There. Did you see her? There goes the girl with half a face. Didn’t I tell you she was horrid looking? God only knows what they did to deserve that.
Even her aunts and uncles would shake their heads and cluck their tongues every time they saw her, as if every time they were freshly disappointed and shocked to see what she looked like. Her cousins came up with twisted names for her. “Shola face,” as her skin resembled the lumpy soft rice. “Babaloo,” or monster. That one she hated more than the others, since she too was afraid of the babaloo, the creature that frightened every Afghan child in the night.
Shafiqa tried to keep her sheltered from the comments, the jeers, the stares, but it was too late to save Shekiba’s self-esteem, a commodity people didn’t value much anyway. She covered Shekiba with a burqa when she saw people approaching their home or on the rare occasion when the family ventured into the village.
Remember, “Shekiba” means “a gift.” You are our gift, my daughter. No need to let others gawk at you.
Shekiba knew she was horribly disfigured and that she was lucky to even be accepted by her immediate family. In the summers, the burqa was hot and stifling but she felt safer within it, protected. She was not exactly happy but was satisfied to stay in the house and out of sight. Her days passed with fewer insults that way. Her parents withdrew even more from the clan, and the resentment toward Shafiqa’s aloofness grew.
Tariq and Munis were both energetic, and being just a year apart in age, they could pass for twins. When they were eight and nine, they were helping their father with the fieldwork and running errands in the village. They usually ignored the comments they heard about their “cursed sister” but Tariq had been known to throw back insults from time to time. On one occasion, Munis came home with scattered bruises and a foul temper. He’d had more than he could take of the local boys pestering him about his half-faced sister. Padar-jan had gone to the boy’s home to make amends with his parents but he never reprimanded Tariq or Munis for defending their Shekiba.
Aqela, always smiling, would sing nursery rhymes in her sweet bulbul voice and kept her mother and Shekiba’s spirits lifted as they did the chores. They were happy keeping to themselves. They didn’t have much, but they had everything they needed and never felt lonely.
In 1903, a wave of cholera decimated Afghanistan. Children shriveled up within hours and succumbed in their mothers’ weak arms. Shekiba’s family had no choice but to use the poisoned water that coursed through their village. First Munis, then the others. The illness came quickly and it came strong. The smell was unbearable. Shekiba was stunned. She saw her siblings’ faces grow pale and thin in days. Aqela was quiet, her songs reduced to a soft moan. Shafiqa was frantic; Ismail quietly shook his head. Word came from the compound that two children had died, one from each of Shekiba’s uncles.
Shekiba and her parents waited for their own bellies to begin cramping. They nervously cared for the others, watching each other and waiting to see who else would become ill. Shekiba saw her father put his arms around his wife’s shoulders as she rocked and prayed. Aqela’s skin was graying, Tariq’s eyes were sunken. Munis was quiet and still.
She was thirteen when she helped her parents wash and wrap Tariq, Munis and Aqela, the songbird, in white cloth, the traditional garb for the deceased. Shekiba sniffled quietly, knowing she would be haunted by the memory of helping her moaning father to dig the graves for her teenage brothers and delicate Aqela, who had just turned ten. Shekiba and her parents were among the survivors.
It was the first time in years that the clan made an appearance. Shekiba watched her uncles and their wives come in and out of the house, paying their obligatory respects before moving on to the next home grieving their dead. It went without saying that they pitied Shekiba’s parents, not so much for the loss of their three children, but for the disappointment that Allah could not have spared one of the sons instead of the defective girl. Luckily, Shekiba was numb by then.
Thousands died that year. Her family’s losses were notches on the epidemic’s belt.
One week after her three children were buried, Shafiqa began to whisper to herself when no one was looking. She asked Tariq to help her with the water pails. She warned Munis to eat all his food so that he would grow up to be as tall as his brother. Her fingers moved through the yarn of the blanket as if she were braiding Aqela’s hair.
Then Shafiqa started sitting idly, plucking individual hairs from her head, one by one, until her scalp was bare; then her eyebrows and lashes disappeared. With nothing left to pluck, she resorted to picking at the skin of her arms and legs. She ate her food but gagged on pieces that she had forgotten to chew. Her whispers became louder and Shekiba and her father pretended not to notice. Sometimes she would listen and then giggle with a lightheartedness alien to their household. Shekiba slowly became her mother’s mother, making sure she bathed and reminding her to go to sleep at night.
A year later, in the same dismal month of Qows, Shekiba’s languishing mother decided not to wake up from sleep. It came as no surprise.
Ismail held his wife’s hands and thought how tired they must be from all the wringing they had endured. Shekiba brought her cheek to her mother’s and saw that her eyes had lost their desperate glassiness. Madar-jan must have died looking at the face of God, Shekiba thought. Nothing else could have brought the look of peace so quickly.
The house sighed in relief. Shekiba bathed her mother one last time, taking care to wash her bald head and realizing that her mother had even plucked the hairs from her womanly parts. The weight of sadness lifted. Her corpse was shockingly light.
By the following day, Shekiba and her father were back in the field to open the earth once more. They did not bother to tell the rest of the family. Her father read a prayer over the mound of dirt and they looked at each other, quietly wondering which of them would join the others first.
Shekiba was left with her father. A cousin stopped by to tell them of an upcoming wedding and took back news of the new widower to the rest of the clan. The hawks descended on the house within days, extending their condolences, but only after they advised Shekiba’s father that he now had the opportunity to begin again with a new wife. They named a few families with eligible daughters in the village, most of them only a few years older than Shekiba, but her father was so heartbroken and fatigued that his family could not manage to arrange a new wife for him.
Shekiba came of age with only her father to turn to, his sparse words, his lonely eyes. She worked beside him day and night. The more she did, the easier it was for him to forget that she was a girl. He began to think of her as a son, sometimes even slipping and calling her by her brothers’ names. The village chattered about them. How could a father and daughter live alone? Sympathy gave way to criticism and Ismail and Shekiba grew even more distant from the outside world. The clan did not want to be associated with them and the village had no interest in a scarred old man and his even more scarred daughter-son.
Over the years, Ismail lulled himself into believing that he had always lived without a wife and that he had always had only one child. He managed by ignoring everything. He was the only person who did not see Shekiba’s marred face and did not notice that, as a young woman, she might need some direction from a female. When she bled every month, he pretended not to smell the soiled rags that she would keep soaking and hidden behind a stack of logs in their two-room home. And when he heard her shed tears, he shrugged her sniffles off as a touch of flu.