I Should Have Honor Page 2

  My grandfather had paid a visit to his four brothers in the village of Gandakho, in the district of Larkana, Sindh, which borders Balochistan. The same district of the great family of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and his daughter Benazir Bhutto, who would both lead the country as popular prime ministers. Bhalla Aba’s brothers lived there with their families working as day laborers in the fields of landlords. My grandfather once lived among his brothers, but after the great floods that hit Sindh in 1973, he fled to Balochistan and bought the land where their mud haveli stands today. It was a wise decision, because more floods plagued the province after he moved. Many families lost everything, but his brothers refused to give up the lives they had created, believing their chances of earning more income were greater in Sindh than in Balochistan, where the land is more rocky and dry. People in Balochistan live mainly on wage labor, shopkeeping, or herding sheep rather than agriculture.

  My grandfather would occasionally get on the bus and make the eleven-hour journey through the mountains on Wangu Road to visit his brothers. This time he had just returned from a trip there, during which he discovered that his youngest brother had fallen in love with a girl he had seen at a wedding. She was also Brahui but a member of the Jattak clan. He and his brothers were members of the Mengal clan. Marriages between different clans were not common, but they were also not impossible. It was, and still is, common for clans that don’t mix often to swap girls for marriage. To make up for the lack of trust, a daughter from the groom’s clan will be married to a son in the bride’s clan. If one clan harmed the bride, the exchange bride would have to face the consequences. About 30 percent of all marriages in Pakistan are these exchange marriages, commonly known as wata sata.

  My grandfather had accompanied his brothers to go ask for the hand of the girl his youngest brother had seen at the wedding. When they did, her father had demanded a badli—an exchange. This was hard as all the brothers were young, with no children or no daughters. Then my grandfather thought of his four daughters, who were still very young. He loved them dearly, but for a brother one must give his life! He put forward the offer of my mother, the eldest of his girls, as the badli. My uncle’s bride and my mother acted as a kind of collateral for each other. It was a moment of great pride and honor for all the men. The sacrifice that Bhalla Aba was offering was like giving one of his limbs. It made his brothers proud. None of them considered the consequences to the lives that they were trading like livestock, because these lives were their only sources of wealth, their only valuable possessions. To trade them showed not only their power but also their generosity.

  So while Bhalla Aba’s brother was going to be happily marrying a woman of his choosing, my nine-year-old mother was to be offered to three different men in the Jattak family, starting with the eldest, Liaqat, who was about thirty at that time. Liaqat refused immediately, having heard of my mother’s frail thin body, saying she was too ugly. The second son to whom she was offered (age twenty-eight) already had several children who were the same age as my mother. He refused her as well with the same words, adding that he could find a second wife anytime he wanted. And so the decision was made for Noor Jehan to be given to the second-to-last son in the family, Sikander, who at the time was only thirteen and the only one among them striving for an education.

  Sikander was different from his brothers. Aside from being the second youngest, he was also the most curious. He somehow knew that there was a much bigger world beyond the walls of his family hut, beyond the village, beyond Pakistan even. And he was inspired to discover it. While all his brothers proudly went to work in the fields with their father, he dreamed of leaving his small world and being educated. He loved to read books and even dreamed of owning a library one day. He awoke every morning at four to walk for hours on the dirt road that led to the village next to his to attend the closest school. When he arrived at the school, the wind had often blown so much dirt on his face that the teachers failed to recognize him and refused to let him in. So he would find a puddle or trough of water and scrub his face, return to the classroom, identify himself—and walk into his world of education, his road out of poverty and into a new life, a world of his own making.

  My paternal grandfather, Allah Ditta (God Given), was a stern conservative man with a booming voice and strict values. He nonetheless encouraged Sikander in his quest for education, after seeing how committed he was. And because Sikander had their father’s approval, his elder brothers had often bought him a notebook or a pen from their modest wages. They were oddly inspired by their curious little brother. They lacked his drive but were proud to be able to support him. The eldest, Liaqat, took a particular interest in encouraging him, buying him oil paints (which he used to paint a big Pakistani flag on the mud walls of their house) and pictures of prominent politicians as if from some distant land. Liaqat encouraged Sikander to dream of a life in politics, maybe even in Islamabad, an inconceivably distant place for the son of a poor farmer.

  But the exchange marriage to my mother challenged all my father’s dreams. Getting married as a child was not part of the plan he envisioned for himself: he saw it as a trap to keep him from realizing his potential. On the day his brothers and father came to tell him about his upcoming marriage, he was sitting on the floor of their bamboo shack, studying from his geography textbook.

  The shock froze his face. “But Father!” he said. “I have more studies, and so much more to learn!”

  His father, though torn, knew he had indulged his son’s fantasies long enough. His tradition demanded an exchange, and a bride had to come to this house to keep the honor of this family.

  “A bride won’t stop you from getting an education!” he replied sternly, and left the room.

  And so it was settled. The nine-year-old girl would marry the thirteen-year-old boy.

