The Favored Daughter (27 page)

Hamid gave me permission to have an abortion. Abortion was not legal (and is still illegal in Afghanistan today), but there were doctors at the hospital willing to carry out the procedures. I went to see one of them and was shown all sorts of suction machines that they used to carry it out.

But I was too afraid by what the machines might do to my insides. So the doctor suggested giving me an injection to induce miscarriage. I don't know what was in the injection but I allowed them to inject the needle into my arm. No sooner had they done so than I panicked. I had changed my mind. I jumped up shouting: “No, no, I can't do this. I want my baby.”

I was terrified that it was too late and the injection would work. I clutched my stomach and talked to the tiny embryo inside me, willing it to live, telling it I was sorry. Just like my mother before me I had wanted a child to die, only to realize later that I would do anything to keep it alive.

Hamid stayed at home, battling the issue out with my sisters. They had been truly horrified by my desire to abort a child. They screamed at us, telling us we were breaking God's code, that it was against Islam. And they were right to say that. I cannot defend my initial decision to do it, other than to say I really didn't think I could cope with another baby at that time. Hamid understood this and that was why he had supported me.

I came back from the hospital still pregnant. My eldest sister was still there with Hamid. She was overjoyed I hadn't aborted the child, but she was so disgusted I'd even considered it she could barely look at me. Hamid just held me in his arms and whispered that it was going to be okay. I wasn't sure he was right. I had no idea how it was going to be okay. But I also knew now that it wasn't my unborn child's fault we were where we were. My duty was to her as a mother.

My youngest daughter Shuhra knows the whole story. My sister told her when she was about six. Sometimes she uses it to tease me. If I'm telling her off or asking her to tidy her room, she places her hands on her hips and looks at me squarely with a mischievous glint in her eye. “Mother, you wanted to kill me, remember?”

Of course she knows full well that I am then wracked with guilt and she gets away without cleaning her room.

The pregnancy continued but it was hard. I was breastfeeding Shaharzad, which tired me, and I was standing in the classroom teaching from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. The Taliban were also encroaching. They took control of Kisham, the border town of Badakhshan. We were terrified they would get as far as Faizabad. If they did so Hamid and I decided we would try and flee to the mountains and make our way back to my father's village in Koof district.

At one point Taliban fighters were only 15 miles away. I stood outside my school listening to the familiar sound of heavy artillery and watching as the men of the city boarded trucks, volunteering to go fight the Taliban alongside the mujahideen army loyal to the Rabbani government. Part of me wanted Hamid to join them, but then I told him not to go. He was a teacher, not a soldier, and he didn't even know how to use a gun. Besides he was too weak to fight anyone. Many of the young men who got on trucks that day never came back. But they were successful in keeping the Taliban out of Faizabad and succeeded in pushing them back.

In the middle of all this Shuhra decided to make her own entrance to the world. I had a terrible labor that lasted for three days. My sister and a female doctor friend were with me. Hamid stood waiting outside. This time he wanted a boy. I already had given him a girl, now I really was supposed to produce a boy. His family, my family, our neighbors, our entire culture of boys before girls, expected it thus.

But I failed to deliver them the son they wanted. Instead my second daughter Shuhra came kicking and screaming into the world. She was tiny and red faced, just five and a half pounds, which was a dangerously low weight. When I saw her I was reminded of how I might have looked when I was born. I was the baby that was described as ugly as a mouse. The same description could be said of Shuhra. She was wrinkled and bald and red and screaming nonstop. But as I looked at her my heart filled with so much love that I thought it might burst into hundreds of pieces. Here she was. This little girl who was almost not born, whom I had shamefully almost killed, here she was alive and screaming and looking just like I had.

I was overjoyed but Hamid was not. This is Afghanistan, and sadly, even the most liberal or modern-thinking man is affected by hundreds of years of culture. And that culture dictated that I had failed in my biggest duty as a wife by not giving Hamid a son. This time the cruel gossip and innuendo got to him.

