A Different Kind of Daughter Read online

  All through our mud house my family stirred in their dark, cool rooms that smelled of earth, waking one after the other. For the good of the home, which often contained several multigenerational families, Wazir mothers all rose first and, like a gentle echo, the children next. Men, like long-slumbering beasts, were always last to rouse. The younger men looked after the older ones, shaving their leathery, time-creased faces and tending to their clothes and hair. In Waziristan, many people lived in huge houses, walled-in compounds with extended families all living together under a single roof—aunts and uncles, cousins and grandparents, and, of course, the children. The family always built the house together, and everyone had a position in its hierarchy—the elders at the top—as though the family were a machine, each person a moving part.

  Even the birds, which we revered, had a special place among us. We removed a single pucca brick from the wall of our front porch so that a pigeon could make its nest there, and one always came and perched, finding its place among us by some instinct that I never understood. Someone always had the duty to break up the hard leftover bread into tiny pieces and feed it to the bird so that it would stay.

  In my village, every child had a simple task to complete. The girls always looked after the youngest children before they themselves could eat breakfast. Some walked with big buckets fully half their height to the stream that wandered in a silver thread, bubbling with cool water, past the village. I sometimes ran with my metal bucket, banging it with a broken stick, dry dust from the hot ground swarming around my sandal-clad feet. In the high white sun of summer afternoons, we went to the mountain stream in small, chattering groups and jumped into the rippling water. Lotus-like flowers adorned the surface, floating like delicate teacups.

  By the time I came back to our house with the full bucket, heavy and spilling over, my mother would already have finished preparing a breakfast yogurt drink, made from churning fresh milk inside a barrel. There was the smell of fresh naan bread, chopped mint, steaming pots of black tea. As soon as the last men arose, the entire family assembled, the children all happy and loud. The fathers sat quietly on silk mats against the walls. The women moved among the group, slipping between sitting bodies like the stream into whose cold current I’d just lowered my bucket, serving fresh, simple food, such as small bowls of sliced fruit—all of us in the big warm kitchen that was the heart of our house.

  But the thing I loved best of all about morning in Waziristan was a quiet ceremony that unfolded the moment I handed over the fresh water, having played my part, which I think of now almost as a sacred duty. With this water, my mother would dampen the earthen floor of our home, dunking her hands in the bucket and letting big silver drops rain down with quick flicks of her fingertips. Once the ground drank in the cool mountain water and it softened, she would sweep and tamp it down, releasing a sweet, clean fragrance from the moist clay. The soft perfume rose and traveled through our house, its invisible beauty telling everyone that the long day had begun.

  But before I was old enough to know that anything existed beyond our idyll, we would have to leave it. My family moved out of that sprawling house with its big airy rooms, far away from the hard-minded certainty of our customs and the lofty position that we held within our tribe, all of which my father relinquished by standing up for his ideals and allowing his wife and daughters to live in relative freedom. He wanted us all to receive a good education and knew we would have to flee the confines of our small village to ever even dare to dream. Our small family were also unapologetic in their radical ambitions, every last one of us: when she was only six, my sister, Ayesha, was already participating in debating competitions all over the region and writing speeches about women’s rights, democracy, child labor and the environment; at the age of four, I was permitted to dress in boys’ clothes and run amok with a slingshot through the village; my mother, whom we called Aami, pursued university degrees; and my father, our Baba, who also had given his wife permission to stop wearing her burqa, stood at the center of it all like a ringmaster, breaking ancient rules with the relentless daring of a hot-blooded Wazir.

  None of these details mattered to me at the time, not really, but they were serious offenses to the elders of our village. Offenses to the tribe. Offenses to God. The elders had locked my father up for his liberal ideas twice before. The pursuit of enlightenment carried penalties—imprisonment and, in the worst cases, death. If we were all going to get an education, we had no choice but to leave, and for good. Yet even in that environment, fear never existed, even as an afterthought. That was the great thing about being Wazir and about being my father’s daughter. We feared nothing. We simply moved on and kept living.

