Letters to My Daughters (34 page)

I understood these women and admired them. My life now was radically different from theirs. I dressed in the latest fashions and used a computer, while they came to greet me with filthy hands and had never read a book. But I had grown up with their way of life. My mother's life had been just like theirs. I understood their daily struggles and respected them without patronizing them. I know many people in the West will consider these women to be the nameless, faceless victims of our country, but I don't see it like that. They are proud, strong, intelligent and resourceful females.

Convincing male voters, especially the older ones, was harder. In another village, I was supposed to give a speech in a mosque, the largest building in the place and the only venue able to hold a large number of people. But the speech almost didn't happen because some of the elders didn't want me to go inside the mosque. I had to sit in the car while the local men and male members of my campaign team debated it. When they finally agreed I could go inside, I was so nervous I forgot to say “In the name of Allah” when I started my speech, a very silly mistake on my part. I expected a hostile response after that. But as I talked, I saw some of the old men at the back were crying. They were wrinkled, grey-haired men in turbans and traditional long striped coats who had tears streaming down their cheeks. After I had finished, they told me that they had known my father and that hearing me speak had been a reminder of the passion and sincerity he also used to put in his speeches. Hearing them say that made me cry too.

I didn't wear the burka when I was out campaigning because I needed to look people in the eye and communicate with them. But I did make sure I wore respectful and extremely modest local clothes, a long baggy dress over loose trousers—the same type of dress that had once been used to hide my six-year-old brother from would-be assassins.

As the campaign rolled on, so did my levels of support. In one extremely remote district called Jurm, I was thrilled to arrive and find a convoy of over seventy cars waiting for us while elders and young men sat waving Afghan flags and my campaign posters. This wasn't an area I knew particularly well or one that my father had represented. But they supported me because they really cared about the elections. They were interested in the democratic process and wanted to make their voices heard by selecting their own local leader.

Critics of the United States often say that America has forced democracy on an unwilling Afghanistan and that it is pointless to have democratic processes in such a seemingly underdeveloped country. I strongly disagree. America has supported democracy in Afghanistan but has in no way forced it upon us. Afghanistan has had democratic traditions for centuries, whether in selecting arbabs (community leaders) or in the tradition of elders voting on local issues at
loya jirgas
(community councils). Voting for national government is only one step further on from that. And I had no doubt that the people I met, even the illiterate and poor, wanted this chance to vote for change. Who in the world would not want to vote for their own leader if it was safe to do so and they were given the opportunity?

As I drove around the province, it felt strange to see my poster and picture staring down at me. My face on the poster adorned cars, shop windows and houses. I began to feel a sense of rising panic. What if I let these people down? What if I couldn't justify their belief in me? What if I couldn't deliver the services they badly needed?

At night, I would be racked with self-doubt. I was afraid that I would win this time but then lose all trust by the next set of elections. I could not bear the thought of losing the trust of these kindly old men with their honest faces or the women who grabbed me with their callused hands and told me my struggle was their struggle.

People liked me, but only because they needed someone to help them. However, realistic delivery is one thing. Convincing people I wasn't able to make them rich or wave a magic wand was another. One woman asked me if I could make sure she was given a free house in Kabul. She really believed I could do that for her. I had to explain that that is not an MP's job, at least not an MP who doesn't believe in corruption.

As the campaign wore on, I got more and more excited. Dawn broke at 4 A.M., and with it my day began. Most days I didn't get to bed until after midnight. I got as many as two hundred calls a day from people wanting to ask me questions or offering to volunteer. The whole thing took on a momentum of its own.

I remember one man who rang me and told me none of the women in his family, his wife or his mother, had voting cards because he had not given them permission to vote. But these women had all been urging him to use his own vote to vote for me. He had no idea who I was or what I represented so he called me up to ask. He was so traditional; a man who would not let his wife vote but who respected her view enough to bother to find out about the candidate she liked. He reminded me a little of my father. At the end of the conversation, he promised me his vote. I hope in later years he let his wife vote too.

Some of the calls were hostile. I had several men, complete strangers, call me and tell me I was a whore because I was standing for election. Some simply screamed over the phone at me, telling me to go back home and leave politics to the men. Others told me I was a bad Muslim and should be punished. I tried not to let such calls upset me, but of course they always did.

In one town, we visited the house of some of my mother's sisters. As a child, I used to love visiting these relatives because I remembered the woman as highly glamorous, particularly one aunt who always wore makeup. Their house then had been noisy and warm, and I remember being smothered in hugs and kisses and the scent of perfume. Now the house was silent. Only two old ladies had survived and living with them were several children, assorted relatives who had been orphaned. It was so heart-rending: a house of widows and sad-eyed children.

One boy, Najibullah, about nine years old, stood out to me. He had lovely, deep brown eyes that resembled those of my brother Muqim, the brother who was murdered. I asked who he was and learned he was the grandson of my mother's favourite brother—the brother who had once galloped his horse back to our house after learning of my father's beatings and offered to take my mother away if she wanted to leave. He and his family had all been killed during the war, leaving only this little boy named Najibullah. I couldn't leave him there in that house of sadness, so I offered to take him home with me. Today, he's a lively teenager and he lives with Shaharzad, Shuhra and me in our house in Kabul. He goes to school and is excelling at his studies. He's wonderful with the girls and is a great help to me in the house.

