I Should Have Honor Page 4

  That was when he and my mother left the haveli and that life to start a new one on their own, hoping to grow a family far from traditional crimes and restrictions.

  To this day, I wonder what would have happened if my father had stayed, if like every son in that tribe, he had respected his father’s command. That day, a year before my birth, he did the most sinful thing he could imagine: he made his father cry by raising his voice to him. But to me, standing up for a daughter he had not yet even held in his hands was the most honorable thing. He saved my life.

  IN 1988, WHEN MY MOTHER was thirteen, she gave birth to her first child in the small mud room of our haveli in Balochistan. According to our tradition, it was in the presence of her mother and an elderly midwife. It was a boy! My father was working as a small-time journalist at a Sindhi newspaper in Hyderabad at the time. He worked hard and he was quite good at his job, but he was still able to bring in only some six hundred PKR (Pakistani rupees, the equivalent of six dollars) to the house each month. Even with his work, there were days when he and my mother had to collect old newspapers and cardboard to sell to the recycling man in town in order to buy rice or potatoes for meals. Still, they were happy. Like any young couple, they knew they had started on a journey that the two of them would figure out together as a team. Because of their poverty, the newborn was severely malnourished and desperately needed a blood transfusion to survive. My parents could hardly afford this, and in places like Hyderabad, preferential treatment is always given to those who can afford it. In an act of desperation and ingenuity, my father tapped his small network of journalist friends and put together a radio campaign to collect blood for his son’s transfusion. It worked. Soon my brother Ali was in good health.

  When my mother was not busy with childcare and keeping house, she was reading every book she could. Her favorite was a story about a sughar woman, meaning a woman who is good at everything, from cleaning house, to keeping track of budgets, to raising children. Sughar women were great role models. My mother wanted to be just like them, and eventually she was. She became the woman in our neighborhood to go to for haircuts, for sewn dresses, and for traditional ear and nose piercings. She was even consulted for advice on putting together a savings club for the local women.

  Only a year later, at the age of fourteen, my mother had me. Being a small girl still herself, she was weak when I was born. I was tiny, like a little chick with pale skin and bones that could be broken if someone held me too tight. Just like my brother, I was severely malnourished, but my condition was more severe because of the diarrhea that I had from birth. I quickly became extremely dehydrated.

  Within two weeks I became so frail and blue in the body that no one had any hope for my survival. They took me to many doctors, but none of them knew what to do with me. One day my aunts came to visit, to see my young mother and her ailing infant. They held me in their arms and cried. Together they mourned me.

  That was when—out of core indigenous belief—they decided to change my name. It is said that names can sometimes impact us negatively when they run against our character. My tribe believes that a name that matches our personality helps us feel lighter and stronger. Conversely, a wrong name can weigh us down and make us weak. My original name had been Zubaida. Now, together with my aunts, my mother decided to name me Khalida.

  The indigenous wisdom of my aunts worked where conventional medical knowledge failed. I not only survived but was soon on the road to recovery. Somehow the combination of those women’s faith in God, trust in intuition, and tribal wisdom cured me. My name is a reflection of that faith, and I honor it everywhere I go. We would later come to learn that Khalida means “immortal.”

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  I GREW UP TO be Aba’s little girl with two ponytails. When I was small, my father loved putting me on his shoulders and taking me outside. This was very unusual, as in my culture fathers do this only with their sons. I would hold tight to his hair as he walked. I loved the way the world looked from up high, the way my mother must have viewed it from the branches of her pomegranate tree back home. As Aba walked past, people stared at us, witnessing this strange bond of father and daughter. We passed shops, donkey carts, and cars. Some people would wave at me, and I would grin with pride, my tiny feet kicking my father’s shoulders. Later I would come to believe that Aba carried me on his shoulders to show everyone how special I was to him, and for me to see that my place was up above cultural restrictions. Rules couldn’t pull me down from my place in the world.

  To give my brother and me a good life, Aba sometimes worked three different jobs in a single day, while Ammi (Mommy) sewed dresses and pierced ears from home. They never let us feel what poverty meant. Aba would take Ali and me for outings on his motorcycle after he returned from work at night. We would sing songs while holding each other on the back of his bike as he drove fast in the streets of Hyderabad.

  When my sister Fatima arrived, we children began to overwhelm our seventeen-year-old mother while Aba was at the office. So Aba had a great idea: he would drop us off at the local library before he went to work. Although we couldn’t actually read yet, we loved it—the smell of books, row after row of information, stories, magic, and wonder. I would fly from shelf to shelf, hunting for the books with the pop-ups, while Fatima would play with an abacus, contentedly adding and subtracting beads from each wire. (Years later she would pursue a degree in business administration.) And Ali would concentrate on one book at a time, diligently looking at it, enraptured.

  Books were a big part of our lives. Some of my favorite memories are of my father taking us to get used books from a small roadside shack close to the city center in Hyderabad. He valued books so much that when friends and family came to visit us in our empty apartment, they would joke that we should make furniture from all the books.

