In My Father's Country: An Afghan Woman Defies Her Fate Read online

  FOUR

  Events that would change my life forever had been set into motion. We all call him Ustaz, “the teacher” in Pashtu. He was my father’s oldest brother, and he had emigrated to the United States in the late 1960s to attend college. I’m not sure why he decided to stay in the States, but he settled in Portland, Oregon, which was a quiet city in the seventies. He then went on to gain tenure as a professor at a small liberal arts college there. The talks between him and Baba started out in secrecy. Something as significant as sending the children to America was not the kind of thing one discussed in public. I heard whispers, but the adults made sure that we weren’t around when they were discussing the plans to send us to America for a better future. Now that it was a real possibility, I couldn’t decide how I felt about the idea of going to America. On the one hand, it would take me away from everything I knew was wrong with the lives of Afghan women. I wouldn’t have to marry someone just to bear him many children and die. At the tender age of ten or eleven, this was the bleak view I had of what lay ahead. I knew Baba wanted to protect me for as long as he could, but he was just one man, up against thousands of Pashtun men who would kill anyone they thought was trying to defy Pashtunwali. I was very much aware of his mortality and could see that he was aging. He had become confusingly forgetful at times; I now know that he was exhibiting early signs of Alzheimer’s.

  The knowledge that there wasn’t much other than Baba standing in the way of my Afghan fate scared me sleepless at night, filling me with dread that the next day would be the one when I would be told I couldn’t go to school and that the next month would be the ceremony to hand me over to another family to control my destiny for the rest of my life. This was not unfounded fear. I knew of many girls my age, some younger, who were told just a couple of weeks before their wedding day that they were now promised to be wed to a man they had never met. When I heard that Nafisa was being promised to one of her distant cousins, I cried and cried. Mamai thought that it was because I would miss Nafisa, so she tried to reassure me that she would come and visit her parents and see me, too. I couldn’t explain to her that I cried in part for myself, fearing that the same fate might be awaiting me. I felt so guilty for worrying more about myself than about my best friend, but I couldn’t help it.

  NEARLY TWO YEARS later my uncle Kaka told us that we had to have passport pictures taken, making the plan to go to America real. I should have been ecstatic beyond measure, but I knew the plan wasn’t foolproof, that people were denied entry for one reason or another all the time. I was afraid of setting my hopes too high, knowing I wouldn’t be able to handle the letdown if it didn’t work out. At the age of twelve, I already knew that I would be dealt many disappointments in my life, but this would be like no other, and for me there would be no returning to living like Nafisa, married to a distant cousin. I had to decide what I would do with my life if this didn’t work. Would I have the courage to end it all if I failed to fulfill my father’s prophecy? Without my being conscious of it, emigrating had become a life-and-death issue for me. On the one hand, I wanted to rejoice in the possibility of pursuing my destiny, living like no other woman in my whole family, tribe, or even in the province had ever lived. On the other hand, I couldn’t escape the terror of what I would have to do to myself if I was denied a visa.

  FIVE

  We landed at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport in the middle of a dark, gloomy, and wet Washington night. There were six of us—three boys and three girls. It had been a torturous journey, not just because the flights were hours long. I kept reminding myself of the journey I had taken at age five, and to be thankful I didn’t have to worry about being bombed. It took us more than a week to go from Peshawar to Karachi to Cairo to London to Portland. First we were stuck in Karachi because the customs agents wouldn’t let us travel with Pakistani passports unless we bought round-trip tickets. We had to have Pakistani passports because there was no Afghan government, therefore no Afghan passports. We stayed at a hotel for a week, just six children, while Kaka came to meet us with the money and arrange the tickets. This was the first time we had been without adult supervision, and for me it happened when I was paralyzed by uncertainty about the future. The week in Karachi is a blur; I remember mainly my fear that it was all going to be for nothing, and that I would be going back to what I had already started thinking of as my previous life.

  Once we were able to satisfy the requirements of the Pakistani airline, we were allowed to leave the country and move on to the next leg of the journey. I remember people looking at us very strangely. There we were, six children, all under the age of seventeen, with no adults to guide us, not to mention that we spoke almost no English.

  I wasn’t sure what I expected. For Afghan refugees our family was affluent and educated; still, for me, the whole world consisted of just two places: where I had been, Pakistan, and where I wanted to end up, America. Anyplace that was not Afghanistan or Pakistan was where Madonna and Michael Jackson lived. I imagined my uncle the Professor’s house to be like our big house in Kabul, except much grander, because everything was better and bigger in America. I was shocked when I arrived to find it small, dark, and cramped. The worst thing about it was there were no walls to protect us from outsiders.

  Because the Professor was all alone, a younger uncle, Uncle A, who worked as a city engineer, was enlisted to help take care of us and moved in. On the night we arrived, Uncle A had been so worried about collecting us from the airport that he’d forgotten about dinner. Moments after we walked in the door he opened a package of hot dogs, put them in the oven to cook, then forgot about them. He was showing us around the house when the smoke alarm went off. It sounded just like the blaring sirens that filled the streets of Kabul when the Russians were bombing. I was terrified. Had the Russians followed us to America, too? My first meal in America was a burned and blackened hot dog, and even if I could force myself to look beyond the charred pink meat, my appetite was ruined by the flashback of fleeing Russian bombs.