  And we would move many times in the coming years, each new town drawing me in to a story full of adventure and strange characters, both heroes and villains, all of them shaping the woman I would become. Even now, one of those journeys across the valleys stands out as the place and time in which I learned that my world was a cauldron of dangers, not just for me personally, but for everyone who lived in it. This was a startling discovery, whose raw horror, despite everything that happened to me before and after, has never left my battered psyche. Often when I think back to my childhood in Pakistan, I think back to the moment I lost what it meant to be a child for good.

  I was seven years old and already living as a boy. My father took a job teaching at the college in Miranshah, a modern town spreading out in a dense mass of concrete across a valley bordered by the rough peaks of the Hindu Kush. Every new journey always began the same way. My father and mother loaded up a cart with necessities like cooking pots, mattresses filled with dead leaves, my father’s dusty textbooks, and a pair of loudmouthed chickens, and we set off. We were heading toward North Waziristan, and the journey was bumpy and long, with our crude vehicle ferrying our family through mountains that loomed over the dry dirt road. I remember the trip as a trance of passing scenery as we moved slowly through villages, stopping to buy mangoes and apricots from ramshackle stalls. The roads were rocky and narrow, and the sky above was a wall of light and heat. It must have taken us a long time to pass from South Waziristan into the northern region.

  *

  At first, my life in Miranshah was no less free or happy than it had been in the unspoiled valleys of South Waziristan, or anywhere else we’d lived. I napped in the soft pool-like shade of acacia trees and skipped across the flat rooftops. I swam as a boy in the swift river and ran along its muddy banks, and in quiet moments I’d stop and let my gaze linger far across the long, populated valley toward the treacherous and fabled foothills of the Kush. I paid little attention to the fact that, materially, we had less—less food, fewer clothes, and we were all crammed into a small concrete house inside the college colony.

  When my father gave me money to run to the market for food, I had no idea that that small handful of soiled rupees was so hard to come by. Poor was a word I never learned until we left home for good. To get to the local market—or anywhere in town —I had to scale a concrete wall and navigate alleyways, the coins jingling like tiny bells in the frayed pockets of my shirt and pants. It was the ninth month of the lunar Islamic calendar, and a crescent moon showed like a thin fingernail through the cloudless wash of the late morning sky, signaling the holy month of Ramadan. I had a satchel full of pine nuts gathered from the forest, to trade for cups of white rice or a bag of fruit. My mother surely sent me with a warning not to linger. I left my family at home, fasting as they would from sunrise to sunset for the entire month, and walked out the front door. I recall the silence at that time. You could feel our part of the world folded into itself in heavy prayer. I sprinted to the cement wall, swung myself over and down into the narrow, shadowed alleyway. Along its full length, I saw no one. I always walked with my body slightly bent, feeling my size—so tall for a girl, so big—hands jammed into my pockets. I looked like a young boy, determined and fast, who knew where he was going. I’d taken that walk, been sent on that same errand, many times
. When I got to the end of the alley, I heard the revving of an engine rise and fall, then cut out. The air carried the hot stench of gasoline. I saw a man dressed in a bright, clean shalwar kameez step toward the open door of the market store and slip into the interior darkness. The window on the far side of the small wooden market framed a picture of another empty street behind it. A short counter stood at one end, where an old man sat, half-asleep, against the wall.

  I walked to the other end, along a table holding baskets of produce.

  Two more men entered the market behind me. The sourness of male sweat overpowered the scent of coriander and cardamom that always hovered in the air of the shop. I went to the fruit baskets tucked into a shadowed corner, eyed a ripe pomegranate, tapped it with my finger, and picked it up.

  The men stood around the store. I heard whispering and the shuffling of feet.

