Our small adobe house was tucked between others running for a full block, side by side, along a pockmarked road. My mother had secured our accommodation through a stipend from the government of Pakistan, which encouraged open education in the tribal areas as part of a long-term strategy designed to stifle extremism. All of the dwellings were brown and nestled low to the ground, the foothills so close that at each turn you could see their shadowed faces rising in a forbidding wall beyond the flat rooftops. When my mother released the long bolt and pushed our front door open, I stood quietly in the threshold awhile and took in the sweet smell of tamped mud that for a moment took me back to the fragrant floors of our first home. The air was so cool, though space was limited; I remember thinking that it was like standing inside a rain cloud. All that cacophony outside didn’t bother me much; my father had settled my mind before we’d even pulled into our street—we were simply going from a matchstick town to a gun town. I knew already that my father would be at home most of the day to care for my siblings, and my mother would be home each morning and night. Baba had been transferred to a college for boys in the city of Kohat, which was not far from Darra. Meanwhile, based on a series of competitive examinations, the government education board offered Aami the post of principal of the only high school for girls in the area. I couldn’t have cared less about gunfire and the dust—in Darra Adam Khel I was free of my childcare duties. More importantly, our family was together at last. Back in Miranshah, my mother had grown weary of her nine-hour stop-and-start bus commute just to join us on weekends. Back then, I had no idea how much traveling she undertook for her work across FATA: writing exams in Peshawar, submitting papers in Kohat, recruiting students village by village, and then taking a break to see us for a day or two in Miranshah. Once my mother received financial backing from the government, my father handed in his resignation to the college and we packed up the truck.
My first full day in town, I was dressed as I always was— shorts and a T-shirt. My family accepted my boyish ways with open arms. To them, I was just Genghis—a tomboy—and out in the streets I was just a regular boy. I lived quite easily under the cloak of that public assumption, never having to outright lie about my gender.
Wearing Taimur’s old clothes, I took the dilapidated bicycle out into our dirt-covered street. I never referred to that fast two-wheeled contraption with its rusting handlebars and flimsy tires simply as a bike. It was my freedom and my friend and I always called it by name—Sohrab. Pumping fast on the bicycle, I rode down a long alleyway. The roads were narrow and short, and huts and adobe homes flanked each one like a perimeter fence against which I reflected my shadow and the moving wheels of the bicycle. I skirted the edge of town along the looming foothills, ridges, and land folds, the fossils of a million rainfalls that had cut veins deep into the mountainsides. Positioned on a low rise overlooking town, I stopped pedaling and peered into the alleys, listening. Gunfire shook the ground beneath my feet. A sheen of sand vibrated over the pavement like a shifting curtain. I knew we were in a formidable region of the world, among outcasts and hooligans, and yet I felt that because I was free, I was safe—my father had given me that assurance—and all I had to do was keep quiet and away from trouble. No one would bother a kid on a bicycle—they were all too busy with the business of arms dealing and jihad. I pumped hard, shifted gears, and rode straight toward the heart of town.
The busy gun bazaar teemed with characters: men on horse carts riding at a lazy clobber, others drifting on soft-buzzing motorbikes, some just moseying the route on foot, window-shopping for weapons. Customers tested merchandise from rooftops adjacent to the hillsides. You could see them chattering, making considerations, studying pieces of the firearms and passing them around. They test-fired every variety of gun— automatic, semi-automatic, pump-action, even old-fashioned gunslinger pistols. Standing on makeshift rooftop ranges, men shot blindly into the surrounding hills, or they drove in large caravans out into the plains to try out heavier munitions.
Slipping into a side alley with dozens of small workshops, I swung my leg off the bicycle and walked. In the first arcade I passed, the size of a closet, a man sat cross-legged in the sand. He was chattering to himself and stopped when he saw me there. He gave me a once-over and then a toothless grin. He had a carved wooden rifle stock in his lap and was sanding it down. The next moment, he got up and put the smooth piece on a table. He motioned with his hands for me to touch it, and I propped my bike against the wall. The mud-and-timber hut smelled of freshly cut wood, and I saw against the wall behind the old man a dozen shaped and sanded stocks.
