“Why do they care how, Baba? She is gone.”
“Maria, everything is in the how. A gunshot makes a martyr. An accident makes a fool.”
Then we turned to see Ayesha sitting against the wall, gold dress, adjusting her veil, busying her hands to quiet her breaking heart. I knew she was counting up the seconds before she blinked.
“Bhutto’s Muse, tell me one thing as you sit alone over there like a child I knew years ago who made the fruit tremble on a jamun tree. Tell me before we all start to cry, though we know things are just as they were written. It is all Allah’s will.”
“I’ll tell you whatever will help you, Baba.”
My father moved away from the screen, stepped up to his daughter, pulled back her veil, and took her pale hands.
“What are the three most beautiful words ever spoken in any language?”
Ayesha looked up, black eyes shining.
“Call me Mother.”
6. The Wall
Not long after my father’s and Ayesha’s fight with the elders at Benazir Bhutto’s speech, we were forced out of our own tribe and told that we could never go back to our native valley, not even for a day. Whatever transpired at the jirga, the elders’ decision was final—transgression would be fatal. My family’s acts of heresy and dishonor were far too many now to count, or ever forgive. Over the course of many years, my father had persistently and publicly raised his voice for women’s rights. I was seven years old and living out in the open dressed as a boy; my mother was still attending college; and all the members of our family lived as equals—male or female. My father often did household chores with my older brother, Taimur. The elders gave him many warnings, but my father refused to submit to their conservative patriarchal code. As the eldest son of an eldest son, Shams held a position of influence in the clan that his renegade views began to steadily undermine. Soon a proud and power-seeking uncle saw a chance for his own son to take my father’s place in the hierarchy and plotted Shams’ demise.
In the middle of the night, a group of cousins went to shoot my father, but a firefight ensued that lasted until daybreak. In the end, my father survived, but two cousins were dead. To this day my father believes that Allah had protected him against those who conspired against him, so that he could carry on his work to achieve justice for his daughters, and all the daughters who had no father to speak out for them. He could not bring himself to see any of us subjugated any more than we already had been—it simply wasn’t in his heart.
“Look at the bird tending its nest. Does it feed the male birds first, or tend to their needs before the females? No. They see and know no difference between their offspring. I am the same. I love and treat my sons and daughters equally. I believe this is what Allah truly wishes for our race, and I will not yield out of fear.”
I know my father said as much to the elders at the jirga and in that moment relinquished his privileged family ties and all the trappings that came with them. The only thing that saved him from a swift death sentence at the last tribal meeting he would ever attend was his noble lineage. Despite the consequences, he was willing to surrender blue-blooded wealth and power to emancipate his wife and daughters. I remember well how my father explained his predicament when we learned that we were truly outcasts and would never see our many cousins and other relatives again. He read out loud a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche, holding a beat-up hardcover book of philosophy in his hands as though it were a holy tome, and each word went straight into me like a courage-tipped arrow.
“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
*
Our pick-up truck was piled higher this time, with every possession we could fit. My mother had been offered a position running a local school, and my proud father moved us all so that she could accept it. Within months, she was promoted and sent to administer girls’ schools as well as teach all over the region. I sat in the back, muscled legs tanned to a molasses shade, big arms hard as granite. I had one of my father’s tattered old T-shirts on—Led Zeppelin. Signposts flew past us like giant playing cards: TOCHI MATCHSTICK COMPANY, KHYBER-MATCH. From the open back of the truck we could smell the fragrant air— cardamom and sulfur. Shams turned to us, smiling through the back window from the driver’s seat; he had to shout over the racing wind: “It smells like the fireworks on Independence Day!” It was not quite dusk, and flocks of cranes flew across the sky like living boomerangs. Beyond us in the valley, jet planes sat parked along the army airfield like giant resting birds themselves. Several times, we had to pull over and stop at military checkpoints, my father always affable with the questioning Frontier Corps officers, showing off his Soviet-era Makarov pistol and multilingual books. They were on the lookout for smugglers, extremists, opium dealers, addicts—anyone with trouble on their minds or blood on their hands.
