The Favored Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page B

bibi, wife number three, could just never get along. One day, as the women sat on the floor eating naan for breakfast, the two began quarrelling. I was only about 18 months old, but I somehow sensed the enmity between them. I toddled over to Niaz bibi and yanked down hard on her plaits. 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, Bibi jan, is a very clever girl, just like her mother,” laughed my mother’s enemy, showering my face in kisses.
    Even at that early age I had a sense of the injustice of the position of women in our culture. I remember the quiet despair of the wives were 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 to beat her. I flew at him, kicking out at him and trying to protect her. He flung me aside with one arm.
    Once, he viciously tore out a chunk of her hair during a beating. Her brother visited a week later and, as was the custom, spent time with the men of the family, meaning my mother was unable to talk privately to him about what had happened. When he left my mother prepared his lunch for his long journey on horseback across the mountains home. She cleverly hid the locks of her torn-out hair in the wrapping. After a full morning’s riding, he stopped at 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. Her family support was unusual. Most women were encouraged not to complain about beatings and to endure them in silence. Often girls who fled to a family home would be returned by their father to the very husband who had hurt them. Beating a woman was normal, a 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 to her parents, whom she visited every year, and her brothers loved her. Her brother sat with her in the hooli garden and told her she was free to leave with him, that he would take her home, now, if that was what she wanted. At this time in her marriage she was at the point of despair, constantly depressed. She suffered splitting headaches, her stiffened hands didn’t work well due to the injuries she received from the beatings with the metal ladle, and she was tired of the constant humiliations of each new wife. She had had enough. She almost went through with the divorce.
    But she knew that leaving her husband meant losing her beloved children. In Afghan culture, as is the norm in most Islamic cultures, children stay with their fathers, not their mothers, after divorce. She couldn’t bear to give her children up and leave them behind, even if it meant an end to her own sufferings.
    She asked to see her children and looked into their eyes and faces. She said nothing, but told me years later she could see herself reflected in her children’s eyes. She couldn’t leave them. So she told her brother she would stay with her husband and her children, and that he should go home. Reluctantly he got back onto his horse and left. I have no idea how my father reacted after her brother left. Did he beat my mother again for her insolence and for daring to tell her brother? Or was he tender and kind and regretful, realizing just how close he had come to losing the woman he needed? Probably a bit of both.
    I remember my sisters being married off one by one. The first sister to be married had a trousseau brought specially from Saudi Arabia. Caskets of fine cloth and gold jewels befitting the importance of the marriage of a daughter of Abdul Rahman were brought to the hooli and unpacked with care as we all