  NOOR JEHAN, BLISSFULLY UNAWARE, CAREFULLY spread her worn yellow scarf with the big red flowers and bright green leaves over the dirt floor. She gleefully took her only dress, the baby’s cloth diapers, some baby clothes, and a bag of chips that her second eldest brother (who secretly was her favorite) had sneaked to her from his wage money. She placed all these things in the middle of the scarf, gathered the four corners, and tied them tightly. She tucked the bundle under her arm, happily rejoining the family outside. She was ready for the journey to Sindh.

  Meanwhile Bhalla Ama was bathing the infant in a big tin plate that my mother often used to wash clothes. Her foot firmly planted in the plate, she held the baby straddling her ankle with one hand while using the other to scoop warm water over her. Bhalla Ama had not shown any signs of joy at this sudden trip, which surprised Noor Jehan. In fact, her mother was quieter and a little more preoccupied with her thoughts than normal. Everyone knew Bhalla Ama didn’t show her joy on the outside. She considered it unladylike to giggle and chortle. Only the occasional warm smile told those who knew her that she was in fact happy. But today Noor Jehan saw no trace of a smile on her mother’s face.

  My mother knew that Bhalla Ama had been married off at eleven to Bhalla Aba, who was ten years older than she. It is common in my culture for guests in a house to catch a glimpse of the young women, maybe even be served by them. Sometimes those glimpses turn into marriage proposals. Many times families will hide their women before guests arrive to preserve their purity and avoid such proposals. Declining a proposal can cause lasting strife between two families. In the case of my grandmother, she had caught the eye of Bhalla Aba’s parents for her grace and maturity. And because she was old enough to have children, her parents agreed to marry her off, receiving a sum of money in exchange. She had lived a life of difficulty, poverty, and diseases. She worked hard and through her wisdom transformed the heart of her husband.

  “Sabr,” Bhalla Ama would tell my mother years later, “sabr [patience] is the true virtue of a woman. If I hadn’t had patience, today we would not be living this good life. Do remember that, my daughter,” she wo
uld repeat over and over. And my mother would promise to remember, because in her heart she knew one thing about Bhalla Ama—she never lied.

  Noor Jehan was not given any details about what was happening that fateful day, and it would likely have been difficult to help her understand. She was only nine. Unlike her mother at her wedding, she showed no signs of puberty. Her childhood was cut even shorter than that of her peers. To this day, my mother’s eyes fill with sadness at the thought of never having said a proper goodbye to her mud haveli, or to that old pomegranate tree and the fabric doll she left behind, or to those friends playing in the corner of the street and giggling as their eyes twinkled in the sunlight.

  But in that moment, the excitement of going to a foreign land had overcome any other thoughts in her mind. She sat next to Bhalla Ama on the brightly painted bus, staring out the window in anticipation as the road moved fast beneath her. She enjoyed imagining the stories of the people she saw through the windows. She admired their mud houses and the mountains beyond the ones she had known. When the bus stopped to let passengers on and off, fruit or snack walas (vendors) on the side of the road would pass coconut pieces, water, or chips through the windows to eager hands. It was exciting to share sweets with her family and gaze eagerly at the sights sweeping by. As night fell and the road became black, the sound of sweet love songs playing on the radio and the gentle heaving of the road lulled her to sleep.

  The next morning, as the sun spread in the sky, breaking the darkness over vast green fields, the trees swung in the wind. Finally the bus arrived at a small open ground, its final station. My mother smiled with sleepy eyes and a happy heart. She had already fallen in love with this new land, with its wind, with the herds of cows churning dirt beneath their hooves. There were no mountains, only flat green fields of rice, okra, wheat, and sunflowers, but they filled her heart with joy.

  The family went to the village where my mother was to meet her young husband. She was still oblivious to what was happening. They were greeted at the gate and led inside. As she passed, the women of the haveli stared and whispered to one another. As she sat in this strange home taking in the new surroundings, she didn’t know that her hosts were judging her. They were disappointed. They had given up a beautiful girl in marriage to an unknown family and received in exchange, they realized, a tiny, skinny girl. My mother, malnourished and chronically anemic, was not much to look at. So my father’s family demanded further compensation—not just one but two girls—from my mother’s family. It was decided that the firstborn girl of my maternal uncle would be married into my father’s family. With one word, the elders made the decision. Phidi, which means “from the belly,” was the ritual, and it was marked on a stone.

  In this way—in one brief moment—a gathering of men, a few quiet women, and some religious leaders sealed the fate of three women across two generations. I grew up to know it as a woman’s fate. My aunts would say to one another, “It’s our fate, my dear one, sob as much as you want. Go in a corner and shed your tears, but you come back to this house, to this reality, and in the end it’s you who faces it all. So just accept it.”