He took a metal rod from a crate and sat down again to rifle a barrel with the long cutting tool. He tapped the length over and over again, in and out, twisting and turning his wrists in deliberate movements, employing some physical equation obviously perfected over years. Once finished, he placed the piece in a pile with all the others. Most workshops had walled-in brick spaces at the back that looked like doghouses, where they fired off ammunition to test each newly made weapon before it was put out into the open market. Hundreds of rounds were shot daily inside those huts. My father explained that at the end of the day, someone raked up the spent metal casings to be used again. The hellfire of Darra was as incessant as a holy war. The walls all over town were covered in bullet holes.
Over weeks, stopping on the way to the dairy farm to buy milk or just wandering the town, I learned all the parts of guns the way I’d learned about cars and combustion engines in Shams’ college workshop in Miranshah. Any man-made thing could be broken down into components, and the very idea of that fascinated me—outside in, from big to small: truck engines, gear-shift bicycles, television sets, a VCR, an original Khyber Pass rifle, Smith &Wesson Magnums, a yellow kite . . .
In the forging shops, I watched blocks of steel—called blanks—being heated and then pressed into the shapes of handguns. Several thousand pounds of pressure dropped down over them one by one with the pull of a lever—as simple as cutting out cookies. The manufacturing methods appeared crude, but the sum process was highly sophisticated—a Darra gun counterfeiter could outwit any MIT engineer. They were master forgers, replicating—with nothing more than simple lathes, presses, drills, hammers, and fire—even the most complicated weapon, from James Bond’s PPK pistol to a Soviet RPG, assembled piece by piece, working barefoot in the dirt in cramped, sweltering conditions. The older men were often deaf. Many were missing parts of themselves—fingers, toes, a slice of cheekbone, a whole foot, an eye. Still, they sat or squatted in that squalor and worked, tools in their laps, fashioning guns by the thousands. Maimed or not, there was something indomitable about those men. The Afridi clan who populated Darra Adam Khel were famous among the tribes for their prowess; they’d crushed whole contingents of the Mughal dynasty, torn the British to pieces in the Anglo-Afghan Wars, and they ran FATA. If the Wazir were warriors, then the Afridi were the kings of warfare. Nevertheless, throughout history, from the time before Jesus Christ, invaders thought they could send armies through the Khyber Pass and subdue those hard-to-the-bone inhabitants of the Valley of Humans. As my father said: “What were they thinking?” The Afridi were invincible—then as now.
*
Somehow, in those echoes of gunfire, in addition to her position as a high school principal, my mother had founded a small school for girls. Five days a week, she taught classes inside a ramshackle building on the periphery of town to two dozen wide-eyed girls. She transformed the dingy hut into a vibrant classroom—big maps and flags from around the world adorning the mildewed walls in a colorful patchwork quilt; she had notebooks and paper, a blackboard, dictionaries, and colored pencils. The Pakistani government sent money for supplies, which my mother had to supplement regularly from our own meager family income. She was an expert at pestering government officials—if she could fill enough desks, she’d been promised scholarship money to help attract more students. She was just one woman, but there were thousands of illiterate girls out there.