I think somebody a made a joke to him about the $20,000-dollar girl being a bad value. Perhaps he had heard these jokes at his expense so many times over the years that he was just sick of it and something snapped inside.

He didn't come into my room to see me for almost nine hours. I lay back on the pillows with Shuhra in my arms, waiting for him and unable to understand where he was. She was so tiny she almost disappeared into her swaddling clothes and I could hardly hold onto her.

When he finally came in, Shuhra was asleep in a crib next to me. He refused to look at me. When Shaharzad was born he had burst into the room excitedly, stroking my hair and cheek as he gazed in wonderment at his child. This time he offered his wife no tender touch or reassuring words. His angry face said it all. He looked into the crib and at least managed a wan smile at his sleeping baby daughter, another of Afghanistan's “poor girls.”

In the weeks that followed I found it difficult to forgive Hamid for how he had treated me the day she was born. I knew he was only behaving like countless other Afghan men and within the confines of a culture that makes boys more important, but I had not expected it from him. He had always been so supportive in the past, taking pride in his ability to fly in the face of the gossips and the patriarchy.

Perhaps I had expected too much from him. But I felt disappointed and badly let down.

His coughing kept me and the baby awake at night so he moved into a separate room. That marked the end of our physical relationship. We never again shared a bed or any sexual intimacies.

But despite my own upset at him over this, I was aware of how lucky I was that he was such a wonderful, tender father to his girls. He loved both of them openly and deeply, and if he was still angry at not having a son, he never once let that show to his daughters. For that I was grateful.

By now he was barely strong enough to teach, and he cut down his days at the university to just two a week. The rest of the time he stayed at home and looked after Shaharzad. She has wonderful memories of a father who sang to her, played games with her, let her play dress up with him, and even allowed her to make him up as a bride and put ribbons in his hair.

Hamid was everything to me and he was an extraordinary Afghan man. In many ways he was very ahead of his time. We were in love when we married, deeply in love. But I suppose the years together, the trials and tribulations of his imprisonment, and his illness just meant that over time we grew apart from each other. The casual intimacy, the laughter, the joy of being in the same room and sharing secret glances had gone. I think it's probably a sad truth, but over time that happens to couples all over the world, wherever and whoever they are. We forget to take a moment to listen to what our partner is trying to say to us, we jump too easily to harsh words and impatience, and we fail to make the special little efforts that we used to. Then one day we wake up and our intimacy and love is gone.

Up until she was about six months old I was desperately worried Shuhra would not survive. She was so tiny and frail I was scared that even washing her would give her a fever. I was also terrified and wracked with guilt that the medicine I had taken to try and abort her had affected her development somehow. If she had died I don't think I would ever have forgiven myself. Like my mother before me I felt my denial of her then gave me an even greater debt of duty to her now.

Gradually she grew stronger and put on weight. And as she did so she became all the more funny and clever. Today she is the brightest, cheekiest, and sometimes naughtiest little girl that ever lived. I see myself and both of my parents in her. She has my father's wisdom and my mother's wit and strength.

She also wants to be president of Afghanistan when she grows up. Thankfully she is far removed from the image of a “poor girl.”

A couple of weeks after she was born I had received a part-time job offer to manage a small orphanage. I didn't want to return to work so quickly, but with Hamid sick we needed the money. I left Shaharzad with her father and wrapped baby Shuhra in a big scarf that I tied around me. She would lie quietly against my breast, hidden under the burqa. I would attend meetings with my baby hidden this way and people wouldn't even realize she was there. She didn't complain and rarely even made a noise. I think she was just happy to be alive and to be snuggled so close to her mother. I carried her at work like this until she was five months old and became too heavy. I think it's one of the reasons she's so secure and confident as a child today.

As Shuhra and Shaharzad blossomed and grew, Hamid was dying before my eyes.

He was losing weight almost daily. The skin on his once handsome face had turned dark, almost like a translucent layer of black coated it. His eyes were bloodshot and he coughed almost constantly, and he was beginning to cough little bits of blood.