  AMID VAST FIELDS OF GREENS and yellows, with purple flowers, large trees, and small streams running throughout, lay the village of Satanave, where my father grew up. Sindh, with its beauty and ancient culture, has been home to renowned Sufi poets, artists, and lovers. Songs in this land praise the countryside, the sky above it, and the beautiful channel that the vast Indus River carves through the heart of this province. Sindh is a place of color, music, and simple people, the majority living in small shacks made of bamboo, hay, and tree trunks, like my father’s. Unlike Balochistan, the land in this part of the country is flat, wet, and suitable for farming, and it is more heavily populated. The provincial capital, Karachi, is the biggest city in Pakistan and also its financial center. But Sikander, born into a family of five brothers and four sisters, was far removed from urban life. The son of a sharecropper, he was the second-to-last brother, and like every boy in his village, he was expected to generate income for his family. While his elder brothers helped their father in the fields growing rice and wheat for rich landlords who paid them a pittance, my father, at the age of four, was assigned to herd goats with his same-age friend Durroo, for his house and for the neighbors’.

  Every morning after breakfast, which included a cup of sweet chai and dried roti (flatbread baked over an open fire), he went along with Durroo to herd goats in the neighborhood lands. They would walk, sometimes barefoot, sticks in hand, with about a dozen goats ahead of them. Sometimes they sang or hummed a Sindhi song that they had heard on the radio. Sometimes Durroo would talk and my father would daydream, a habit that stayed with him into adulthood. As a child, he could easily walk into a dream in the bright of day. He would think about and analyze everything, from strategies to win at playing marbles, to how the stars hung in the sky, to why his father, Allah Ditta, gave such importance to people from a certain caste.

  Sikander, though very young, had an intuitive sense of justice. He had developed a dislike for those given special and unearned treatment. He knew his father was not a very educated man, but to sit, as his father did, at the feet of men and ask for their prayer simply because of their heritage—and they were not necessarily good people—felt very wrong to him. As a young boy, my father was already questioning the culture and traditions he’d been raised in.

  While herding goats one quiet day, Sikander hummed and chatted with Durroo. The sun rose high over their heads, marking the afternoon. When they came to a lush green pasture, they stopped the herd, sat down, and opened their meals that his sister had packed that morning: jaggary (raw cane sugar) atop freshly made roti, tied inside a piece of fabric so that the warm bread melted the sugar into a delicious sticky syrup. As Durroo and my father ate, they gazed up at the big blue sky that enveloped their small familiar world, cherishing the day’s stillness. It was hot, but a soothing breeze occasionally made the trees in the distance dance, which my father found delightful.

  As the sun set on this ordinary day, Durroo was sleeping next to the river. Sikander came out of his thoughts and noticed that something was wrong with the goats. They were not moving. He took his stick and went to investigate. To his horror, he discovered they were desperately bloated and in distress. It turned out that while the boys ate and daydreamed, the animals had overgrazed on alfalfa. The goats were in severe pain and could not be saved. None of them survived—a tremendous loss for the family. Allah Ditta, ashamed of what his son had done, punished him for his mistake by sending him to school.

  In the village where my father was raised, school was for useless boys, a place for those who couldn’t contribute to their family’s livelihood. It was a complete disgrace for a boy my father’s age. Boys were expected to have honor, a child’s version of their fathers’. They were expected never to cry or show signs of hunger, to carry heavy things and fix problems around the house, to escort and safeguard their sisters (the honor of their fathers), and to help put food on the table. Being sent to school was shameful because it indicated weakness and an inability to earn income.

  But my father’s disgrace would one day become the reason for the education of his six daughters and the prosperity of countless women and men across Pakistan.

  From the moment my father first opened a textbook to learn to read, the world suddenly expanded for him. Being the first in his family to go to school, he soon discovered what an incredible treasure they had all missed. His shame and disappointment were replaced with an urgency—an unquenchable thirst—and a lifelong determination to become a man who could help not just his family but his community, and to change some of the systems he disliked so much.

  My father set goals for each year, each month, and each day to study and to read and to learn. On hot nights he often sat with a candle and a book under the enormous water pot stand, because that was the coolest place. On days he knew he woul
d be disturbed from his studies, he would walk far from his hut and sit under the trees reading about history, geography, and other cultures and traditions, his mind and heart expanding with every word, until the sun set.

  NOOR JEHAN’S NEW FRIENDS AND her little sisters stood below the jujube tree in her uncle’s yard as she climbed up to pick the round, ripe fruit. One of her sisters would hand her a stone, and she would throw it at the branches loaded with jujubes. The girls below would run to collect the fallen fruit in their colorful scarves and rub them on their shirts before popping them into their mouths. From the top of that tree, Noor Jehan spotted a procession of women in bright and shining clothes making their way into the haveli.

  The women sang Sindhi and Brahui songs in high-pitched voices, holding their infants to their chests, as their uneven makeup crumbled with the humidity. Their preparations had been made in haste, running off to a wedding in chaos. Women in villages have dozens of things to do before they leave for anything: prepare lunch for the whole family, fold the beds and the clothes, bathe the kids, and so on. Only after preparing everything for their husbands and children can they get ready themselves. In that haste, all they can often manage is to pat round patches of blush onto their cheeks, smear dark red lipstick on one lip so that it would spread to the other lip over the course of the day, and smudge kohl on their eyes. Makeup is not a common thing in the villages, but if someone in that village has a TV, slowly the word will spread about how makeup is necessary for women. Soon cheap makeup stalls will spring up on the street corners that older women in long veils will walk to in herds to buy for the younger ones who are not allowed to buy for themselves.