Soon we approached Fort Miranshah, whose high stone walls rose from a rocky ledge along amber-colored ground like a vision out of the colonial past with ramparts and lookout towers. The massive edifice stood as so many others the British built across the frontier lands to concentrate their legions and subdue the wild Pashtun—yet there we were, a whole family of Wazir exiles, tearing toward the city perimeter in our rusted truck.
As pious as ever, five times each day on the journey, we got out of the truck, washed our hands in streams or with wet cloths, and knelt over our mats to pray, remembering each time who we were and what we believed, as those two things were one and the same. At the entrance of the main boulevard we stopped for the muezzin’s melodic calls, recited our supplications, and then made our way into Miranshah, which spread out in a mass of low buildings, shadowed alleys, and packed streets.
The Government Degree College, where my father had found a job as a professor of auto engineering, skirted the eastern rim of town. Teaching positions at universities were scarce and often only temporary, lasting a few semesters or a few years. When my father’s application was accepted, he was jubilant. We had a good home to go to, my parents both had stable jobs, and my siblings would continue to go to school while I took care of the twins— though we could never go back into the fold of our tribe.
Every campus building in Miranshah looked new, and to me the patches of lawn between them seemed so green, I thought they might have been painted. We were close to the air base, and I felt the booming engines of a landing jet thunder in my chest. My father laughed over the deafening roar and said the runway was seven thousand feet long. Our truck bumped along streets lined with posts and wires. My father had a city map unfolded across his lap, but he didn’t look down once.
His position came with a house in what was referred to as the “college colony,” homes usually reserved for professors and their families. It had views, he said, of open land on one side, the dense and sprawling cityscape on the other. When we pulled into the neighborhood, I knew right away we’d lucked out. Government posts in Pakistan had their perks. The compound had tall iron gates and long stone walls that surrounded a garden full of trees—mulberry, bottle brush, apples, apricots, purple plum-like jamuns, and a half-dead pomegranate off to one side. Our bungalow was made of cool cement and had running water, which was clean, and we could use as much as we pleased. There was a room for each of us, and others to spare. The size of the house made up for the fact that we had so little to put inside it. Right away, my mother sent us out into the plain with sacks to gather dead leaves and make our mattresses. We had electricity, but nothing to plug in except a fan.
My mother’s job teaching girls and overseeing their schools often took her all over the region. For a short time Ayesha and I attended one of her schools in Miranshah-Bazar, which was a half-hour journey on foot through mountain passes where we would often stop to collect fossils. Several times each week, after our morning fajr prayers, we would set off next to Aami out into
the quiet dawn, barely a whisper of light to guide us. When we reached the main road, the local horse carts that served as public transportation would take us the rest of the way. Once my mother received a new post as the principal of a school in Darra Adam Khel, our routine suddenly changed. The journey between her new school and our home was nine hours by bus; she also took master’s classes when she could—English, literature, history, and politics. We saw her on weekends, while during the week she slept on cots in back rooms at the schools she administered. She wore her jean jacket inside, her face as enchanting and unashamed as ever, but outside she went everywhere in a burqa and was wary. In her absence, I often ran the house like her understudy. Ayesha continued to excel academically, but helped with the chores when she came home from school. My family always worked as a team, each one doing what they could to help the others. Thankfully, I took easily to learning at home and looking after the twins. Playing mother, washing clothes, killing quail with a slingshot. I de-feathered and gutted fowl in the yard, then I’d roast the delicate birds on spits over red coals for supper. We ate chutneys made from mint and guava. I served scrambled eggs, fried-up tomatoes and onions in spice, and fruit from the plentiful trees— whatever I could reach that was ripe.
