In a corner of the house, my father stopped at a set of doors and then led my mother over the threshold into their marital wing of the house. She realized from the furniture that she was in a living room and accepted the chair silently offered to her. When she sat down, her cumbersome jora crinkled and cracked as she pulled at it. How she wished to take off the fabric sarcophagus; and how she loathed the idea all at once. The old women had told her that it was her sacred duty to perform whatever act was requested. She noted a book lying open on a table, and it stopped her thoughts. Many others stood in tall stacks on the floor. She squinted through her garb at the spine and said quietly: “Moby-Dick.” Somehow, my father heard that murmur, and he stopped and turned to stare at her. A large box in his hand, he approached his terrified bride and knelt before her.
“I think you must have come here to test my wisdom, Yasrab. I can see from your eyes that you worship the sun, and from your grace that you are a queen.”
My mother even now recalls the shock that reverberated through her in that strange moment. She felt his fingers pull at her hijab to reveal the fullness of her face. He was gentle, and never once touched her skin. Body damp from fear, she was sure he could smell it on her. Even in middle age, my mother would tell us that if she closed her eyes, she could still hear every word of their first conversation; the sound of her own young voice in that moment, and all the horror it held, still chilled her.
“I am no Queen of Sheba, and you are no King Solomon.”
My mother told me that my father laughed so hard, tears flooded his dark eyes, and he shook his head so many times, she thought it might rattle. Then he reached deep into a box and opened it. Pulling out a blue garment, he stood up and unfolded a denim jacket, the silver buttons shining like coins before her. Draping it across her lap, he pulled her hijab way down over her shoulders, letting out her shining braids and all the heat trapped in there.
“Then I will make you one.”
In those few seconds of absurdity, my mother guessed instantly that the elders had sentenced her to marry a madman.
She held up the stiff garment.
“What do you expect me to do with this, Shams? Wear it over my burqa or on my head?”
“That is a jean jacket, Yasrab. Levi’s, from America. My wedding gift to you. And I expect you to wear nothing on your head unless you choose to. Inside these walls, and with me, you are the queen of the house.”
On their wedding night, my parents stood together before a mirror, both dressed in denim; she in her deep blue jacket and he in boot-cut jeans laughing, looking at themselves again and again, seeing a whole world of possibility unfold in their shared reflection—awed as though they’d discovered an entire continent in a single day.
“The first time he spoke to me, Maria, your father’s words struck my heart and made it chime. It was a miracle. In one week, I was back at school.”
*
Two weeks later, a sixteen-year-old girl from their village fled with a boy her own age in a battered horse-drawn cart for the city of Peshawar. The young couple explained that they wished only to marry, but it made no difference to the posse that came after them. Their physical coupling was attested to by several witnesses, and both the girl and boy were sentenced to death long before they were caught. The boy’s family would have to pay blood money to the girl’s father to make amends for the shame their sinful acts placed upon the family. Once the money was paid, the offending boy was shot—one bullet to the nape of his neck— as no punishment could undo what had been done. The girl’s family had already promised her to a man from her village who had recently lost his wife in childbirth. It also made no difference that they prayed five times each day in a perfect state of wudu. Shame descended upon their families like a swarm of locusts, and the village grew still as the jirga tent went up. The girl was a small-boned thing with blue eyes so unusual that some thought it was a sign of impurity.
From the flat roof of my father’s family home, my mother had a perfect vantage of the rocky gulley where executions took place. She made herself watch what she could have been, had fate written a different story for her. On the day of the execution, the men approached in a solemn group, all clustered around the girl, who was already draped in the brown robe and veil that she would die in. A heavy rope tied about her waist was used to pull her along as though she were a goat.
Several men came forward and took the girl by her shoulders, then held her face so that she stood erect and stared straight ahead. A bearded man stepped up to face the girl and read aloud the lengthy punishment. My mother could see the girl shifting about within the heavy draping, her head nodding slowly several times. A man asked that before they kill her, she agree with the sentence, and Aami wondered why. Still does. She wanted to shout out—no. Instead, up there hiding in the shaded sanctuary of the roof, she only whispered it over and over to the careless wind. The girl’s eyes darted back and forth, back and forth, from the shallow pit before her to a sullen man with a red kaffiyeh. The whites of her eyes shone; even from where she crouched, my mother could see them. Beseeching. The girl still held some hope of mercy and held out her hands to the man who was likely her father, though aloud she asked for mercy only of God. Now the man in the kaffiyeh stepped closer to the bearded one, hands clasped over his protruding belly. Aami strained to hear them; as they spoke, she committed every word like a sacrament to memory.
“Is there anything you’d like to say to your daughter now?”
“No.”
“Ask him to forgive me before God does. Please.”
“Every girl asks this of her father at the moment of her stoning. It is common. And I will tell you what we say to every man in your position. Surely, Allah will reward you for forgiving your daughter such a thing as your shame.”
“No, it is not in me to forgive her. It would not be in any man’s heart.”
“Baba, forgive me, forgive me.”
“No. Do not call me that. You are no longer my daughter and I am no longer your father.”
