The Favored Daughter (4 page)

My friends and I were generally happy when my father was home because we could be as naughty as we liked and steal chocolate, safe in the knowledge my mother was too busy worrying about him to stop us.

I have few real memories of my father. I remember him always walking, wearing a shalwar kameez. He wore a smart brown wool waistcoat over it, and he always had his sheepskin hat on and his hands clasped tightly behind his back. The hooli had a long flat roof, and in those days he would walk along it for hours and hours. He would start pacing back and forth in the afternoon and continue through the evening. He was just walking and walking and thinking, and always in the same position, with his hands behind his back.

I think I had a sense even then that was my father was a great man. That whatever the stresses and troubles he brought home to us, even the beatings, were partly because of the pressure he was under. The pressure of maintaining a home and extended family the size of ours, the pressure of politics, the pressure of representing some of the poorest people in Afghanistan. He barely had any time to himself. When he was home our guest house, a single-story dwelling at the back of the hooli, was always full with visitors, those seeking his advice or his wisdom to solve a family dispute, those bringing news of errant tribes or violence in the mountains, the desperate and the needy wanting his help. His door was closed to none of them, and light relief was something he had no time to enjoy. How then could he be blamed for demanding the most from his family?

I don't condone my father's behavior in beating my mother the way he did, of course, but those times were different and it was the norm. And I know at other times he was a good husband to her, as much as tradition allowed. Perhaps today I understand him more than ever because I understand his workload. I understand the pressure of politics, the feeling of never having any time alone or free from duty, the burden of responsibility. I think my mother understood that too, and it was why she endured so much.

Under the sharia law system my father espoused, a man is supposed to show justice to all of his wives equally, sharing himself without favor among them. I too believe in sharia justice. In its purest forms it is a fair system because it is a system based on Islamic values of justice and is what all Muslims should believe.

But affairs of the human heart are different, and in polygamous marriages it is bound to fail. How can a man help it if his heart prefers some wives over others?

My father's suite of rooms was called the Paris Suite, decorated with hand-painted murals by an artist brought especially from Kabul. The room had two windows looking out over an apricot garden, and in the summertime the room was washed in a cool apricot-scented breeze. No modern air conditioning could ever come close to that natural coolness which was coupled with a delicate scent.

Each night he was home, a different wife shared his bed. The only wife who didn't go there was his first wife, the Khalifa. In order to take more wives than the sharia-allowed maximum of four, my father divorced two of his original wives and made his first wife what is known as a Khalifa. Under this agreement a woman retains the title of wife and is cared for financially, but loses the intimacy that comes with marriage and never sleeps with her husband again. I remember the sadness in this woman's eyes, the power and status that should have come to her naturally as first wife totally destroyed by her forced sexless status.

Instead, my mother, the second wife, became head wife. The Khalifa never showed my mother any anger or disrespect, but I wonder if she too had felt devastated and hurt when my father first brought my mother home or when she was given the head wife status. How was it for the poor Khalifa to be usurped by a teenage girl?

I like to think my father looked forward the most to the nights he spent with my mother. She recalled how after the necessary intimacies, they would lay there until the early hours just talking, and he would tell her stories of his work, share with her the strains of his political life in Kabul, and give instructions for how she was to handle the land, the latest wheat harvest or sale of some cattle in his absence. She was so authoritative when he wasn't there that she earned the local nickname—“deputy wakil sahib,” deputy representative sir.

The harder the times were for him politically, the more he relied on my mother. So long as his home was harmonious and ran like clockwork, he could deal with all the machinations and dealings that parliament could throw at him. It was she who kept the farms and business running, she who kept order in the house, who solved disputes between the wives. This was something she needed a certain amount of her own political skill to negotiate.

Certain wives, particularly the third one, Niaz bibi, resented my mother's status and tried to turn my father against her. This woman was intelligent and frustrated by her life of drudgery, so she can't be blamed for being jealous of the few freedoms and small powers my mother had over her. But her attempts to win my father's favor this way always failed, not only because my father didn't like to think badly about my mother, but because of my mother's own abilities to foresee a situation arising and take evasive action.

Her strategy was kindness. She could have beaten the younger wives, made them do the hardest work, but instead she tried to create a happy house, one where all children were loved equally and where wives could work together as sisters and friends. When one of the younger wives was caught stealing from the household food store, a large locked cellar at the back of the kitchen, my mother didn't tell my father, knowing that he would give her a vicious beating. Instead she dealt with the matter herself, secretly. This strategy slowly earned her the gratitude and loyalty of the others.

Only one wife, number six, wasn't chosen for her political usefulness but for her practical homemaking skills. She was a stunningly beautiful Mongolian woman chosen for her ability to weave the most beautiful Mongolian rugs and carpets. She taught my mother this art, and the two of them would sit for hours together in comfortable silence weaving, their hands rhythmically spinning and threading richly colored yarn while I sat and watched.

But my mother's best friend was wife number four, Khal bibi. She called my mother “Apa,” which means elder sister.

Once, my mother became sick with a serious eye infection, and considering the absence of any doctors in the village, a female elder suggested that if a person were to put their tongue into the eye and licked it clean each morning, the natural antibiotic in the saliva would heal it. Such was the closeness of their friendship that Khal bibi volunteered without hesitation. Each day for eight weeks she licked my mother's swollen, pus-filled eye until, as the elderly lady had promised, it healed.

But my mother and Niaz bibi, wife number three, could just never get along. One day, as the women sat on the floor eating naan for breakfast, the two began quarrelling. I was only about 18 months old, but I somehow sensed the enmity between them. I toddled over to Niaz bibi and yanked down hard on her plaits. She gasped with shock and began laughing, taking me in her arms and cuddling me. She and my mother forgot their quarrel and both laughed out loud: “This one, Bibi jan, is a very clever girl, just like her mother,” laughed my mother's enemy, showering my face in kisses.