As night fell, the house cooled, and wind rushed through; sometimes we could hear storms pounding mountains miles beyond the Tochi Valley like the restless ghosts of the Hindu Kush. My sister, who feared no man, was terrified of thunder; flashes of lightning would make her cry out. All through her childhood, she believed that the world would come to an end through a massive bombing, and each new storm stirred that terror. Often between thunderclaps, and in a breathless voice, she would teach me to recite ayahs, calming herself in the faith that Allah would protect us. Five mornings each week I was up before dawn, and if there had been an overnight storm, I often found Ayesha all tangled up in her nightdress and lying fast asleep next to me.
Every morning, I made the rounds of the house—the corridors and the many shadowed rooms where my family slept on their makeshift beds. I checked every one. I could hear them, father and siblings, breathing like pumps in tandem, so that it seemed that the house itself was a single living thing or an engine moving us all together. I felt my mother’s absence then, as I took on the sacred tasks of her morning rituals.
I would venture to the courtyard to pray out in the open, as was my way, and then to the kitchen. Fanning the smoke from the cooking fire, I could hear my mother call to me by my rarely used middle name: Gulgatai, Gulgatai—rosebud, and I never understood why she sometimes called me that, her hotheaded seven-year-old girl masquerading as a boy and hardened from head to toe. She said she was only giving the name to what she knew of my soul.
My father’s classroom at the college was a vast warehouse full of machinery, whole vehicles, trucks and tractors, engines on blocks, dismembered cars spread out in greasy bits and oily chunks over long work tables. I’d often visit him at school, where I would find him wandering his domain, ferreting around with tools, untangling clumps of wires, crouching under engines, always talking—if not to himself, then to a cluster of captivated students.
“Henry Ford said that failure is a chance to begin again, but the next time more intelligently. So fail here all you must, but always start again. That’s how he built the V-8 engine on a single block when all of his engineers said it couldn’t be done.”
Often I brought my toddler brothers with me to the warehouse, and we’d spend hours playing in the gutted cars and trucks, dusty rays streaming in from the high open doors, while my father taught classes or dismantled engines. Roaming the periphery, sucking on sugar cubes I would keep in my pockets, I picked up bits of knowledge here and there like dropped coins. Before long, I could name the basic parts of an automotive engine: cylinders, pistons, spark plugs, valves all working together for a singular purpose—motion. And that’s all my family ever seemed to do—move.
Mesmerized, I watched my father perform miracles at the helm of his classroom. Igniting drops of gasoline in a small tube, he directed the massive eruption of energy to catapult a single mango several hundred feet and straight over the heads of his spellbound students. Hitting the door of a white Datsun, the fruit instantly pulverized. “Behold, combustion! Do this one hundred times in a minute and you have a car engine. Do this with your mind and you’ll change the world.” At that moment, I knew that my father was a marvel. He made me feel rich when I was with him, poor while he was away. He taught me every single thing I knew. Fearless and genuine, he was honest to the core, with his mass of dark hair, unruly sideburns, and infinite grin. It never occurred to me for a moment how little my professor father was paid, how hungry he might have been, skipping lunches so we could have shoes.
Hands coated in grime, my father often came home in the evening with treasure: a single square of Turkish delight dusted in sugar and carefully cut into small pieces and shared; ballpoint pens from the college; a sack of scuffed-up marbles; postcards of the Egyptian pyramids, the Eiffel tower, Big Ben; an old Rubik’s Cube with some of the stickers missing. My father had a way of finding and bartering for dilapidated curiosities that were like tiny windows out into the big world. He got the run-down Rubik’s Cube at a roadside stall for a bag of fruit from our trees. Sometimes he came back with people instead of things, inviting them in with a flourish and telling me to put on a pot of black tea.
“Meet my new friend. He’s an oncologist from Lahore and he’s going to explain how our body can rebel against us if we rebel against it. Five minutes with him and you’ll never touch a cigarette.”
