Letters to My Daughters (14 page)

The sense of relief on the streets was palpable. Cinemas that had closed because of the fighting sprang back into life, showing the latest Indian films, and children returned to play in parks that had formerly been home to snipers. The bustling streets around the centre of Kabul once more smelled of
kabab
as street vendors and their customers felt safe to be out. The indomitable spirit of Kabul city surged back once more.

My life was also beginning to take on a regular pattern again. But I was still deeply traumatized. One of my favourite possessions was a beautiful doll, who sat in a cart and carried a stuffed dog with her. I was too old to be playing with dolls, but I needed security and comfort, and the doll seemed to give me that. I would spend hours brushing her hair and putting nice clothes on her, obsessively arranging a vase of flowers next to her cart.

Hamid wasn't the only person trying to propose to me at this time. Various Mujahideen commanders also came to see my brothers to ask for my hand. Fortunately, my brothers would never have forced me to marry against my will. I had to agree to the match. The more I compared these men with Hamid, the more I knew it was him I wanted to marry. I didn't want to be the wife of a soldier; I wanted to be the wife of the intellectual with kind eyes.

Hamid was a trained engineer but he ran a small finance company, a kind of money exchange. He also taught chemistry part-time at the university. The idea of being married to a lecturer with his own business was a far more romantic notion to me than being married to someone who carried a gun for a living.

His family came several times to talk to my brothers and send the proposal, but each time my family said no. My brothers' biggest fear was that Hamid's family were not as rich as we were and that there would be too great a difference in our lifestyles. Hamid relied on his salary to make ends meet and had no other sources of income. My brothers also wanted me to continue the family tradition of expanding our political networks by marrying someone from a politically useful family. Hamid's family was not that.

My brother Mirshakay discussed it with me honestly. He told me he knew I liked this man but that he was trying to protect me by opposing the match. “Fawzia jan, how will you cope if he loses his job? You've grown up in a family where no one had to rely on a monthly salary to live. Imagine the stress each month of having to pay for rent and food and not knowing where the money will come from.”

But my brother's concerns didn't worry me. I had always wanted to work too. My education had given me career prospects. We would both work and contribute to the household. We would be a team, real partners. I wanted a life in which I could make the decisions along with my husband. Unfortunately, this was not something I could explain to my brother. Culturally, I could not tell him I liked Hamid or how we spoke to each other outside the university. That would never have been allowed. But my silence and the clear expression of pain on my face when my brother spoke negatively about him probably told him all he needed to know.

I tried to get the support of my sisters, thinking they could help win my brother over, but they too were opposed to my marrying Hamid. They all wanted the best for me—and in their eyes, a life of wealth and status was best. They told me stories of wedding parties they had attended with thousands of guests where the bride was given her weight in gold jewellery. They tried to enthuse me about the kind of wedding I might have if I married one of my richer suitors. But it meant nothing to me. What use was gold? I wanted the gift of freedom. In the life they wanted for me, I would have felt like a bird trapped in a gilded cage.

I came from a family in which polygamy was the norm, but I knew I didn't want it for myself. My father had seven wives, and my two elder brothers each had two, so I had seen too much of the pain and jealousy the women suffered. Many of the suitors who came for me were already married, and I'd have been wife number two or three. I didn't want to destroy another woman's life in the same way I had seen my father's later wives destroy my mother. And I would never have coped with the lack of independence that came with that situation. I think I might even have killed myself after a week of a life like that.

The next winter came. By now, I had a diploma in English and had started volunteering as an English teacher, teaching women of all ages. It was an amazing experience for me, watching the light go on in my pupils' faces when they understood something. I loved it.

I didn't ask for a salary, but one day the head of the course gave me about two thousand afghanis, the equivalent of forty dollars. They were my first-ever earnings. I was so proud I almost cried. I didn't spend the money but kept it in my purse and just kept looking at it. I wanted to keep it there forever.

As the snow started to fall, I was finally feeling happy. I passed my university entrance exam and got a place in the medical school. I was teaching, and I had some independence. The raw, angry hole in my heart that was my mother's absence was still there, but the pain had dulled to a manageable level.

The fighting was becoming more and more sporadic. Rabbani's government had finally achieved a degree of calm. In the summer of 1995, a peace agreement was brokered. Hekmatyar agreed to lay down his arms in return for the position of prime minister within the Rabbani government. The motive behind the peace agreement was the growing influence of the Taliban in the south.

No one knew much about the Taliban, other than that they were religious students who had studied at the
madrassas
in the border regions between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Stories abounded about how these young men wore white clothes and called themselves the “angels of rescue.” Villagers living in the south, like people throughout Afghanistan, had grown tired of the civil war, the lack of rule of law and the weak central government. As the fighting raged in Kabul, people living in quieter provinces had felt ignored and neglected. Their overwhelming poverty had not disappeared but had only worsened in the chaos, and they were desperate for a proper government that could help them.

These men who called themselves angels arrived in villages on the back of pickups and set about restoring order and security at the community level. They were almost like self-styled vigilantes, but for people who had been too scared to open their shops for fear of looting or to send their children to school these vigilantes started to make individual neighbourhoods safe. That was enough to foster confidence in them.

