Letters to My Daughters (29 page)

The labour was relatively short but it was tough. I had a female doctor friend with me but no pain relief. In our culture, it is hoped and almost expected that a woman will give birth to a son first. But I didn't care what sex my baby was, as long as it was healthy. After my baby was delivered, it was taken from me to be washed and dressed in swaddling clothes. No one had yet told me its sex.

Then Hamid was allowed to enter the room. In most Islamic societies, it is not normal for men to be present during the birth. He came over to the bed and stroked my hair, smoothing the perspiration from my forehead. He spoke softly: “A daughter, we have ourselves a daughter.” He genuinely wasn't bothered that he didn't have a son. Our baby was a perfectly formed 4.5 kilos of delight, and we were both overjoyed. She looked like Hamid with thick black hair.

In the days after her birth, when like all new mothers I struggled to learn how to breastfeed and deal with sleepless nights and exhaustion, I became very reflective. As I stared at her tiny sleeping form, I prayed so hard for a better world for her, a better Afghanistan. I didn't want her to know any of the discrimination and hate that women suffer in our country. As I held her to my breast, I had the sense that she was my world now. Nothing mattered but her. My clothes, my appearance, my own petty and selfish desires all just melted away.

I had to argue with my family to be allowed to breastfeed immediately. In Badakhshani tradition, breastfeeding does not begin until three days after the birth. People believe that something bad is in the milk in those first few days. Because I had studied medicine at university, I knew that of course the opposite is true. In those first few hours, breast milk contains colostrum, which is essential for a child's immune system.

Without food in those first few hours, the baby gets weak and cold. And if a woman doesn't start to express her milk straight away, she's at greater risk of infections like mastitis or of not being able to express milk when the time comes. This faulty perception about immediate breastfeeding is yet another reason why maternal and child mortality is so high in my province.

I had to argue with my sisters to stop them from preventing me from feeding her. They tried so hard to stop me, shouting that I was hurting my baby by feeding her so soon. I tried to explain to them that it was good for her, but they just looked at me accusingly, as if I was being a bad mother. In their eyes, years of tradition and being told the same thing far outweighed whatever their sister may have learned at university.

But my sisters were kind to me in other ways, forcing me to stay warm and wrapped up in blankets (even though it was July and baking hot), cooking me my favourite foods to keep my strength up and forbidding me to do housework. But the joy of the baby was tempered by the acute agony of missing my mother. I wished so much she had lived to see her granddaughter. She'd have known that another one of us had been born, that another woman of strength and determination had entered the world.

Six days after her birth, Hamid and I threw a big party to celebrate. We invited half the town and we had music and a video camera—everything we had not been allowed at our wedding. In some ways, that party became the wedding day we'd never had. It was a genuine celebration of our love and of our new little family.

I decided to teach again. I advertised myself as an English teacher and rented a house near the centre of town as my school. Within a month, I had three hundred female students, ranging from young girls to doctors, university students and teachers. I didn't have a lot of teacher training, so I ordered audio and visual material from overseas. Such things had never been used in Faizabad before, and my school earned a reputation as a modern, professional place of learning. I couldn't believe my luck. I was earning a good income of around six hundred dollars a month running my own business doing something I loved. I brought my baby into the classes with me and the students loved her; some of them became my close friends. For the first time in my life, I was experiencing real independence.

I still wore my burka every day and strangely it no longer bothered me. There was no Taliban rule in Badakhshan and no law forcing me to wear it. But nonetheless, most women here seemed to wear them and all my students did. It was important for me to be respected for the sake of my school, so I decided to wear it too. I think I did not mind wearing it precisely because it was my choice to do so rather than it being imposed on me.

The only blot on this happy landscape was my husband's health. He enjoyed his teaching job at the university, but the chalk dust from the blackboards got into his lungs and made his coughing worse.

When Shaharzad was just six months old, life took another unwanted twist. I got that familiar nauseous feeling again. I was pregnant. I was devastated. I didn't want another child so soon. My school was running successfully; I had my friends and my life. I didn't want a baby.

Hamid gave me permission to have an abortion. Abortion was not legal (and is still illegal in Afghanistan today), but back then there were doctors at the hospital willing to carry out the procedure. I went to see them and was shown all sorts of suction machines that they used to carry it out. I was afraid of what the machines might do to my insides. So the doctor suggested giving me an injection to induce miscarriage. I don't know what it contained 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 it was too late and that 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. When I look back now, I admit I cannot defend my initial decision to do it, other than to say that 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 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. But I also knew now that it was not my unborn child's fault that we were where we were. My duty was to her as a mother.

My daughter Shuhra knows the whole story. My sister told her about it all 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 saying that will leave me racked with guilt and she'll get away with not cleaning her room.

The pregnancy continued, but it was hard. I was breastfeeding Shaharzad, which tired me, as did standing in the classroom from 8 A.M. until 5 P.M. Also, the Taliban were 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 to flee to the mountains and make our way back to my father's village in Koof district.

At one point, Taliban fighters were only twenty-five kilometres 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, which was loyal to the Rabbani government. Part of me wanted Hamid to join them, but I told him not to go. He was a teacher, not a soldier—he didn't even know how to fire a gun. Besides, he was too weak to fight anyone. Many of the young men who got onto trucks and went into battle that day never came back. But they were successful in keeping the Taliban out of Faizabad and managed to push them back.

In the middle of all this, Shuhra decided to make her entrance. I had a terrible labour 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 had already given him a girl, so now I really was supposed to produce a boy. His family, my family, our neighbours, 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 2.5 kilos, 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 applied to Shuhra. She was wrinkled and bald and red and screaming non-stop. 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, modern-thinking man cannot be untouched by hundreds of years of culture. And that culture dictated that I had failed in my biggest duty as a wife by not giving him a son. This time, the cruel gossip and innuendo got to him. I think somebody made a joke to him about the twenty-thousand–dollar girl being bad value for money. Perhaps he had heard these jokes at his expense so many times over the years that something just snapped inside him.

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, 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, but I had not expected it from him. He had always been so supportive, 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.

But despite being upset with 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, at least, I was truly grateful.

By now, he was barely strong enough to teach, cutting 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, played games and dress-up, even allowing 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 meant that over time we just grew apart. 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 that 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 that Shuhra would not survive. She was so tiny and frail that I was scared that even washing her might give her a fever. I was also terrified and tormented with guilt that the injection I had taken to try to abort her had somehow affected her development. If she had died, I don't think I would have ever forgiven myself. As my mother had experienced before me, my initial rejection of my child gave me an even greater debt of duty to her now.

Gradually, she grew stronger and put on weight, growing ever funnier and more clever as she did so. Today, she is the brightest, cheekiest and sometimes naughtiest little girl that ever lived. I see much of myself and both of my parents in her. She has my father's wisdom and my mother's wit and strength. She is also immersed in politics and says she would like 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 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 I tied around me. She would lie quietly against my breast, hidden under the burka. 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 she became too heavy. I think it's one of the reasons she's so secure and confident as a child today.