The Favored Daughter Read Online Free Page B

kitchen, a mud-plastered room with three large wood-fired ovens at one end, a deep bread oven called a tanur in the center, 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. And in the kitchen she reigned supreme.
    The women baked bread three times a day, sometimes 50 or 60 loaves a day, so the room was always full of smoke from fires. Then between bakes they had to prepare lunch and dinner. If my father had guests, the heat would become unbearable because wood was burning on all four ovens. On those occasions we would all feel the sense of excitement, and I would boost my popularity by bringing my friends into the kitchen to eat the leftovers. Most of the villagers were much poorer than our family, and the chance to taste unusual and fine foods was too good for them to pass up. We children were never allowed anywhere near the guest house, and if we ever thought to risk a peek inside, one quick glance from one of my father’s security men guarding the doorway sent us running for cover.
    But away from the eyes of the men of the house, the kitchen was a place of laughter and women’s voices, a place where children were guaranteed treats from the many pots of dried fruit and sweets lining the shelves. A place where, on cold winter nights after the bread was finished, we would sit with our feet inside the dying embers of the tanur, a carpet over our legs to keep us warm.
    At night we would unroll our mattresses and sleep there. And my mother would tell us stories. She would start with stories closer to home. She talked to us openly about her marriage and how she felt when she first met my father, about how hard it was for her leaving her childhood behind to become a wife, with all the duties that entailed. But then she would regale us with stories of faraway queens and kings, castles and warriors who gave all for honor. She told us love stories and stories about big wolves that used to make us scream. 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 all the love she had lost from my father in those later years she recollected somehow and gave to me twice over. She had recovered from her initial disappointment in my being a girl, after a story was recounted to her by my aunt Gada, my father’s eldest sister. Informing him of my birth upon his return to the village, the aunt 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 uncharacteristically laughed out loud: “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. For her it was my father’s way of sending a message that he still loved her, and that she should not feel like a failure for providing him a last daughter instead of a son. She recounted that story often. I must have heard it hundreds of times.
    But by then my father was a distant man, and politics was becoming a very dangerous game in Afghanistan. The regime had recently changed from a kingdom to a presidency. Dawoud Khan removed King Zahir Shah through a peaceful coup d’état while the king was abroad in 1973 and declared himself the first president of Afghanistan. When he took power, he suspended the constitution and abolished the parliament.
    My father was soon imprisoned for disobeying the