house sat close to each other, silently holding their scarves up to their mouths as their eyes bled with sadness.
Finally Khadija, in the middle of her tears, asked, “What punishment has father decided for me?”
The answer—and the punishment—came soon. In a couple of days, three men—my uncle Liaqat and two others—arrived at the house. They took Khadija by the arm and asked her to walk beside them.
She knew immediately that she was going to be killed, as it was the only way for the family to restore their lost honor. The women in the haveli cried and begged the men to let her be, to forgive her sins. But Khadija stood with confidence. Wearing her chador, she walked out with them.
It was a long walk. On that day the earth, the trees, and the wind witnessed a young skinny girl walking beside three big men who knew only that they must kill. They walked for five hours, until the graveyard came into sight. There among lines of graves raised with dirt and stone, Khadija saw an empty grave dug into the earth. She knew it was hers.
And so in the year 2002, at the age of fourteen, my cousin Khadija was murdered in the name of honor. Her photos were burned. Her clothes were thrown away. Her identity was removed.
Khadija’s mother would die of grief. Her father, unable to bear the burden of what he had allowed, died of a heart attack soon after. Khadija’s second sister was disgraced and married off as a second wife. One of her younger sisters was taken out of school and married off. Sajda, a thirteen-year-old, disappeared from the family to avoid being married off to an older man. Kalsoom, only twelve at the time, was left to practice nursing at a local clinic and take care of the uncle who murdered Khadija, along with her two youngest siblings. The murder on that sad day in 2002 led to the death and devastation of an entire family. It left no room for honor.
I imagine that in her last moments Khadija looked around at the men and saw no gun, no sticks, no knives. Maybe she looked straight into the eyes of her uncle and asked how he planned to kill her. Her daring gaze, her confident tone, and her erect posture might have made the three men uncomfortable. But they had a job to do, and they did it.
They strangled her. And then they buried her. All because she had fallen in love.
Before all the photos of Khadija were taken away and buried or burned, I remember seeing one of them. She is with her family. Her older sisters have grim, set faces and look unprepared to be photographed, as though they’ve quickly placed their scarves on their heads at the last minute, perhaps preoccupied with thoughts of food or chores. The younger ones have dirt all over themselves.
Khadija stands in the center, her arms crossed, looking defiantly at the camera.
PEOPLE OFTEN BECOME POETS WHEN they fall in love, but I became a poet when hate entered my heart. My cousin had just been murdered. She was killed for something that was considered a sin: love. Murdered unjustly by my own uncle. Her father had let it happen. Her mother had had no power. The society watched as she was dragged from her home. Memories of her were erased. And we were instructed never to say her name again. Khadija.
That was the hardest part; the inability to speak about it. My cousin had shown me that education is power. Her confidence had inspired me. Her powerful gaze lingered in my thoughts, but now she had never existed. The pain shoved me into a new reality. For years, I had nightmares about Khadija: sudden flashes of her face staring straight at me, her eyes wide and bold. This vision also appeared to me at random times during the day. Whether I was in school or at home washing dishes, I felt that Khadija was living with me, haunting me with thoughts of what I might have done to save her. I thought of that day two years before her murder, when my clay doll, rather than she, had had all my attention. She had hinted at what might become of her, when she could be saved. And so when the pain became a silent throbbing in my chest, I sat in dark corners of rooms composing her existence into a poem. I tried to imagine what it felt like to be a kari. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine how she had felt when she realized that her punishment was death and no one could save her. They took her life to save honor? What kind of honor allows that?
The questions that came out of my heart became poems, with hurt sown into each word. I wrote many in Urdu, the language taught to us at school, trying to make Khadija the voice of every woman and girl murdered in the name of honor. I read my poems to Aba, who tried to hide the cloud of concern that hovered over his face, as he said I had grown older than my actual age. In my desperation, I asked him about honor killings. I already knew what Islam says about such heinous acts. I had studied in the Holy Quran that Allah forbade hurting any soul. Killing one person is like killing the whole of mankind, God says. There were instructions after instructions on the rights of women in Islam and the freedoms that both men and women share. Then what was it that led men to kill in the name of honor? To understand that, I had to understand the concept of dishonor and what it actually meant for men: a state of ri
dicule in the society; an inability to show face in the community; a position reinforced by a community that refuses to interact with the man who does not act in harsh ways to preserve his honor. Some of the common explanations for honor murders are that the men weren’t thinking, that they were so angry, they weren’t in their right minds. But how could this be true when the murders were often planned? They were both senseless and premeditated.