Thirty-six hours before the election, I still had two districts to visit, both of them five-hour drives away in opposite directions. The rules dictated that all campaigning must cease twenty-four hours before voting began. I don't know how we managed it, but we made it to both districts. In one of them, I was touched to find that my local campaign had been led by Uncle Riza, the father of Shahnaz, my father's seventh and last wife, my half brother Ennayat's mother. All these years later, and here he was supporting and helping me. The poor man had lost most of his children, including Shahnaz, in the war. By now he was a very old man but he was still sprightly and fit, and he insisted on walking everywhere with us. We ate dinner and spent the night at his house. It was another reminder to me of how powerful the tendrils of the extended family system can be.

But the district I had been both dreading and longing to visit was my ancestral home of Koof. I hadn't been there since I was four years old. The last time was the day my mother had grabbed me and my siblings and we had run for our lives along the river bank while being chased by gunmen. Going back had dredged up all those old feelings of fear and loss. As our car bumped along the precipitous tracks and over the high plateau where my father had been murdered by the Mujahideen, I felt an ocean of pain wash over me. This was where my family had begun and where it had been destroyed.

I could barely breathe by the time we reached the village. As we drove along the main track that wove its way through the houses, the same track my father had ridden down in procession each time he took a new wife, the reality of the damage wrought by the war was all too devastatingly clear. The spring where we had played as children was now almost dry. The once fresh, clear water that had gushed and gurgled was now just a trickle of brown. My mother's gardens and orchards, which had been her pride and joy, were dust. In her day, the gardens had shone with seasonal colour: greens in the spring, pink berries and blossoms in summer, fat red and orange pumpkins and peppers in the autumn and brown nuts and purple vegetables in the winter. Now there was nothing, just the branches of a few dead trees poking into the sky like twisted skeletons.

The
hooli
—our house—was still standing, but only just. The whole west wing, including the guest house, had been destroyed. The huge pear tree that had stood in the centre of the yard was just a stump. It had taken a direct hit from a rocket during the war. This tree had witnessed so much. It was where I hid from my mother when I'd been naughty, where my father had hidden his weapons and where my sister and sister-in-law had been whipped with rifle butts by Mujahideen trying to steal my father's guns.

My father's suite of rooms, the Paris suite, was still there. The gaily painted murals on the wall were still visible. This was the room where my mother and father lay together as man and wife, where I had been conceived, where my mother had washed my father's dead body with half its skull missing in order to prepare him for his funeral. I touched the cold plastered walls with my hands, tracing what I could of the patterns. Those murals had been my father's pride and joy. In his eyes, they were like the ones from the French royal palace at Versailles—only in his view, his were better.

Finally, I plucked up the courage to go into the kitchen. This was the room where my mother had reigned supreme. The room where we slept on mattresses we rolled out nightly, where she told me and the other children stories of faraway lands and kings and queens, where banquets and feasts were prepared. In here, we had watched the rain and snow fall and the sun rise and set from the high window set into the wall. Once upon a time, I thought the whole world was in that view from the window.

I took a deep breath and walked in. My knees nearly gave way underneath me. It was almost as if I could see my mother bent over a pan of rice with a ladle in her hand, could smell the meat cooking and feel the warmth of the open fire coming from the
tanur
(bread oven) in the centre of the room. For a moment, I was four again and there she was. I felt her. Then she was gone and I was left alone. Just me, the adult Fawzia, standing in a room that no longer seemed to contain all the world. Now I realized how tiny it was, just a mud room with a tiny window looking out onto a single range of mountains. Not the whole world at all.

I sat in the kitchen for a long time, watching through the window as the day turned to dusk and a half crescent moon surrounded by twinkling stars became visible. No one disturbed me. They knew I needed that personal communion with my mother.

Next, I needed to feel my father. I left the
hooli
by the back entrance and climbed the hill where he had been buried. His grave had the best view of the mountains, a 360-degree outlook onto his own paradise. I knelt down beside it and prayed. Then I sat and spoke to the grave. I asked my father for guidance and wisdom to help me on this path of politics. I told him I knew he'd be shocked that it was one of his daughters and not a son who had chosen to continue the family business, but I promised him I wouldn't let him or his memory down.

By now, it was getting cold and dark and one of my mother's friends, a lady who had been one of our servants, came to call me down. She cried and shook her head sadly at my father's grave and told me not a day went by without her remembering my parents. She said my mother had been a woman full of kindness, who saw no difference between rich and poor, and that my father had often been a fearsome man but one determined to improve the lot of his friends and neighbours, whatever the personal sacrifice for himself.

She stroked my cheek and looked me straight in the eye: “Fawzia jan, you will win this election and take your seat in the parliament. You will win it for them. You will.”

It was not a statement of confidence in my abilities. It was more an order. The Koofi political dynasty was to rise once again.

Dear Shuhra and Shaharzad,

Politics has always been at the core of our family. Over the generations, it has shaped and defined our lives, sometimes even dictating who we married
.

I have always shared the family love of politics, but I never thought it would be the career I chose. I wanted to be a doctor and to heal people.

I saw how politics killed my father. And for this reason, most of all, I never wanted a life in politics.

But it seems I had little choice. It was always going to be my destiny. And in some ways, your father's arrest was the start of my own individual politicization. When he was arrested, I could not and would not sit at home and wait, doing nothing. I had to gather resources, find allies, try to see the bigger picture and work with it.

I was tired of being told to stay quietly in the background and not dishonour the men. Where was that getting us? Nowhere.

I had an education and I had a voice and I was determined to use it to help Hamid.