  Outside, in the street behind the shop, a car engine started up again. I saw the car approach, the side windows slowly opening. Datsun. Even then, I knew cars. My father had taken a new job teaching a class in auto mechanics and machinery at the local college. His classroom—where I’d spend whole afternoons playing around—was a huge garage crammed with half-gutted vehicles; greasy engine parts always sat on tables, like mechanical specimens, waiting for the next lesson.

  Behind me, the men in the shop went silent. The old man at the counter stood up and looked over, just as the car came to a stop right below the window. The car doors flung open. Several figures spilled out. Then, as though in one long, sweeping motion, they climbed through the shop window and stood inside. The air in the room pulsed. No one moved for several seconds. I could hear my own breath, feel my own heartbeat, as they quickened. Then one of the intruders drew a pistol. I would learn later that it was a Tokarev, Russian-made, a relic of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the weapon of choice in that part of the world. In the coming years, I’d see the same gun, iconic to our region, many times over. He loaded the chamber, lunged forward, and fired three fast rounds into the head of the man who’d entered the shop before me. I could not move a muscle. I had no instinct for what to do. Confusion and terror swallowed me whole. I heard a gasp and something heavy hit the floor. My eyes searched for anything else but what I knew lay before me—the peeling paint on the ceiling, a broken strap on my sandal, the quick shadow of a bird cutting past the open window. But I had to look over at the wounded man. I remember feeling bad about his shirt for some reason and I focused on it hard—such a clean garment had been soiled beyond redemption.

  A second man fired right into the neck of another. Now two figures were on the floor, bleeding. The one shot in the neck had his fingers at the bullet hole, trying to plug it, I think; but he could not. The wound let out strange wet sounds, like an infant suckling. For an instant, I thought of my twin brothers, Sangeen and Babrak, at home, napping in their shared crib. I wanted to cry out. It’s not real, I told myself again and again. It’s not real. Then something left the man, some invisible weight, and he stopped moving, hands dropping in dull thumps to the floor. His eyes shifted quickly in their sockets and went still.

  The third man was harder to kill, though he’d already been shot several times in the back. He was flailing on the ground, legs kicking. He grabbed at things—the dead man’s shoe, table legs, a length of electrical cord; then he just reached up and grasped with wide-open hands at the hot gunpowdered air. His blood smeared the floor in a wing pattern as he arched across it, half-crawling on his side. Then, he slowed. He was bleeding from the mouth and lay there jerking, as though the cord had sent a current through his body. The shooters all watched without saying a word, standing over him, following his slow journey across the floorboards and looking down until he stopped and there was no doubt he was dead. Two men squatted and grabbed at the spent body, hoisted it up and carried it to the window and tossed it out. Then they all climbed out, one after the other.

  No one so much as looked in my direction as I remained frozen between the long tables of ripe fruit. The car revved as they dumped the body, lifeless and dripping, into the trunk. I stood with the old man, both of us staring. Then the car sped off. As the sound of the engine died away, my entire body began to shake. The smell in the place was sweet and metallic, like wet coins. There was a loud ringing in my ears and nothing else. In that moment, a strange splitting of my childhood took place, like a canvas torn in half, and I knew that a part of me was gone. A long silent scream rose from my throat. I stood there awhile, mouth open, the pomegranate still in my hand, fresh blood at my feet.

  I didn’t say a word to anyone about it when I got home. I don’t know why. No one asked me about the stains on my shoes. Life had changed. We were living in a different world—it was as simple and as terrifying as that. If I could ask Allah to erase a single memory, it would be those brief minutes of carnage in which I learned that men could kill other men without mercy, and with a child standing as witness. I told my father the pomegranate was all I could get, handed it to him, and knelt down to pray.