Darra Adam Khel was a labyrinth of hazards, and not just because of its deadly trade. My mother was running a school for young girls in the dark heart of terrorist country, where they made deals and collected their arsenal. At that time the Taliban ruled Afghanistan and had strong links to every corner of FATA. By anyone’s estimation, she was out of her mind. But she knew how to make herself fit into places and with people. She could be funny or dead serious, quiet or gregarious—whatever made headway. And what made headway in Darra Adam Khel was wearing a pristine veil and staying under the radar. Dressed conservatively, a satchel full of religious books tucked under one arm, she kept her head down. She simply allowed people to make convenient assumptions, as I did walking around in my brother’s clothes. She never mentioned the history, geography, literature, and language lessons she taught. Meanwhile, people imagined hours of sewing and cooking classes. If questioned, she simply explained that she was keeping young, impressionable girls busy until they could be married off—pious and conscientious, which only increased their value. Within months, even the warlords referred to their local principal as “Madam.” Monday to Friday, brothers and fathers accompanied daughters and sisters to her school—on foot, in horse carts, and occasionally in hired pick-up vans or old cars. She stood waiting at the door, greeting each student with a smile as they filed in. Inside, the girls washed their hands and faces in large clay bowls and assembled to pray together. Then they got to work. Aami did her best to create an engaging and peaceful environment for her students—even starting a drama club and athletic teams. Pupils took active roles in student government, debating tournaments and in celebrating holidays. At the end of each day, the girls all made their way out with smiles hidden like secrets underneath their burqas.
Traveling the Indus Highway by bus, I sometimes accompanied my mother on her weekend recruiting missions in the villages clustered all around town. Often we would travel in the local pick-up vans that took passengers from village to village for a small fee. Even when we had enough money for a tank of gas, she didn’t dare take the pick up. Many tribesmen saw the benefit of keeping little girls occupied in classrooms until they could be put to work at home or were married. A woman commanding the wheel of a vehicle, however, was a gross offense. Sometimes, marauding male gangs of hooligans on missions to defend their “ancestral Pashtun culture” hauled a female kicking and screaming by the hair through the driver’s side window and beat her courage right out of her for all to see. Other times, they pulled the woman out and didn’t bother with the beating. During that time and in the ensuing years, many teachers who ignored warnings about returning to a life of dutiful confinement in their homes were routinely kidnapped and shot. Fearless as ever, Aami got up every morning, washed and prayed and went straight to work.
On the first recruiting trip I took with her, wet spells in Darra had transformed its landscape; giant white clouds descended in big masses right over us, settling all along the ridgeline, briefly dampening all the browns to pale greens. Rain didn’t just fall there, it hung in the air, turning the dry dirt to a thick layer of mud. If you had good shoes, you put them away for a while.
After over an hour, we got off the hired van somewhere on the winding southern road to Kohat, nearly fifteen miles away. Up and down hills, we walked for a long time and were soaked right through to the bone. I didn’t say much as I kept pace with my determined mother. She’d find houses with young girls in them by some instinct I never could explain. She had a similar instinct with people, and that was my only way of explaining how she accomplished the impossible—talking conservative fathers into agreeing to the absurd and sending their girls in dilapidated vehicles to a school in plain sight of those violent gangs. The government’s promise of three thousand rupees per child was also very good bait, and Aami always saved it for last.
The first girl I remember wasn’t much different from all the others. Six years old, tall for her age and ancestry. Her grandmother was a hunchback, grandfather a coal miner, mother not much of anything—as was the custom—father who knows where. My mother delivered her short, impassioned oratory at their doorstep. The startled occupants had no choice but to listen as there wasn’t a door, just an opening cut through mud bricks. Within a moment or two, their faces softened from blank stares to awe. I was behind, peering around my mother. They looked at her the way I must have looked at the maimed men making guns in town—they could not believe their eyes.
Soon we were sitting on straw mats inside, drinking yogurt from earthenware cups, and my mother was pulling storybooks from her satchel. She read Little Red Riding Hood to the child— I remember how the little girl sat before my mother, her first teacher, still and rapt, hands folded like a bird’s wings in her lap, never having seen a book at all, or heard a nursery rhyme read aloud. Then my mother pulled a sack of chalk from her bag and showed the girl how to print her name on a slate board. At the very notion of forming letters into words and words into things—into the meaning of her very self—a whole world took beautiful form in that child’s eyes. The little girl stared in wonderment at the letters scrawled over the slate held between my mother’s hands.