Even at that early age I had a sense of the injustice of the position of women in our culture. I remember the quiet despair of the wives were who weren't loved or noticed by my father, and the trials of those who were.

I recall watching in horror once as my father chased my mother along the corridor and began to beat her. I flew at him, kicking out at him and trying to protect her. He flung me aside with one arm.

Once, he viciously tore out a chunk of her hair during a beating. Her brother visited a week later and, as was the custom, spent time with the men of the family, meaning my mother was unable to talk privately to him about what had happened. When he left my mother prepared his lunch for his long journey on horseback across the mountains home. She cleverly hid the locks of her torn-out hair in the wrapping. After a full morning's riding, he stopped at a clearing for lunch, unwrapped his food, and found his sister's hair. He understood the message immediately, mounted his horse, and galloped straight back to our house, challenging my father and telling my mother her family would ensure she would be granted a divorce if she wanted it. Her family support was unusual. Most women were encouraged not to complain about beatings and to endure them in silence. Often girls who fled to a family home would be returned by their father to the very husband who had hurt them. Beating a woman was normal, a part of marriage. Girls grew up knowing it had happened to their mothers and grandmothers and expecting it to happen to them. But Bibi jan was close to her parents, whom she visited every year, and her brothers loved her. Her brother sat with her in the hooli garden and told her she was free to leave with him, that he would take her home, now, if that was what she wanted. At this time in her marriage she was at the point of despair, constantly depressed. She suffered splitting headaches, her stiffened hands didn't work well due to the injuries she received from the beatings with the metal ladle, and she was tired of the constant humiliations of each new wife. She had had enough. She almost went through with the divorce.

But she knew that leaving her husband meant losing her beloved children. In Afghan culture, as is the norm in most Islamic cultures, children stay with their fathers, not their mothers, after divorce. She couldn't bear to give her children up and leave them behind, even if it meant an end to her own sufferings.

She asked to see her children and looked into their eyes and faces. She said nothing, but told me years later she could see herself reflected in her children's eyes. She couldn't leave them. So she told her brother she would stay with her husband and her children, and that he should go home. Reluctantly he got back onto his horse and left. I have no idea how my father reacted after her brother left. Did he beat my mother again for her insolence and for daring to tell her brother? Or was he tender and kind and regretful, realizing just how close he had come to losing the woman he needed? Probably a bit of both.

I remember my sisters being married off one by one. The first sister to be married had a trousseau brought specially from Saudi Arabia. Caskets of fine cloth and gold jewels befitting the importance of the marriage of a daughter of Abdul Rahman were brought to the hooli and unpacked with care as we all gasped, oohing and aahing over the treasures inside. On that day she became an important commodity, a jewel to be traded. But that was the only time in her life she was treated with such importance.

Unlike the boys, the girls' birthdays were never celebrated, and none of my sisters went to school. People saw no purpose in wasting money educating a girl because she would not be around to contribute financially to the household after she married.

I also recall the day my sister-in-law arrived. She had been married to my elder brother at the age of 12, the same age my daughter Shaharzad is today. He was 17 and they were expected to begin a full physical relationship immediately.

It is unthinkable to me that my own daughter should suffer a forced physical relationship at such a tender age as this poor girl. She was still such a child that my mother had to help her bathe and dress in the mornings. I wonder how it felt for my mother to bathe this girl and see the injuries inflicted on her by her own son. I wonder if she recoiled in horror at the injustice of it all. But this was their life and the fate of women. Perhaps all she could do was try to comfort the girl, give her the lighter chores to do, and know that just as the elder women had done, the girl would grow to accept her fate unquestioningly and without complaint. It was a conspiracy of culture that bound them all, and none were free to challenge it.

Without even being aware I was doing so, I broke boundaries and challenged these norms. Partly this was because one of my best friends was Ennayat, the son of my father's seventh wife. Despite the initial rivalries surrounding our births, he and I were instant best friends, a special brotherly and sisterly love that has lasted to this day. He was naughty and mischievous, and I even more so. Knowing that as a girl I was more limited, I was always challenging him into more naughtiness on our joint behalf. We were joined in our naughtiness by Muqim, my mother's son who had been born two years before Ennayat and I. We were the three little musketeers.

I was forever getting them both into trouble. We'd sneak into orchards and steal apples or I'd make them steal from my father's stores and distribute it to my friends.

I remember one day filling our shirts full of dried apricots from the kitchen, Ennayat encouraging me to stuff my shirt as full as I could. I tied my belt under the stash to hold it in. As we sneaked back across the garden in front of the wives who were preparing food on the terrace, the apricots began to leak one by one. I tried to walk with my back to the wall so they wouldn't see, just as a large pile of apricots plopped on the floor. I was mortified, and Ennayat was furious with me for failing in our mission. The women just laughed indulgently at us. Another of our favorite games was to steal cake and eat holes in it from the bottom up, then place it back so no one would notice, until of course they came to eat it.

A few weeks ago I asked Ennayat to recall what I was like at that age, and he replied in that dry, humorous style typical of big brothers all over the world: “You were ugly and very very annoying.”

Today Ennayat, and indeed all my other brothers, are the most wonderful brothers any girl could wish for. They support my political life, campaigning for me and protecting me when they can.

But growing up, we never forgot that they were boys and I was a girl. And in our family, boys were the only ones who really mattered.

As we grew older they'd be expected to go to school and achieve something with their life. My fate was to stay at home with the other girls until I was to be married.