Letters to My Daughters Read Online Free Page A

with great efficiency by my mother. We grew everything we needed: fruits of all kinds, peppers, olives, mulberries, peaches, apricots, apples and huge yellow pumpkins. We even cultivated silk for weaving carpets. My father took great delight in importing trees and seeds from abroad, and our garden housed one of the few black cherry trees in all of Afghanistan. I remember the day it arrived and the sense of importance and occasion as the seedling was planted.
    During the warmer months, the women would come and sit among the mulberry trees for half an hour or so in the late afternoon—the only time of day they could relax. Each would bring a small dish of something to eat, and they would sit gossiping and chatting while the children played around them.
    In those days, many villagers used to wear wooden shoes, because getting to Faizabad to buy conventional shoes was so difficult. An old man in the village used to make them; they looked like carved Venetian gondolas and were very strong. He would hammer nails into the base of the shoe so it would stick to the ice when the women went outside to fetch water in winter. My greatest dream was to own a pair of these shoes, though they were tough to wear and not made for children. When women came to visit, leaving their shoes at the door, I would put them on and go out to play. Once, I was wearing a beautiful embroidered dress a friend of my mother’s had made for me. I wasn’t supposed to go out in it, but I didn’t want to take it off, so I put on some wooden shoes and went to play with my friends near the spring. Inevitably, I fell over in my big shoes, ripping the dress.
    But my world began with the hooli kitchen, a mud-plastered room with three large wood-fired ovens at one end, a deep bread oven called a tanur in the centre and a tiny high window at the other end.
    LIKE MOST Afghan village women of her generation, my mother spent more than half her life in the kitchen, sleeping, cooking and taking care of the little children. In this room, she reigned supreme.
    The women baked bread three times a day, sometimes making as many as fifty or sixty loaves, and the room was always full of smoke from the fires. Between batches, they had to prepare lunch and dinner. If my father had guests, the heat from the wood burning in all four ovens became unbearable. On those occasions, we would all feel excited, and I would boost my popularity by bringing friends into the kitchen to eat the leftovers. Most of the villagers were much poorer than our family, and the chance to taste strange delicacies was too good to pass up. We children were never allowed anywhere near the guest house, and if we ever thought to risk a peep inside, a mere glance from one of my father’s security men guarding the doorway was enough to send us scattering for cover.
    Away from the eyes of the men of the house, the kitchen was a place of laughter and women’s chatter, where children were guaranteed treats from the many pots of dried fruit and sweets lining the shelves. On cold winter nights, after the bread was baked, we would sit with our feet beside the dying embers of the tanur , a carpet over our legs to keep us warm.
    At night, we would unroll our mattresses onto the kitchen floor and sleep there. The wives and daughters did not have their own bedrooms, only their own mattresses. When the boy children were smaller, they would also live and sleep in this female world. As they grew older, the boys went on to share a bedroom. Mother would tell us stories. First, she would recount tales close to home. She talked to us openly about her marriage, how she had felt when she first met my father and how hard it was for her to leave her childhood behind to become a wife, with all the duties that entailed. Then she would regale us with stories of faraway queens, kings and castles and warriors who gave everything for honour. She told us love stories and tales about big wolves that made us scream in