  We moved many times while in Hyderabad, mostly when my father could no longer afford the rent. I had fun lugging our small load of possessions (mostly books) to a new house in rice sacks and bundled in scarves, blissfully unaware of the stress my parents must have been feeling. One of my favorite houses was in Bhitai Town, a small, well-built area on the outskirts of Hyderabad. It had a big jujube tree in the courtyard that was so tall, we could reach the berries only from the roof. Bhitai Town was where my father first made known his desire that I become a doctor. One of our neighbors was a rich Sindhi woman. My mother and aunts called her Appa (“Elder Sister” in Urdu). When she discovered my mother’s talents in embroidery, Appa paid her to make blankets and quilts. Appa often invited us to her house, where we sat on plush sofas while a decorated fan spun above our heads. This was a novelty to us, as we sat on woven straw mats at home. Appa bragged about her daughter, who served us chai and biscuits and sweets like gulab jamun (balls of fried chickpea dough soaked in sugar water). She sat next to us on the sofa in this tidy room, our slippers sprawled just outside the door.

  My father came with us sometimes, and it was there he saw how proud Appa was of her daughter who was studying to be a doctor. He started thinking he would be proud if I grew up to be a doctor too. I would be able to help all my relatives who suffered from illnesses, none of whom could afford treatment in Western-style hospitals. So long before I started school, my father had decided what he wanted me to be when I grew up. And even though it wasn’t what I would’ve chosen for myself, I took pride in it because it made my father proud.

  We moved once again, and one day in our new house, Aba and Ammi had no money to cook a meal. So we just sipped sulaimani chai (tea without milk) for breakfast. But that afternoon when Aba was at work, Ammi handed Ali and me some broken wooden crates to try to sell in the market outside our street. We felt very grown up and responsible. Ali and I happily made the ten-minute walk dragging the crates behind us. When we reached the place where the market connected with the road, there were so many people—men selling fruit and vegetables, some making pakoras (fri
ed snacks), some waiting for a bus—that it was confusing and overwhelming. Buses were loading and unloading people, and there was trash everywhere.

  We meekly went up to one of the fruit walas, who had many people standing nearby. Before we could ask him to buy the wood crates from us, he shouted at Ali for getting in the way. Ali was shocked and became ashamed. We quickly sold our crates for very little, bought some potatoes, and hurried home with our little hearts thumping in our chests. I will never forget the look on Ali’s face: it burned with resolve never to be poor again. He would later become a successful filmmaker.

  MY FATHER COULD NO LONGER afford to keep us in the city, and we had to move back to Kotri, back to the brick haveli that my parents had left five years earlier, near the train tracks. Most of the houses were illegally occupied, and many had no doors, only a quilt nailed over the entrance to create the illusion of privacy. Gutters of wastewater passed by each door, and dirty children played outside.

  We lived with our three uncles and a dozen cousins. My cousins were some of my best friends: Kalsoom, Jameela, and Sajda. We also played with a neighbor girl named Sima and of course my sister Fatima. Over the years we did many things together, from storytelling in bed, to giggling about puberty, to taking fresh dough to a local hotel (restaurant) to bake our rotis in their tandoor (in-ground oven). Our mothers would sometimes send us to get milk from a nearby waro, a dairy farm. Kalsoom and I would walk fifteen minutes to get there, hand them our buckets made of old vegetable oil cans, and wait until they milked the cows for us. When they handed our heavy tins back, the sweet scent of fresh milk would make us hungry. The foam topped to the brim looked delicious! So she and I decided that since our moms needed only the milk, we’d better eat the froth. The whole walk back to the haveli, we scooped it all up with our dirty index fingers.

  One of our favorite activities was to stand at the train tracks and wave at the trains as they passed, imagining where the passengers were headed. I loved seeing all the people sitting inside and peeking out through the windows. I would imagine stories for them. We would run to the tracks and stand just a few inches from the steel behemoth grumbling past, blowing hot wind, fumes, and dust into our faces as we frantically waved.

  Every afternoon my friends and I would play together in the dirt. We would put rocks in old plastic bags, swing the bags in the air, and let the rocks fly free, imagining they were headed to a different world that we couldn’t even visualize. Gutters connected the illegal homes of the poor community, including some immigrants from Afghanistan, and sewage from the industrial plants on the other side of the tracks made the dirt moist. Sima and I dug up the warm, wet clay and shaped it into dolls, because neither of us had real dolls. We made clay beds and sofas for them, like we had seen on TV at Appa’s house. As we played, the boys played with sticks and tires nearby, laughing. Men sat outside shops, talking about a cricket match or someone’s financial troubles. Women in long colorful scarves hurried past. We made fake henna tattoos out of mud and pretended to be brides.

  Mornings in Kotri were delicious. We woke up early to the scent of paratha (fried flatbread), chai, and khara (flaky biscuits), with the birds chirping and a rooster calling. We would run after trucks loaded with sugarcanes and grab some to peel and suck the delicious sweet juice. In the late afternoon, we were called inside the house to have chai with everyone. The smell of milk, water, sugar, and tea, mingling with the scent of wood burning as my mother or my aunt cooked in the haveli’s small kitchen; these are the aromas I associate with childhood.