  The Professor’s house was built on a hill surrounded by trees. Every window had the same view, tall fir trees that blocked out the sun. I was fifteen years old when we arrived in America, on May 3, 1991. Later we would call that day Liberty Day, and celebrated it each year. Much later, when Khalid and Najiba and I lived together in our own place, we celebrated it there. I don’t celebrate it anymore—I guess I have truly become American now, and take my liberty for granted.

  The first order of business, according to the Professor, was learning English. Although I had been enrolled in a private English school in Pakistan I had never paid attention in class, thinking that if I learned English but never actually made it to America, I would be even more resentful of my fate. The Professor put an ad for a tutor up on the job board at the college where he taught, and one morning while we were still groggy with jet lag there was a knock at the front door. Before the Professor and Uncle A had left for work they told us a tutor was coming to teach us English and that we should open the door for her. Khalid was the oldest, so he answered. A girl in dark jeans and a gray T-shirt stood on the porch. She wore her curly hair in a high ponytail.

  We invited her to sit down at our dining room table. She put her hand on her heart and said, “My name is Jessica.” Aziz and Emal came out of the bedroom they shared with Khalid. They stared. How did this American girl get into our house? I sat down beside her and placed my hand on my heart. Outside I could hear crows arguing in the trees.

  “Saima,” I said.

  “Hello, Say-ma,” she said.

  “Sigh-ma,” I said. “Khalid, Najiba, Jamila, Aziz, Emal,” I said slowly, pointing out each one.

  “Okay,” she said, laughing. I could tell she was confused, and indeed, the entire time she came to our house she struggled with our names.

  When she left that day she shook our hands. Emal was seven months younger than me, and Aziz was thirteen, the same age as Najiba. They had never touched the hand of a female who was not a membe
r of our family. Khalid closed the door behind her. We watched through the front window as Jessica got into her little blue Honda and adjusted the mirror. I thought I saw her smile at herself. I remember feeling that I could never in a million years be a girl who wore jeans and drove a car and smiled for no reason. It all seemed so overwhelmingly impossible that I felt my eyes tear up. I should have stayed in the village, where I’d never have met this bright, happy girl and ached with desire to be just like her.

  WHEN WE WEREN’T sitting around the table trying to have a conversation with Jessica, the Professor wanted us to read. He took us to the local branch of the Multnomah County Library and got us each our own library card. Before handing them out the uncles made sure we understood the rules: educational books only, and no movies. Each day, to pass the hours, we walked down the hill to the local middle school, where we sat on the grass and read our library books and watched people play soccer.

  One hot day around lunchtime we were sitting in our usual spot atop a green hill overlooking the track and playing fields. We watched some people running laps, and I remember thinking Americans were crazy; in Afghanistan the only time people ran was to escape falling bombs and rockets. I leaned back on my arms. A breeze ruffled the leaves of some nearby trees. I couldn’t believe we were just sitting out in the open, without anybody bothering us. At home in Peshawar, on the rare occasions when we were allowed to leave the house, men stared at us. Once, when I was maybe ten years old, I put my grandmother’s eyedrops in my eyes because I was bored, or maybe because no one was watching and I thought it couldn’t hurt—after all, she was using them to get better eyesight. I went completely blind in both eyes for hours. I was terrified and cried and told Mamai I couldn’t see, and she panicked and wanted to send me to the doctor, who was just up the street. But I knew that I would have to walk past several shops, where the men out front would stare intently at me. I refused to go and told Mamai that I was already blind, did she have to subject me to the men, too? Of course, she forced me to go, and I was able to see just fine a few days later.

  After watching the joggers run around the track for a while, someone said it was time to go home for lunch. It was just another clear beautiful day in Oregon, and my arms and legs felt wonderful in the rare heat, unlike the oppressive heat of Peshawar. “I’m not ready to go home,” I said in Pashtu, at the time the only language we spoke with each other.

  “There’s that restaurant up the street,” said Khalid. “We could pool our money together and just get one thing and share.”

  I can’t remember how it was that we had money. The uncles must have given it to us, but why? We weren’t supposed to go anywhere except to the library and the playground of the middle school. I knew it would be dangerous—to disobey our uncles. My nerves banished my hunger, but I also felt I had to go with them. The Chinese restaurant was in a strip mall. Khalid opened the door and we all crowded inside. It was hot and smelled like grease—delicious. I stood inside the door and waited for something big to happen. This was the first time in my life I had ever seen the inside of a restaurant. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, respectable women didn’t go to restaurants, and so we weren’t even allowed to go out to eat when we were little. Khalid pointed to a picture on the menu above our heads—a noodle dish with sautéed vegetables. The man behind the counter wrote it on a slip of paper, then turned and threw a handful of vegetables onto the grill sizzling behind him. I couldn’t shake the feeling that my mother would disapprove of what I was doing, and yet at the same time I felt alive in a way I had never felt before. To do something that was frowned upon, not just by my mother but also by my uncles, and to not only get away with it but to end up eating something delicious as a result, was exhilarating. This is what freedom must be, I thought.