When Shuhra was three months old I was asked to take part in a medical survey of the province for an aid agency called Foundation for Children. The survey meant joining a team of 60 nurses, doctors, and support staff to travel across 12 remote districts assessing the medical and nutritional needs of the people. It was an incredible offer and the type of community outreach work I had dreamed of doing when I had wanted to be a doctor. Despite the bad timing with a new baby and a dying husband I couldn't turn it down. Hamid understood this and gave me his blessing to go.

I almost didn't, though. It was a grueling trip for anyone, let alone someone with a tiny baby. It would be hard to find clean water or proper washing facilities and we would be traveling across remote and barely accessible mountain tracks. The journey was to take in many of the country's Ismaili communities—devotees of Shia Islam's second-largest sect. In Afghanistan they predominantly live near the Takjik border. Our trip would also take us to the wild and rarely traveled Wakhan corridor—a finger of land that connects Afghanistan with China. It was created during the so-called Great Game—the nineteenth-century period when the Russian and British Empires were wrestling for control of central Asia—and it served as a buffer between the militarized ambitions of the British Lion and the Russian Bear.

Despite my reservations I knew I'd regret it if I didn't go. Good opportunities rarely present themselves at the perfect moment, that's just a fact of life. And I felt I could play a real part in the success of the survey.

As we set off, I was reminded of the trips my mother used to make each year, driving my father's cattle herd out to graze the spring pasture. She would sit proudly upon her horse, still wearing her burqa, and go off on her annual adventures complete with a caravan of donkeys, horses, and servants. I remember sitting on the horse in front of her feeling so small in the large mountainscape but so important in our mission. As we set off across rugged tracks on our survey I felt a similar emotion, only this time it was me with the baby on my lap.

That trip changed my life.

We visited some of the most remote places in the region. Places I have never been able to visit again. The levels of extreme poverty we found crystallized once and for all my political awakening. I knew my calling was to help.

We started the survey in January. It was so cold that people were actually using fresh animal dung to keep their babies warm while they slept. Their biggest fear was that their children would freeze to death, so they thought they were helping their child. They had no idea that the dung could cause disease or infection. Hygiene was nonexistent, children were barefoot in the snow, and most of them were malnourished.

By night we would eat and take shelter in the religious leaders' houses. That would usually be the largest house in the village with running water and a drop toilet, literally a large, deep hole in the ground. That was similar to the house I had grown up in, and although the Western doctors on our survey found it hard, for me it was reassuringly familiar.

But community leaders aside, the other villagers lived in a poverty I had never seen before, even as a child. Often we would find a one-room house with an entire family living inside, the animals in one corner and a toilet in the other. And when I say toilet I don't mean the traditional hole in the ground, or even a bucket—just a corner of the room with feces piled high and babies crawling around all over the room. It was shocking. I tried to explain the dangers such poor hygiene posed, but the reality is, it would fall to the husband to dig a proper latrine a safe distance from the house. Digging latrines—even ones that might save his children's lives, is sadly often more than the Afghan machismo of these uneducated village men could bear and they didn't like to lower themselves by doing it.

I tried a different approach: “Doesn't your good Muslim wife deserve her dignity being preserved when she performs her bodily functions?” But sadly, the indignity suffered by a woman defecating in the corner of the living room, or outside in full view of her neighbors, is outweighed by the male indignity of providing such a facility. Having seen all that, it makes me understand even more why Badakhshan province has the world's highest infant and maternal mortality rate.

In Darwaz, one of the poorest of all the districts, the women told me they have to go out at four o'clock in the morning in the snow to feed the animals. Sometimes the snow can be as much as three feet deep. No one helps them, and then when they get back in they have to cook the bread on an open fire and prepare the food for the family. It is more than a life of domestic drudgery. It is a life of hard labor. The men, too, work hard, going out into the fields at 6.00 a.m. and not returning until after dark, trying to grow enough crops in summer to last the family and the animals throughout the winter. It was a wake-up call to remind me how poor and marginalized these people are.