The Favored Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page A

president. He was vocal in his criticisms of the new regime and put pressure on Dawoud to bring back the constitution and reinvest parliament with power. The rumblings of political discontent were heard across the country. Unemployment was rising, social problems were increasing, and Afghanistan’s neighbors, Pakistan and the USSR in particular, were once more beginning to play out their own political strategies on our soil.
    In these days my father was mostly needed in Kabul and was rarely home. When he was away our house was relaxed and children’s laughter rang through the rooms. But when he was there, the women of our household nervously floated down corridors, preparing meals for his guests and trying to keep the children silent so as not to disturb him.
    My friends and I were generally happy when my father was home because we could be as naughty as we liked and steal chocolate, safe in the knowledge my mother was too busy worrying about him to stop us.
    I have few real memories of my father. I remember him always walking, wearing a shalwar kameez. He wore a smart brown wool waistcoat over it, and he always had his sheepskin hat on and his hands clasped tightly behind his back. The hooli had a long flat roof, and in those days he would walk along it for hours and hours. He would start pacing back and forth in the afternoon and continue through the evening. He was just walking and walking and thinking, and always in the same position, with his hands behind his back.
    I think I had a sense even then that was my father was a great man. That whatever the stresses and troubles he brought home to us, even the beatings, were partly because of the pressure he was under. The pressure of maintaining a home and extended family the size of ours, the pressure of politics, the pressure of representing some of the poorest people in Afghanistan. He barely had any time to himself. When he was home our guest house, a single-story dwelling at the back of the hooli, was always full with visitors, those seeking his advice or his wisdom to solve a family dispute, those bringing news of errant tribes or violence in the mountains, the desperate and the needy wanting his help. His door was closed to none of them, and light relief was something he had no time to enjoy. How then could he be blamed for demanding the most from his family?
    I don’t condone my father’s behavior in beating my mother the way he did, of course, but those times were different and it was the norm. And I know at other times he was a good husband to her, as much as tradition allowed. Perhaps today I understand him more than ever because I understand his workload. I understand the pressure of politics, the feeling of never having any time alone or free from duty, the burden of responsibility. I think my mother understood that too, and it was why she endured so much.
    Under the sharia law system my father espoused, a man is supposed to show justice to all of his wives equally, sharing himself without favor among them. I too believe in sharia justice. In its purest forms it is a fair system because it is a system based on Islamic values of justice and is what all Muslims should believe.
    But affairs of the human heart are different, and in polygamous marriages it is bound to fail. How can a man help it if his heart prefers some wives over others?
    My father’s suite of rooms was called the Paris Suite, decorated with hand-painted murals by an artist brought especially from Kabul. The room had two windows looking out over an apricot garden, and in the summertime the room was washed in a cool apricot-scented breeze. No modern air conditioning could ever come close to that natural coolness which was coupled with a delicate scent.
    Each night he was home, a different wife shared his bed. The only wife who didn’t go there was his first wife, the Khalifa. In order to take more wives than the sharia-allowed maximum of four, my father divorced two of his