  2. The Mullah

  I was born with three names. Most Pashtun girls receive only one. One week after my birth, my father shot up from sleep. Years later, he told me that he often woke that way, startled and lost, sure that a sudden voice calling out had summoned him. He reached for my mother, felt heartbeats knock between the rising and falling wings of her shoulder blades, and then he gently pulled his hand from the comfort of her skin. All quiet, still he could not sleep again. His infant daughter slumbered in a hammock near their bed, no bigger than a loaf of bread, swaddled in tight reams of white cloth—Pashtun babies always slept bound neck to feet to prevent their limbs from flailing. Getting up, my father did not dare touch me, but lowered his cheek to mine and let my newborn breath warm his face. Feeling his way along the rough mortared walls in the darkness, he found clothes on hooks, his boots on a polished stone shelf by the door. Before slipping out, he would have attended to his prayers, kissed the jeweled silks of his sacred mat, and bowed east, where the still-unseen sun was slowly making its way from the other side of the world.

  My father told me that outside, on the cracked dirt road, his feet found the right path through the dark, as though an invisible string tied around his body had pulled him. The first faint threads of dawn spread over the ground that led him higher into rocky hills over which the last shadows of night receded like deep bruises fading from the earth. He made his way past hibernating mango groves and the two dead acacias positioned as skeletal guards by the stream at the far end of our village. Walking through that acacia gateway, Shams tapped a weak trunk, as everyone did as they passed by there, to hear the soft, hollow sounds echo. Then he jumped stone by stone across the flickering stream and went out into the valley.

  All his life, my father could walk for miles and miles over terrain and end up nowhere in particular, but come home with whole worlds full of wisdom. He taught me that Earth itself was but one place, and if you left from one end and walked for eternity, you’d end up right where you started. It was November, and the thin air was laced with ice, eagles were circling, the lazy sun still hiding. The elements, however cruel, could not deter my father from his walks, or from his thoughts, which always had a definite purpose. Circumstances and discomfort have never deterred me either; I received all of my resilience from him. Even now, while apart from my father, I often walk the foreign land I live in, thinking of him, out there wandering, half a world away.

  He told me he hiked for hours that morning to clear his head, tracing the basin edge like the rim of a great bowl. I was his second daughter, but one week old, born helpless into a pinprick on the surface of a boundless earth, where I could be sentenced to death for pursuing any ambition beyond the roles of dutiful wife and daughter, for nothing more than daring to dream. All the physical beauty surrounding my father, every miracle laid out before him from soil to sky, could not alter that hard truth. From the sound of my first howling cry, purdah awaited his sinless infant girl.

/>   Not a soul had come to see his new daughter when she was born. No one left coins. Rifles remained silent, propped against walls like forgotten walking sticks. No feast. Only foreboding— his own and my mother’s. My father stared along the tumbling wall of hills and ridges, the just-visible sun like a jewel on the serrated peaks. On that morning, I reached my seventh day, a holy event to our people, and my father thought out loud: “If she has breathed one week in Waziristan, she might as well go on doing so forever.”

  “Maria!” he suddenly shouted, with all the air in his lungs. His voice catapulted across the wide-open basin. Seconds later, the echo of my first name came back to him again and again, boomeranging off the blue vault and swooping down shadowed ridges along which Alexander and Solomon had marched whole armies. Every living thing heard the reverberations of my name and the next two that followed. The very air of Waziristan knew who I was before I did. Maria. Gulgatai. Toorpakai. Then my father took up his wool cloak and wrapped his shoulders against the pounding wind. He squinted into the sunshine, and he made his way back down to earth.

  My mother could hear her husband approaching when he passed through the dead-acacia gate. His voice came forth, singing in wild Pashto couplets and calling out. Despite the hours spent hiking the frostbitten passes, he ran to her. The tips of his black mustache were white with snow, as though he’d dipped his face into a sugar bowl, and she told him that, laughing as she warmed his grinning face between her palms.

  Opening her drowsy eyes to the first whispers of dawn, my mother had felt the empty space beside her, and she knew. She knew my father, still half dreaming, was out searching the surface of the sky for those three names, precious gifts to bestow upon their newborn daughter. He’d done the very same thing for my sister, Ayesha.