“All right. You are not her father; but, as she has asked, you must forgive. She was compelled to do this thing by a man, and she must serve as a warning to other women who come across such men.”
“Forgive me. Forgive. Forgive . . .”
“Just do it, as much as it makes you ill. In minutes, Allah will forgive her anyway.”
“Baba, forgive me.”
“Do not call me that. I told you. Fine, I forgive you. Now will you be quiet?”
“Good, that’s it. Take her to the pit and tie her feet.”
Leading her quivering form, his hands tight around the rope at her waist, the father stopped twice to straighten the crude robe as her feet tripped against the dragging hem. He seemed rushed, and glared at his daughter in annoyance. She didn’t see him; already her eyes were elsewhere. Carefully, as the others stood around examining rocks, he pushed her with one hand down into the pit. Instinctively, though she had closed her eyes, the girl crouched to her knees. The bearded man nodded in approval and told her to say a prayer. She did so; but her words were barely more than air and it was impossible for Aami to hear her. Then the father jumped in after his daughter and tied her feet so that she could not run. A woman who escaped a stoning with her life was often allowed to live.
“Hold my hand, father. Hold my hand a moment.”
My mother heard her utter those words several times, and clenched her own fists. She could feel the girl’s cold hands slip into her own.
“No.”
“Hold my hand.”
“My hand cannot go from yours to the stone that will kill you.”
The girl laid her head down on the loose sand surrounding her and waited, all the while uttering a staccato of whispered prayers. The first and second rocks made her cry out loud enough to echo, and she jerked to one side in her bindings. Every man took a turn, each rock falling in a direct blow to her head, and after many she grew quieter and still. My mother looked away and hated hersel
f for that moment of cowardice. She gathered up all her breath and held it in. Where just minutes before she’d seen a pale, blue-eyed face, already there was only a wash of blood. My mother told me that she forced herself to give her eyes fully to the scene, fixing them unblinking on the body, slumped and still twitching in the pit. At last, the bearded man whistled and approached and kicked the girl once to find her still moving. Then he motioned to another man, who stepped forward and presented the shamed father with the salvation of the largest death-blow stone. Without a flicker of hesitation, the girl’s father took the boulder and raised it way up with tremendous force, a torrent of rage twisting through him. Standing no more than five feet from his half-dead child, he hurled the heavy rock like a catapult into her already ruined face. And she was gone.
After my mother witnessed the execution of the young girl named Adeela, she’d scoured the Quran again and again. Finding not a single word about what she sought, she asked my father to ask a holy man what he had to say about the ritual. My father returned home with a pomegranate in his hand. He held it out to her like an offering and told her what he’d learned at morning prayer.
“The woman must be buried in the earth up to her chest, her feet and hands tied in case she attempts to flee. The chosen stones must not be large enough to kill her with one or two strikes. Or small enough to be called pebbles.”
As my father spoke, he descended as though he were sinking into the floor and held his new wife’s slippered feet, unable to let go:
“Forgive me, Yasrab.”
“Why?”
“You came here to test my wisdom, and I failed you already. I have no answers.”
“But you just told me what I asked for.”
“Forgive me. Just say you do.”
My mother always said that it was in that moment, my father’s damp face looking up at her, beseeching between her cumin-scented palms, that she felt their marriage was consecrated. She knew that she was safe.
“All right, Solomon, I forgive you. Get up from the ground now, and take hold of my hand.”
4. Genghis Khan
I gave Maria up when I was four and a half in the Valley of God—Dera Ismail Khan—west of the Indus, four miles inland from the wide, muddy banks. There I saw the river that birthed me, Abasin, for the first time that I could remember, threading its lazy silver water along a vast green plain, when our family moved out of South Waziristan to the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in Pakistan proper. We crossed into the level ground of the pleasant town of Khan at noon in a white pick-up truck, our belongings trussed in huge bundles to the roof; two squawking chickens in a cage; bottles of water; several oranges rolling around; a record player; and my mother’s heavy textbooks tied up in stacks at our feet.
This was not an exile but an exodus, one of many to come. We’d travelled more than two hundred miles away from our tribal home, on a thin road running the southern extension of the Khyber Pass. In the high heat of early summer, driving from my father’s village to the city, our old truck barreled through the carbon haze of Daraban Road. We were moving to a region known as a cradle of higher learning, full of colleges and universities, all accepting female students. And within months, my mother would be among them, taking courses for four years until she received a bachelor’s degree in history.
My father’s first wedding gift to my mother was a midnight-blue pair of Levi’s; the second, which came years later, was the continuation of her education. No more correspondence courses or long journeys back and forth between the mountains to attend lectures. When my father told the village elders he wanted to move his family, they believed his tale about returning to the polytechnic college where he’d taken a position teaching classes in engineering. He left out the part about my mother’s acceptance letter to the Government Degree College, the one she kept folded in her pocket, to pull out and read again and again.
A thin mud wall spanned the perimeter of Dera Ismail Khan, and the entry gate looked to me like a secret archway into a pleasant, bustling citadel. Those first glimpses of the town left me spellbound: tree-lined boulevards as wide as flooded rivers; buses and big trucks; zigzagging mopeds; swarms of bicycles, spinning wheels and blurs of limbs cutting through traffic. And so many people everywhere, strolling up and down the lanes or lingering in chattering groups: Muslims moved among Hindus, Sikhs, Punjabis, Baluchis, Jats, and Pashtuns, rich or poor, all them known collectively as Derawals.