I slowly learned that “honor” killings—a custom not ordered by religion, caste, or tradition but done solely to restore men’s egos—weren’t just my tribe’s issue but took place all across Pakistan and all over the world. The shock was enough to transform my agony into action. Khadija’s murder shook me to the core. It made me question my very identity, my role in my family, tribe, and society.
I always thank God that I had a father who heard me. Aba listened to my anger and understood my rage. He saw my despair. And I believe he was secretly grateful.
Aba was running a nonprofit nongovernmental organization called Participatory Development Initiatives (PDI). When big institutions like the Asian Development Bank, the IMF, and the World Bank invested in projects in Pakistan, the projects often didn’t include the local communities in the planning and implementation processes. By not being sensitive to the cultural issues surrounding major infrastructure changes, these projects ended up harming the local and indigenous communities as much as helping them. Aba organized conferences and workshops on the big issues that affected local populations—water, disaster management, environmental policies, and gender rights—in order to raise awareness in those communities and engage them in the planning process, and he also organized an event at an international gathering called the World Social Forum in Karachi, where we were living at the time.
I enjoyed helping Aba with his conferences, learning what he did and how. The sight of hundreds of people convening in one place to discuss issues that were impacting communities around the world made me feel connected for the first time to something larger than myself, and I saw how this kind of work could become my path. Aba often asked me to be the announcer during these events. I began to read my poems to conference attendees so they could know the truth about honor killings. I didn’t think about taking on an issue so brutal and big—I just wanted others to hear my pain in my words.
At a conference on water rights, my father made me the master of ceremonies, and I surprised the audience by pausing in my commentary and asking them to listen to a poem. It was one I’d written about Khadija. It was incredibly awkward and the audience was stunned, but they listened. In the audience were men from all kinds of tribes, traditions, and social classes. As I finished reading, I looked up and saw Aba beaming with pride.
One day in April 2006, a year after I began reading my poems to activists and civil society members, I was reading a poem in front of an audience of about eighty people. Among them were organizers for a global campaign called WE CAN End Violence Against Women. In Pakistan, WE CAN had begun the same year as an advocacy campaign to influence policy change on honor killings, and it took the name WE CAN End Honor Killings of Women. The organizers called Aba right after the event. They had heard about this girl from a rural area who was reading her poems in public, and they asked to publish one of them on the back cover of their magazine to recruit change makers for their campaign. And they invited me to Islamabad to join the conference to launch WE CAN and read the same poem in front of seven hundred people.
I was desperate to go, but Aba was hesitant. Composing poetry about a heavy, divisive topic and being vocal about it was different from getting on a plane to become part of a national campaign. But his love and trust had given me the confidence to be stubborn. I begged and pleaded and told him I wouldn’t go back to school if I didn’t do this.
He saw I was not going to relent, which was how I ended up experiencing the hustle and bustle of Karachi’s Jinnah International Airport at sixteen. I had seen train stations and traditional bus stations, but never this level of activity. Once on the plane, I gripped my seat tightly and held my breath. I remembered a morning when my aunt and I sat on the floor of our kitchen hut in the haveli making flour rotis over the burning embers of cow dung patties. As I rolled the small piece of dough in my hands and put it on the bishenk for my aunt to throw in the fire, we heard a soft buzz in the blue sky above. We looked up to see the tiny dot of an airplane moving across the vast sky—we stared in awe.
Now I was on such a plane. It lifted off the ground. I felt as if a string were pulling on it, and if I breathed, the string would let go, and the giant pill-like machine would fall from the sky.