Ironically, the latest Mujahideen peace treaty allowed the Rabbani government to function effectively for the first time. The civil war was over, and the Mujahideen government was finally sharing power peacefully and doing a decent job of running the country. But it was all too little, too late to placate a desperate population. Calm had descended, but calm in Afghanistan is as fleeting and fragile as the life of a butterfly. The Afghan people were already looking for new heroes to believe in. The Taliban were on the ascent.

PART TWO

My dear mother,

I still wait and hope that you will come back. Even now, my breath catches in my throat when I remember that you are no longer in this world with me. I'm a politician now. But sometimes I'm just a silly girl who makes mistakes. When I do, I imagine you'll be there gently chiding me and correcting me. If I arrive home later than usual, I still expect you to be waiting in the yard for me in your burka, prodding me in the back until I reach the front door.

I still wish I could sleep curled next to you, as I did until the last days of your life. I want to lie next to you with my fingers in your hair and listen as you tell me stories about your life. Stories about your good times, your bad times, your sufferings, your patience and your hopefulness.

Mother, your stories taught me how to live.

Those stories taught me that as a woman I should learn to suffer and be patient. I remember as a child when I was not happy during the day—when one of my brothers would tell me not to go to school, or my mind couldn't concentrate properly in the class, or I saw my classmate's father coming to pick up my friend from school with his nice car, or when my girlfriend Nooria talked about her father. At those times, I would feel very sad about the loss of my own father, and a great sorrow would take over my heart. At those times, I thought that I was the weakest and poorest girl in the world—but whenever I remembered your stories, I grew stronger. How could I be weak when you told me how you had married when you were sixteen years old? How so often you endured a new woman marrying my father and how, despite your pain, you stayed with my father and his other wives so that your children could have a good future?

It was important for you that my father should be the best man in the world; that is why you always tried to make the best food for his guests and why you always kept the yard tidy. That is why you would always be nice to the other women of the family so they didn't become jealous and create problems for him. I think of how you used all your natural intelligence to try to solve people's problems when my father was not around, and how after my father was martyred you realized how important it was that his children—both girls and boys—go to school and live with you in the same house so that you would know their problems and be there for them. It was important for you that my brothers should grow to be men of good character and become people who could do something for their country. You suffered and starved yourself so my brothers could study and go to university.

When I remember all this, I still feel amazed that through all these problems and heavy responsibilities you laughed. You laughed all the time.

I wish I was able to face my problems laughing like you.

Mother, my entire world was in these stories.

The interesting thing was the older I became, the more I wanted to hear these nighttime tales; they would make me feel calm and safe in bed. Maybe I was trying to escape from the war all around us.

You were the refuge from my surroundings. The best moments in my life were after you had finished the stories and would turn your attention to me. Promising me I'd become someone important. Telling me my father's words after I was born, that I would grow to be like you. Beautiful, clever, wise and warm. They were small words, but they became my inspiration to struggle and strive for a better life.

When I asked you what I would become, you'd smile and reply, “Maybe, Fawzia jan, you will be a teacher or a doctor. You will have your own clinic and will treat the poor patients who come from the provinces for free. You will be a kind, good doctor.” Then I would laugh and say: “No, Mother, maybe I will be a president.” I said this because once I heard you telling a neighbour, “My daughter tries so hard at school. I am sure she will become president.”

I learned so many life lessons from those stories.

And I have never felt so calm and safe with anybody else as I did with you. Mother, I learned from you what self-sacrifice really means. I learned from you that literacy alone is not enough to bring up good children but that intelligence, patience, planning and self-sacrifice are what really count. This is the example of Afghan women, women like you who would walk miles with an empty stomach to make sure your children got to school.

I learned from you that any human, even a “poor girl,” can change everything if she has a positive and strong attitude.

Mother, you were among the bravest of the bravest Afghan women. I am glad you were not here to witness the horrors that came next in our lives—the Taliban years.

Your daughter,
Fawzia

· · NINE · ·
One Ordinary Thursday

{
1996
}

I WILL NEVER forget the day the Taliban came to Kabul. It was a Thursday in September. I had stayed home from university that day to study. My sister Shahjan needed to buy bread, and I needed a new pair of shoes, so in the afternoon we walked to the bazaar together.

I was wearing one of my favourite brightly coloured head scarves and a tunic. My sister told me a joke, and I giggled. A shopkeeper smiled at us and said, “You ladies will not be able to come here dressed like that tomorrow. The Taliban will be here and this will be your last day of pleasure in the market, so be sure to enjoy yourselves.” He was laughing as he said it, his green eyes smiling and the lines around them crinkled. I thought he was joking, but his remark still made me angry. I stared at him furiously and told him this was a wish he'd be taking to the grave because it would never come true.

I only vaguely knew who the Taliban were—religious students who had formed a political movement—and we still didn't know what they stood for. During the years we were fighting the Russians, the Afghan Mujahideen had been joined by thousands of Arab, Pakistani and Chechen fighters. They had been funded by other countries, such as the USA, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, to help fight the Soviets. Each of those countries had its own vested interests and political reasons for helping us. While their help in our battle was initially welcomed, these foreign Mujahideen fighters brought with them a fundamentalist version of Islam, Wahhabism, which was new to Afghanistan. The Wahhabis originated in Saudi Arabia and form a particularly conservative branch of Sunni Islam
madrassas
in the border regions between Pakistan and Afghanistan promoted this type of Islam to young Afghan men, many of them barely children and many of them vulnerable, traumatized refugees.