  By the time we took the food back to the middle school, extracted the six plastic forks from the take-out bag, and dug in, I was famished. The noodles were hot and greasy, the vegetables so bright and crisp; it was the first and best Chinese food I have ever eaten.

  It didn’t take long for us to expand the boundaries of our disobedience. One day we decided that after spending some time at the library we would take a walk and see what was on the other side of the road. A few doors down from the Chinese restaurant was a 7-Eleven, the likes of which I had never seen back home (although I hadn’t seen the inside of many stores at all). I was transfixed by the offerings at the 7-Eleven, the dozens of kinds of candy, the wall of coolers, the countless bottles of things to drink. While we decided which bag of chips we wanted—I had already developed a preference for barbecued—the buzzer would bleat, announcing kids our age busting through the doors. They headed to the far side of the store, where they bought huge paper cups of bright-blue icy drinks.

  We knew without talking about it that the uncles must never find out. The Professor and Uncle A had made it abundantly clear that they’d gone to the trouble and expense of bringing us to America so we could learn English, become educated, and then go back to Afghanistan. This seemed like the noblest of goals, maybe a little overwhelming for six teenage children, but I still felt honored and privileged to be part of it. We were told as soon as we got to America that we were not like other kids our age, and were not to behave like them. Anything that threatened to distract us from our mission, like selecting and buying potato chips, was absolutely forbidden. The first bag of chips I ate, therefore, came with a deep feeling of guilt, guilt that had nothing to do with their nutritional offenses.

  However, being children who had freedom of movement for the first time in our lives, we did disobey, again. There was a video store in the strip mall next door to the 7-Eleven. One day we walked inside, just to see what was there and look at all the pretty boxes lined up on the shelves. It must have been August, just before school started. The loud pink blossoms that had adorned the shrubs in our neighborhood had come and gone. The lawn at our middle school was turning gold.

  Inside the video store we walked up and down the aisles, trying to pronounce the names of the different movie genres: Family. Drama. Action. Classic. Even if we had wanted to rent a movie, we didn’t know how to do it, and had no money anyway. We were just looking—what harm could it do?

  We walked outside and saw a woman unlocking her car door who looked very familiar: the Professor’s secretary. She wore a long skirt and sandals and was carrying a white paper bag from the Subway next to the video store. Her face broke into a smile when she saw us. We heard her say a few of our names, then a slur of excited English. She patted my shoulder, because I was within reach. Behind me I could feel the collective gasp of my siblings and cousins. This was a disaster. We had been working with Jessica every morning, but we hadn’t learned any words even close to please don’t tell our uncle you saw us coming out of a video store!

  That night the Professor came home around six o’clock, his usual time. We were sitting in the living room reading our books. Soon it would be time to turn on ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. The Professor thought Peter Jennings’s English was worth emulating, so he required us to watch his news show every evening. He set his briefcase by the front door.

  “So, what did you guys do today?” he asked.

  We looked at one another, trying to figure out if this was a trick question. No one answered. He shook his head.

  “Juanita said she ran into you today. But it’s almost time for the news, so we’ll talk about this more on Sunday.”

  Sunday? I looked up and met Najiba’s worried gaze.

  An American parent or uncle might have marched into the house and started in, but the Professor and Uncle A preferred to deliver their lectures once a week, at a Sunday family meeting. We were Afghans. We didn’t talk about our issues or our feelings. Thus began the very much dreaded weekly tradition of Sunday meetings. At this first Sunday meeting, he told us that his secretary had indeed reported that she had run into us at the video store.

  “I’m not against movies,” he said. “Nor am I against renting m
ovies, but you will not rent movies. I will.”

  He nodded at each one of us. We sat with our heads lowered. I was fifteen and had only known the life of a Pashtun girl. Still, I couldn’t help thinking that what he said wasn’t true. He was against movies, and I knew he would never rent one for us. He issued our punishment: no TV. I snuck a look at my brother, since he was the oldest, to see his reaction. He was looking as terrified and guilty as I’m sure I did.

  SCHOOL WAS GOING to begin in September. So far, we had been wearing shalwar kameez at home, even when we went out to the middle school to sit around. But apparently the uncles had discussed it and decided that we were going to be outfitted in Western clothes. Uncle A took us shopping. Back home, we had never gone shopping for ourselves. Kaka bought our clothes, and I remember how much I had wished that I had been allowed to pick out my own. I would tell him to get me a brown shirt, and he would come home with a green shirt. At the time I thought he was just being cruel and didn’t even want to give me something as simple as a brown shirt. Years later, while taking him to an eye exam in Oregon, I would find out he was color-blind—only then did I forgive him for never getting me the right color all those years ago.

  Now that I was finally allowed to go out and choose my own clothes, I was unbelievably excited. I’m sure there were plenty of children being dragged to the mall for before-school shopping who would rather have been out playing, but for me, it was my dream of making my own choices coming true. That feeling would not last. As we followed Uncle A through one of the department stores, we passed a display of folded sweaters. A red one caught my eye. I showed it to Uncle A.