  As I got older, I realized that some girls, like my friends Najma and Rubi, weren’t allowed to play outside. Like me, they were six or seven years old, but they wore long scarves even in the house. We would sit on the floor of their modest rooms, making dolls out of cloth or playing cham cham (pattycake).

  One of my favorite things about growing up in Kotri was the immense kindness people had for one another. Everyone was struggling, and families would help one another out whenever they could. I took pride in helping my mother cook for neighbors who had just moved in and perhaps didn’t have a fire to prepare their lunch. Or we collected children from the neighborhood to give them food. And sometimes we took food next door because we knew they might not be able to afford that day’s meal.

  Just like that, one day in the heat of the afternoon sun, my mother gave me a cup of gravy and roti and asked me to take it to my friend Sima’s house across the train tracks. I happily crossed the tracks and walked to the house, pushing my feet in the dirt the way I liked. I entered the house without knocking, as was my custom. I heard Sima crying, and then I saw her hugging her mother, who was also weeping. I froze, the roti and gravy still in my hands.

  Sima’s mother was being kicked out of her house. Her husband was divorcing her because she had “dishonored” him by visiting a female friend in the neighborhood without asking his permission. My mother was allowed to go out on her own; she did not have to report to my father, and he never became suspicious of what she was doing or whom she was seeing. With tears running down my eyes and nose, I ran home. I never saw Sima again.

  After witnessing Sima and her mother’s helplessness, I felt it important to have an education, in case my future husband did the same thing to me. I wanted to go to school as an act of rebellion more than anything else, to make myself stronger. I looked up to one person for a model of female strength—my cousin Khadija, the elder sister of Kalsoom. She was a beautiful girl several years older than me. Every morning she put on a crisp white uniform that she had washed the night before, and a long white shawl, and she carried her books in the crook of her arm. Khadija was the eldest daughter of my kaka Ali, my uncle on my father’s side. Perhaps because she was the eldest daughter, or perhaps because her fair skin and big eyes made her the center of everyone’s attention, she grew up to be self-confident, carrying herself with a great sense of pride. In cloistered, traditional village life, many interpret these features as signs of arrogance, but I looked up to Khadija with admiration and affection. I thought of her as an elder sister. I was captivated by the way she could be so silent and serious; she could gaze at you with a look that was so piercing, it seemed to be searching your very soul.

  People wagged their tongues when Khadija showed her love for education and fought to go to school. She was often seen reading a magazine or writing: people gossiped that now that she was educated, she wrote love poems. As the eldest of five sisters, she had started the revolution of education but was opposed not only by her community but by her own family.

  One day her mother (my aunt) put on Khadija’s school scarf while she washed dishes. Khadija asked her to take it off. It was her only scarf for school, and she took pride in wearing clean, crisp clothes. Her mother didn’t respond, intending to embarrass her. Khadija pleaded with her mother, who picked up the end of her scarf and cleaned her dirty teeth with it, yellowing it, proving her dislike for Khadija’s schooling. Khadija’s eyes filled with tears. Her mother felt immense peer pressure from her neighbors and her family to put her daughter in her place, but Khadija was resolved to rise above it.

  THE NEXT YEAR ABA HAD finally saved enough money to move us back to Hyderabad and educate us. He invited one male family member each from his and Ammi’s families to live with us and go to school with us.

  My first school was a government school where the boys wore dark yellow uniforms and the girls wore sky-blue-and-white dresses. But because I was the only girl in my class, I was allowed to wear whatever I wanted. Throughout my childhood I enjoyed wearing my traditional Brahui dress with the pocket in the front (which I always believed was there so you could keep your favorite things close to you). I wear these traditional dresses to this day.

  My favorite part of going to school was the long walk to get there. My cousins and I would climb over small sand dunes, pass through markets, even through the main hall of a local hospital, and finally make our way
through a fancy mall. I liked to look through the glass windows of the closed shops, especially a fancy toy shop that had dolls lined up on the shelves. I had only ever had my own handmade clay dolls, so when I saw a doll with two hearts on her cheeks, my heart exploded. She was plump and white-skinned, with big eyes. I wanted that doll so badly; I wanted to hold her and cradle her like a baby.

  I was a good student, and the teachers liked me. The boys were naughty, always pulling pranks on one another, but they didn’t dare say anything to me because I came to school with two boy cousins and a brother. At home, Ammi and Aba both took an interest in our schoolwork, asking questions and helping out. Aba used to give us homework himself. We had to write paragraphs from a chapter of our book on our black slates. We did it dozens of times to perfect our handwriting.

  Ammi and Aba always made sure we had time to do our homework, but because I was the elder daughter, I had the most responsibilities around the house. Fatima was still too little to help, and Ali was a boy. I did not like this. “Shonki!” my mother would call (meaning someone who wants too many things), asking me to wash the dishes or the clothes or clean the floors. I often cut the vegetables for Ammi to cook, cleaned the rice of small stones, wiped down the stairs, bathed the children, and scrubbed the dirty diapers. Sometimes I quarreled with my mother, refused to work, and hid in a corner to sulk.

  Then my father would come home and ask, “Where is my Khali?” My mother would angrily point to the corner where I was hiding. He’d bring me out on his shoulders.