Letters to My Daughters Read Online Free PDF

a difficult situation arising and take evasive action.
    Her strategy was kindness. She could have beaten the younger wives and made them do the hardest work, but instead she tried to create a happy house in which all the children were loved equally and where wives could work together as sisters and friends. When one of the younger wives was caught stealing from the household food store, a large locked cellar at the back of the kitchen, my mother didn’t tell my father, knowing that he would give the miscreant a vicious beating. Instead she dealt with the matter in secret. This strategy slowly earned her the others’ gratitude and loyalty.
    Only one wife, number six, was chosen not for her political usefulness but for her practical homemaking skills. She was a stunningly beautiful Mongolian woman selected for her ability to weave the most beautiful rugs and carpets. She taught my mother this art, and I would watch as they sat together in comfortable silence for hours, their hands rhythmically spinning and threading the richly coloured yarn.
    But my mother’s best friend was wife number four, Khal bibi. She called my mother Apa, elder sister. Once, my mother became sick with a serious eye infection, and in the absence of doctors in the village a female elder suggested that if someone were to put their tongue on the eye and lick it clean each morning, the natural antibiotic in the saliva would heal it. Such was their closeness that Khal bibi volunteered without hesitation. Each day for eight weeks, she licked my mother’s swollen, pus-filled eye until, just as the elderly lady had promised, it healed.
    My mother did not have such a relationship with wife number three, Niaz bibi, with whom she could never get along. One day, as the women sat on the floor eating naan for breakfast, the two began quarrelling. Although I was only about eighteen months old, I somehow sensed the enmity between them. I toddled over to Niaz bibi and yanked down hard on her braids. She gasped with shock and began laughing, taking me in her arms and cuddling me. She and my mother forgot their quarrel and both laughed out loud. “This one is a very clever girl, Bibi jan, just like her mother,” laughed her enemy, showering my face with kisses.
    Even at that early age, I had a sense of injustice about the position of women in our culture. I remember the quiet despair of the wives who weren’t loved or noticed by my father and the trials of those who were. I recall watching in horror once as my father chased my mother along the corridor and began beating her. I flew at him, kicking him and trying to protect her. He flung me aside with one arm.
    Once, my father viciously tore out a chunk of her hair during a beating. Her brother visited a week later and, as was the custom, he spent time with the men of the family so my mother was unable to talk privately to him about what had happened. Before he left, my mother prepared his lunch for his long journey home across the mountains on horseback. She cleverly hid the locks of her torn hair in the wrapping. After a full morning’s riding, he stopped in a clearing for lunch, unwrapped his food and found his sister’s hair. He understood the message immediately, mounted his horse and galloped straight back to our house, challenging my father and telling my mother her family would ensure she would be granted a divorce if she wanted it.
    This family support was unusual. Most women were encouraged not to complain about beatings and to endure them in silence. Girls who fled to a family home to escape a violent marriage would often be returned by their father to the very husband who had brutalized them. Beating was a normal part of marriage. Girls grew up knowing it had happened to their mothers and grandmothers and expecting it to happen to them.
    But Bibi jan was close with her parents, whom she visited every year, and her brothers loved her. Her brother sat with her in the hooli garden