Our truck sped down University Road toward my father’s college, stirring up dust, the chickens protesting and my laughing mother holding me in the soft spoon of her arm. She was pregnant, and her belly swelled tight as a drum and so round; I rubbed it many times as though she were a Buddha. My eight-year-old sister, Ayesha, who would be starting first grade at the local girls’ school, was nestled on the other side of her. Taimur was up front with my father, a map held out between his hands.
We entered the neighborhood where college employees lived, and everything slowed and quieted. It was full of short, meandering streets that ended in cul-de-sacs, where professors lived, every house stuccoed white. Behind the neighborhood, a huge valley sloped down to a long, flashing thread of river, with mountains far off in the distance.
Within a month of moving into our university house, my mother left in the dead of night and disappeared for several days. I know now she was at the city hospital maternity ward, giving birth for a fourth time, but for the first time in a bright, sanitary room. When my father led my mother slowly up the front walk a few days later, both of them grinning ear to ear and each cradling a small swaddled bundle, I simply assumed they’d been away fishing for babies in the Indus. How lucky my father had a big net—they’d caught two.
My parents named the first boy Sangeen Khan, and on the seventh day following the ritual naming, proffering a polished gold coin, my father knelt down before me with the second twin.
“This one is for you, Maria. The current swept him into my net just as I was about to hoist up Sangeen. Then I noticed two small cuts at his temples—see there? And I knew he was yours.”
“What are the marks?”
“Those are from the front teeth of the Great Lion, Maria. He marked your temples the very same way. Here, take your brother and give him his name—Babrak Khan.”
And so I held out my short arms and took hold of the sleeping infant. Crouching, I felt his newborn breaths flutter against my cheek, and I brought my lips close to his tiny seashell ear.
“Babrak Khan. Never be afraid, because you are my boy. I will look after you.” And then into his right ear, with all the love I thought existed in the world entire, I breathed the azan, our Muslim call to prayer.
*
Every morning, all the members of my family except the twins and me would set out from the front gate like travelers, bags slung over their shoulders, lunches packed, into the dense sunlit streets of Dera Ismail Khan, on their way to classrooms and lecture halls. My father would walk Ayesha and Taimur to the local elementary school before making his way to the college where he lectured, while my mother rode the public bus to her own classes. Even when he had to travel far or was in a rush, he always went around town on foot. When my father walked, people paid attention as his tall noble figure passed by. To this day, they say that Shams Wazir walks like a general.
Hours spent alone were routine to me, my solitude second nature; but now, two wailing infants populated the quiet stillness of my world. Rather than go to school, I had to stay home to learn to be a mother—fast. And somehow, I did. Ayesha had already shown that she was academically gifted; she read simple textbooks and was rapidly learning to speak English. Still so young, I showed very little interest in books and a great deal in my twin brothers. Not yet five years old and I already felt like an adult, as many Pashtun children do; we grow up quickly in the tribe. We have no choice.
My mother had started school part-time and was gone several afternoons each week. On days when she was home, she would often take what time she had to
give me lessons in spelling and arithmetic. In the early evening, when both my parents returned, satchels full of papers, eyelids swollen from reading, they sat down to rest in the lamplight of our small living room. I brought them steaming green tea in little cups and then handed over a howling Sangeen. Babrak, however, was all mine, and he stayed with me as much as possible—my parents had known exactly what they were doing.
Often, before leaving for her university lectures my mother oiled and braided my hair, slipping long, shiny lengths of ribbon along each braid. She dressed me up to look just like the dolls I regularly tossed around or defaced with pens. She took great pleasure in these rituals, but I did not. Every now and then, an old man came to our door with a huge pile of folded dresses tied up in a white sheet and carried in a bundle balanced on his head. His wife was a seamstress, and he made a living peddling her ornate creations door-to-door. It took my mother weeks of selling washed-out tin cans at the metal depot to save enough rupees in her big collection jar to make a purchase. Sometimes she bought two or three garments at a time, each one more lavish than the last. And every one of them was my torment.
*
When the twins were six months old, my mother started taking more classes and was often gone for whole days. She always left a small bottle of goat’s milk, which I’d learned to heat over our single electrical element in a shallow pan of hot water, testing the temperature with a drop on my wrist. I liked to lick it off, so sweet and as white as a pearl against my skin. After the twins started on solid food, I took great pleasure in concocting their meals. I peeled mangoes and mashed them with a fork, and I soon figured out that I could pulverize anything into baby food: naan bread soaked in broth, white rice boiled with lentils, a tangerine; all together in strange soupy concoctions the twins accepted, smacking their smooth, wet gums as though I was offering them nothing but God-made manna. Kneeling on the cool clay floor, I scooped small morsels of food from a bowl with my fingertips and fed the babies, who were only just sitting up, by dropping little bits into their open, toothless mouths.
A Different Kind of Daughter Page 5
