My mother demanded order. She assigned Shahnaz to check the younger children’s homework each evening, and my sister learned her duties well. She was very strict and wasn’t afraid to hit any of us if our work wasn’t done correctly or neatly enough.
I wouldn’t start first grade until I was six, but Mommy prepared me for that day with constant reminders. “Education is like eating,” she said. If we weren’t learning, we weren’t growing. She had high expectations for all of us.
If my sisters and brothers weren’t doing well in school, she wasn’t happy. Attending school and then going off to college was an expectation for all of us—girls and boys—without distinction. Education was such a preoccupation of hers that I never gave a thought to the idea that in other parts of Afghanistan, children didn’t go to school or even have access to learning.
She often talked about college regretfully. She had wanted to get a degree in fashion design after high school, but then she married Padar and that opportunity closed to her because it was traditional that women didn’t work outside the home. Still she kept up her sewing, making dresses and shirts and blouses for all of us. Beautiful things for Shahnaz and Shapairi, who were older and could wear more fashionable skirts and blouses. She made dresses for me and Laila and Zulaikha.
One year she even sewed uniforms for my brother Ahmad Shah’s neighborhood volleyball team. He loved playing volleyball with his friends from school. So he talked Mommy into sewing uniforms for the guys who came over to play on our backyard court. They were fancy colored jerseys with numbers on the back. He was so proud of them that he decreed that anyone who came over had to be dressed in uniform to play.
While Mommy cared for the house and saw to the household staff and constantly monitored what Noor was cooking for the family meals, I was busy. My brother Zia, who was six years older than me, my sisters Zulaikha and Laila, and I were always together out in our yard or at our neighbor’s house. Zia and I were especially close. Vida, my younger sister, was too small to run and play in the games, so she stayed inside where the maids and Mommy could watch her. Outside I climbed trees in our orchard. I ran along the top of the wall that coursed between the expansive yards of our neighbors. I was fast, zigging and zagging at full speed as the wall made its way from one side of our neighborhood to the other. No one could catch me.
On occasion I did fall, bruising my knees, dirtying my clothes, and making a mess of myself. When I went home, Mommy would turn up her nose at me. “Look at you,” she’d say, and then huff a bit. Hands on her hips, she’d call Shapairi to come and take me away to the bath.
If Mommy kept an eye on how I cared for my clothes, part of her concern most likely came from the fact that she made almost everything I wore with her own hands. More so than any of my siblings, I loved to shop with her for fabric she would use to make my pajamas, dresses, and blouses. She taught me how to select fabrics for colors and patterns, and then at home I would stand beside her as she worked at her sewing machine. She taught me to thread the needle on the machine and how to hold the cloth as the machine stitched the material. Most of all, I enjoyed just standing next to her, which gave me comfort and assurance I needed. Those sessions with Mommy nurtured my sense of fashion, which grew, years later, into an entrepreneurial spirit to make a living owning clothing stores.
During Ramadan, when we fasted, Mommy was busy with Noor, making sure the large meals that we would eat each evening to break our fast were prepared properly. We fasted all day, only drinking some water or tea. In the evening we gathered around the family table and waited as Noor brought out the plates of rice and kebabs, and baklava for dessert.
Then there was Eid al-Fitr after Ramadan. Padar would give Shapairi money to buy us all outfits—three each. Each day of Eids, we’d wear a new one. A carnival set up not far from our house with rides and entertainment. My parents would take us, giving us money to buy tickets for rides. We’d always come home exhausted and dirty, our new outfits so filthy, Mother was appalled. The very next day, we’d do the same thing. The three-day holiday was one of my greatest memories.
Within months after their engagement party, Shahnaz and Saleem were married in a dazzling ceremony and celebration that took place at the Kabul Serena Hotel, with more than five hundred guests in attendance. Shahnaz moved in with Saleem’s parents. It’s the custom that sons don’t leave their parents’ house until they’re married for one year. They bring their new brides home to live for the first year.
After the wedding, the tone of our family dinners changed. It was as if Shahnaz leaving our home had caused a shift in the entire city of Kabul. Padar and Mother talked about the troubles with the government and about the protests in the countryside. It was concerning because Padar owned lots of farmland outside Kabul, and Mommy spoke often to the cousins that had attended Shahnaz’s engagement party, both of whom were far up in government. I overheard her many times speaking to them on the phone. She always had a sense of unease in her speech, as if something drastic was taking place. Both Shahnaz and Shapairi said Mommy could be so dramatic at times. I didn’t know what to make of it.
One day I asked Zia and Laila, who were smart about these things, what Mother was upset about. Laila explained that just before Shahnaz was married, the government had changed. The people who took over from President Daoud Khan didn’t like democracy. The new president was a communist. I had no idea what that meant, but my sisters’ schools had new books they wanted the students to read, so I knew it was different from the way things had been up till then.
“It means they don’t like freedom,” Zia told me one night.
Later, Ahmad Shah, my oldest brother, who had a real taste for gory stories, told us that when President Taraki took over, all of Daoud Khan’s family were shot: his wife, his children, his sister, his brother, and his grandchildren. They even killed his little baby granddaughter. Eighteen people, shot right in the Arg-e-Shahi, the presidential palace, the big one where the kings of Afghanistan have lived for centuries.
That sent shivers down my spine. The palace wasn’t far from our home. Padar had driven us by it many times on our way to the American embassy, where he worked. So many people killed, and little kids. Who would shoot little kids?
My mother loved Daoud Khan. She talked about him all the time. He had brought so much prosperity to the country, and now he was gone. No wonder she was sad all the time.
Dinners around Mother’s long Italian table were usually very talkative. Padar would tell us interesting things that were going on in the world. But after the government changed, so did the tone of our mealtimes. I heard more about the fighting taking place in the countryside and cities to the south. I didn’t know what all of this meant or how it could change my life. Laila often tried to explain things to me later, but it only brought up more questions. She did tell me that the communists were kicking teachers out of the schools who wouldn’t teach their ideas. University students were protesting, and Padar didn’t want us going near the campus. The army was beginning to draft more soldiers, and they talked about what Ahmad Shah would do as he neared graduation from high school. Padar didn’t want him to join the army. Mother was even more determined that he wouldn’t fight for the communists. Bits of fear slowly crept into our home through every conversation, but to me, danger had to be far away. Behind the whitewashed walls of our home on Shura Street, our life went on in the same patterns of school and play and friends. If life was changing outside the walls, I didn’t believe it could ever reach inside our home.