Letters to My Daughters Read Online Free Page B

terror. I would listen and look out the window at the moon and stars. I was certain I could see the entire sky.
    I had no idea the rest of the world lay beyond the big mountain at the end of the valley and I didn’t care. My mother loved me and I loved her; we were inseparable. It was as if she somehow gathered up all the love she had lost from my father in those later years and gave it to me twice over. She had recovered from her initial disappointment at my being a girl after hearing a story recounted by my aunt Gada, my father’s eldest sister. Informing him of my birth upon his return to the village, my aunt had declared, “Abdul Rahman, your wife has given birth to a mouse, a tiny red mouse.” He laughed and demanded to see me, the first time he’d ever asked to see a newborn girl child. Looking at my scarred face and the third-degree burns caused by the sun, he threw his head back and laughed uncharacteristically. “Don’t worry, my sister,” he told my aunt. “Her mother has good genes. And I know one day this little mouse will grow to be as beautiful as her mother.”
    When my mother heard this story, she cried tears of joy. To her, it was my father’s way of telling her he still loved her and of reassuring her that she should not feel like a failure for providing him with a last daughter instead of a son. She told that story often. I must have heard it hundreds of times.
    But by then my father was a distant man. In those days, politics in Afghanistan was becoming a very dangerous game. The regime had recently changed. Mohammed Dawoud Khan had removed Zahir Shah in a peaceful coup d’état while the king was abroad in 1973, declaring himself the first president of Afghanistan. He suspended the constitution and abolished the parliament.
    Soon afterwards, my father was imprisoned for disobeying the president. He was vocal in his criticisms of the new regime, putting pressure on Dawoud to restore the previous constitution and parliament. Rumblings of political discontent were heard across the country. Unemployment was rising, social problems were on the increase and Afghanistan’s neighbours, particularly Pakistan and the USSR, were once more beginning to play out their political strategies on our soil.
    My father was mostly away in Kabul and was rarely home. When he was absent, our house was relaxed and children’s laughter rang throughout the rooms. But when he was home, the women of our household hurried nervously along corridors, feverishly preparing meals for his guests and trying to keep the children silent so as not to disturb him.
    My friends and I were generally happy when my father was home because we could be as naughty as we liked, filching chocolate from the kitchen stores safe in the knowledge that my mother was too preoccupied with him to stop us.
    I have few real memories of my father. I remember him walking around, wearing a white shalwar kameez with a smart brown wool waistcoat on top and a sheepskin hat, his hands clasped firmly behind his back. The hooli had a long, flat roof, and in those days he would walk on it for hours on end. He would start pacing restlessly back and forth in the afternoon and carry on until evening without stopping—just walking and thinking, always in the same position with his hands behind his back.
    I had a sense even then that my father was a great man. That whatever the stresses and troubles he brought home to us and however frightening the beatings, they were all due in part to the multiple pressures he was under: the pressure of maintaining a home and extended family as large as ours, the pressure of political life, 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-storey dwelling at the back of the hooli , was always full of visitors: some sought his advice or wisdom; others wanted him to resolve a family