At the conference, activists, politicians, entrepreneurs, speakers, media groups, writers, poets, students, scholars, and even police officers were in attendance. Everyone who was passionate to end the custom of honor killing had gathered here. I couldn’t believe it was happening and that I was a part of it! But my excitement turned into nausea when we were shown pictures of bloody murdered women, murders that had been reported to the police: young women, old women, sisters, mothers, wives, cousins. A sister shot in the eyes by her brother; a woman lying on the ground cold, just because she had looked out the window of her home at a strange man in the street. Emotion flooded me, and I ran outside the hall and cried as I had never cried before. When I went back inside, I felt a new clarity and resolve. I didn’t care what my peers said—I knew what my path was, what journey I was beginning.
About one thousand women are killed each year in Pakistan in the name of honor. And these are just the reported cases. I was going to end this custom or die trying.
That evening I read my poem and danced to the WE CAN campaign song with Samina Peerzada, a famous national television actress and women’s rights activist who has inspired thousands of Pakistani women to step into their true potential through her TV programs and other initiatives. At the end of the event, I mustered my confidence and approached the twenty kindest-looking people in the room to ask for their business cards, hoping to make connections for the future. The WE CAN campaign had disseminated information in print, on television, and on the radio. It ran in several districts across Pakistan, raising awareness of people against honor killings, doing advocacy on policy, and pressuring the government to implement policies that protected women.
THE NEXT DAY, BACK IN Aba’s office in Karachi, I spread the business cards in front of me like rare treasures and carefully typed each name out in separate emails. I sent them all the same note:
TO: Chris Wardle
SUBJECT: hello
Hi
This is Khalida Brohi, how are you, we had some great conversations together. Hope to meet you again sometime soon.
Take care
Khalida Brohi
It was a start to my new life. I continued my education and participated in events organized by WE CAN: workshops, rallies, protests, and focus group discussions. The main thrust of the campaign was to get the government to adopt policies that were harder on honor killings. Pakistan had accepted a number of key international commitments to gender equality and women’s human rights—the Beijing Platform for Action, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the Millennium Declaration, and the Millennium Development Goals—but none of them had brought protection to women in tribal areas of Pakistan. WE CAN pushed for the implementation of laws and raised people’s awareness of honor killing.
Deeply inspired, it occurred to me that the places that most needed to hear this message—the remote tribal areas where most honor killings occur—were the places least likely to be touched unless we engaged them directly. So I wanted to bring the WE CAN campaign to my own community, to my family and friends back in my villages, where my cousins continued to be victims of honor-related crimes. I wanted to start a youth revolution in my village. I wanted to bring young voices together, strengthen them, and ready them to st
and up for women’s rights in tribal areas.
In Kotri, they did not receive my reaction to Khadija’s murder well, and I couldn’t start campaigning there. So I decided to start in Balochistan instead.
And so that summer, as my family climbed into the bus to go to Balochistan for summer vacation, I joined them, but this time I was determined to create groups of youth and empower them.
To make it happen, I knew I had to recruit my grandmother. In tribal village life, every family respects their own elders as well as the elders of other families. Bhalla Ama, my grandmother, was a respected elder. If I could get her to walk with me to the other houses, it would send a much stronger message than if I went with a cousin or an aunt. Her presence would ensure that my message was received without anger, and even if others in the village didn’t immediately understand my message, it would at least get a hearing.
But my plan hit a snag: Bhalla Ama was not on board with it.
I approached her as she was sitting on a cot, where she had just taken a short nap. She was having her midmorning chai, surrounded by my four aunts and a dozen children. A few neighbors sat to the other side of the veranda on the floor, and my siblings played outside in the open.
“Why would we go to the houses of these other girls?” Bhalla Ama asked me, confused. “What are you trying to do?”
The other women echoed Bhalla Ama’s skepticism. They couldn’t see the wrongs in the cultural restrictions that I was trying to describe, or the physical and emotional harm some traditions inflicted on women. I did not yet understand that one debilitating effect of honor killings is that they make the women who are left behind think nothing of domestic violence, seeing it as natural and ordained.
This project was going to be harder than I thought. I had assumed my main task would be to change the minds of the men—I hadn’t counted on having to change the minds of the women too. I had to frame my request in a way that would get them to listen.
I Should Have Honor Page 6