“What is that, Madam?”
“A-T-I-Y-A, Atiya. It means gift—that is you.”
Again and again my mother performed the same miracle— she went into mud-and-stone huts tucked along the rocky passes and gave blind girls their sight.
*
I don’t remember which student started the backlash, or if she was even one of my mother’s, though I heard the story many times. The girl was one of the older ones—fifteen—and pretty, they said: green eyes; raven tresses like an oil slick running down her long back. Too smart for her own good. She fell in love with the school bus driver, a wiry boy from Kohat. Apparently they discovered each other without a single word—just a warm smile to greet her as she climbed onto the bus. He shouldn’t have looked at her so long in the first place.
Lovers on the run often tried to hide themselves in cosmopolitan Peshawar, but they never got very far—including that couple. The highway that ran the passes in long curving roads carved into mountain bedrock, skirting deadly cliffs along the switchbacks, was the only sure way to get there alive. The posse from Darra that went after them were expert trackers and had plenty of guns.
When they found the couple riding together on horseback in a rutted-out path off to the side of the highway, the girl slipped down from their saddle, losing her shoes. Then she ran out, barefoot, along a field of sunflowers. Hopeless, she dropped to her knees in the black dirt. She dug her hands into the earth and put her head down and shouted for them to get it over with. The men all stood there, stupefied to hear her beg for her own execution—most begged for their fathers first, and then for forgiveness. They didn’t shoot her, though she’d already been sentenced. Tribal laws could be finicky. In that moment of stunned silence, the girl’s cousin, who’d been part of the armed contingent, stepped forward and unslung his rifle. He put it down in the dirt. The shamed bus driver sat paralyzed in his saddle, gawking, as the cousin held out his hand to the girl. Without hesitation, he turned and made an abrupt offer of marriage to her father, who was standing off to one side. The girl’s father accepted the cousin’s bold proposal wordlessly, and the girl took the proffered hand and stood up with her betrothed. Everyone could hear her quick, shallow breaths. For a long time, she could not look up, just stared at her soiled bare feet sinking into the earth. Then she turned to her cousin and whispered, though they all heard her.
“Maherbani, Maherbani—thank you.”
It didn’t matter that the story had a happy ending—from that day on, educated tribal girls were marked, and their principal was the primary target. My mother had often invited students to our home to study books or watch videos. My father taught a few of them grammar and literature in the living room, or brought in a parade of motley characters—Frontier Corps officers, coal miners, philosophers, and down-on-their-luck Pashtuns—to teach them as he had
taught us all our lives. When they shuttered the school, my mother went underground and kept out of view. It made no difference—everyone knew where Madam lived. Over a period of several days our home was routinely stoned, and in the night passing gangs of “Holy Warriors” shot up our walls using pistols and AK-47s. I remember my sister telling me how those men referred to themselves as devout Muslims, but seemed to ignore the tenets of the Holy Quran, which demand that every man and woman should seek out an education. Considering the very real threat to my mother’s life, for a time the government sent an armed guard to watch our house. Apart from the evil few, most of the locals still held a great respect for my mother. Even today, with her school long turned to rubble, the villagers in that region invite her to return to their homes to celebrate special events, such as the wedding ceremonies of their children, at which she is always given a place of honor.
After the uproar finally died down, my mother started looking for another building far away from the perimeter of town.
*
The man who somehow broke through the bolted front door and into our house had an American 1911 .45-caliber pistol and a clear agenda. I knew the gun instantly when I saw it, the way I knew Datsuns or Nissans or 9mm Berettas. I also knew he was after us because of my mother’s school—we’d received warnings in the form of letters tacked to our door. To teach Muslim girls anything but domestic duties and lessons from the Quran was heresy and would not go unpunished. None of us were sure what that meant—until we saw the man’s gun.
A Different Kind of Daughter Page 10