Sitting on the cold clay floor of our living room, we were introduced to film actors from Iran who told us wild Shakespearean tales; a dentist showed us models of rotten teeth; we listened rapt as poets read out couplets, painters explained the variances of light. Once, he brought home a pair of American backpackers, two men from New York City: “Take note, you won’t see this kind of human again for many years, if at all. I discovered them both eating figs under a poplar tree, and couldn’t believe my luck.” The young men sat on mats in our living room, showing their perfect teeth within easy smiles, and jabbering beautifully on and off for three days, drinking tea and eating naan with dal with us. Every now and then, from the deep recesses of their big packs, they handed out sour candies and lollipops that changed my tongue from red to green. They slept on mats inside long cloth bags, like butterflies in chrysalises. The Americans’ stories were wild and impossible to fathom: strip malls, escalators, elevators, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, jury duty, the Peace Corps, Yankee Stadium, making choices like traveling the world, getting tattoos, marrying for love alone.
It was the first time I’d seen hair the color of maize, skin so white you could pour it into a glass. Freckles. When I cut my knee, they gave me a sticky strip of fake skin called a Band-Aid. I taught them to recite my favorite suras; they sang me “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I remember thinking that being star-spangled meant smiling like an American. It meant having everything. Being American, they said, meant being free—my father had already taught us the word “democracy.”
Late one afternoon, my father brought home a derelict he had picked up on one of his rounds of Miranshah, running errands, people-watching—always on the lookout for teachers. We were never sure how he got the frail young man across town, and conjectured about it for a whole hour—splayed across his shoulders, stuffed in a borrowed wheelbarrow? It turned out they’d just walked slowly side by side—my father was a patient man. Without a word, he led his guest in by the arm, gently, as though unaware of his putrid clothes. We all stepped back as they moved past us. The foulness that came off his skin like a living death made us touch our own faces. I held my breath—hard to believe that a human being could reek from the inside out of garbage.
In the kitchen, my father fed him first—a plate of steamed white rice, roasted goat meat, and a ripe pomegranate. Then he filled a big bowl with warm water and carefully washed the man’s f
eet with sandalwood soap, talking softly all the while; he touched his trembling hands, cleaned off the grit, and gave him a fresh shirt and let him take his time. He was clean but still dazed and disheveled. We all congregated in the living room and waited for him to speak.
“Please tell my children how you came to be all alone in this world, living on the streets as a beggar. May Allah make an angel of you for letting your sorrows nourish their minds.”
That was the day I learned about heroin—how to get it and why not to try it. The man my father led by the arm through our front doorway to the only cushioned seat we owned, a fake-leather desk chair borrowed from the college, was an Afghan and addict from the Khyber tribal region. He hadn’t started using until his mother did, after a neighbor gave her a small hit for her sore throat. Instantly, her pain was gone, vanishing in an unexpected rush of wild euphoria. Soon she started to smoke the drug for every ailment and twinge: headaches, insomnia, fevers, and the shakes; to drown out her crying babies, color in her boredom, or dull the depths of her loneliness—she’d been married off to an uncle twice her age.
My father’s guest became an addict by proxy while sitting next to his mother as she lit up globs of black tar in her long glass pipe. The curling smoke infiltrated his system like silken tendrils, seducing every ounce of him. First opium, then heroin. He tried a full hit when he couldn’t sleep, melting the opiate down to gold liquid and injecting himself with a needle borrowed from the woman next door. She showed him how to do it, tying his bicep and tapping veins. They all believed heroin was just medicine, like aspirin or a cup of Virgin’s Mantle tea. It was everywhere, sold by the spoonful in every village, so much of it and so cheap. Miles of poppy fields barely a hike away. Before the plunger hit the bottom of his syringe, the serpent had called him by name. Instantly, his skin flushed with an embrace of warmth he told us was so much better than love. Better than the finest meal, money, a whole future. Before long, he slept every afternoon with heroin; she was his lover, his best friend, his new mother—the other one had descended so far into her own living trance that she hardly spoke to any of them anymore. Their combined stupor carried on until one baby was dead.
A Different Kind of Daughter Page 8
