Breathtaking mountain chains framed my childhood home, a boundless vista
known only as “the Abode of God.” They were massive daggers of rock, full
of light the color of fire. Nestled between the peaks, hidden in soft pockets,
flowed rivers edged with villages made of mud and stone. And above it all, a
big blue dome of clear sky stretched out with no end. Across the valleys,
where corn grew and sheep grazed, there was sometimes no human in sight.
No sound. A person could walk for days across the plains and not see a soul
and yet feel God’s touch everywhere.
For me, that quiet and beautiful land is heaven. Still, when the world thinks
of my home, they envision an outpost of hell. South Waziristan is one of the
Federally Administered Tribal Areas of northwest Pakistan, but in reality it
governs itself through an ancient system of tyrannical tribal laws. Ax-shaped,
its 2,500 square miles of territory cut into the lawless and blood-soaked
border of Afghanistan, and it is the present-day headquarters of the Taliban.
My native land is considered the most dangerous place on earth, but it lives in
my mind as the tribal home I would go back to without a second thought if I
could—if no one there wanted me dead.
In the afternoons of my childhood, a steady breeze blew and the dancing
gusts shifted from warm to cool and back again. But as the weather changed,
before a storm or as the seasons slid one into the next, a new wind would
steal over the mountains, rushing through the peaks with long strips of cloud
and wrapping the ranges as though in thick reams of gauze. The nameless
foreign scents and, as I imagined, whole invisible worlds carried on that
sweet wind dared my mind to roam far beyond our quiet place between the
mountains.
That same breeze blew on the day I was born, November 22, 1990, in a
village like all the others, quiet and small, an insignificant speck nestled in a
wide green valley. My mother, Yasrab, was twenty-six years old and had no
help in giving birth to me—not a hospital or a doctor, and no medication of ny kind. Neighboring women came and went with cups of cool water, quick
whispers, and strips of clean cloth. Men left to pray at the mosque, eat
mangoes picked from the wild groves, suck on sugar cubes, and stayed well
away. The birthing room was kept dark and no one could hear a sound
through the locked door. When it was over, it would not really matter to the
clan whether my first cries were hearty or whimpering, or if I was born alive
or dead. I came into this world like my sister, Ayesha Gulalai, four years
before me—a girl, a blemish on the face of our tribe.
My father, Shams Qayyum Wazir, not yet thirty himself, was a liberated
man of noble blood, which meant that he was a renegade among Pashtun
men. Shams never once made my sister and me feel inferior to our brother,
Taimur Khan, who was born five years before me, or to the twin boys,
Sangeen Khan and Babrak Khan, who came as a double blessing when I was
four. Unlike in other Pashtun families, where the females were subservient to
the males, we all lived within our large mud-brick home as carefree equals.
Together, we adhered to our Muslim faith, observing feasts and fasts and
praying five times each day, but my father taught us that people the world
over found many ways to reach God. My family were freethinkers, and it was
that quality that would eventually make us outcasts within our conservative
tribe, at the same time as it liberated us.
*
Every inhabitant of Waziristan, North and South, is known as a Wazir; but
Wazir is also a name that refers to a sprawling Pashtun tribe among the many
that exist in our region, connected by the same Pashto tongue and governed
by our Pashtunwali code of honor, the ancestral laws that settle our many
blood feuds and rivalries. Though the Wazir are splintered into clans, we
come together as one at the hint of a foreign threat. No outside power,
however mighty, whatever their modern weaponry, has ever succeeded in
subduing the Wazir, or even occupied our ancient territory for a single day.
British imperialists, with their experience in conquering and colonizing,
unleashed legions of soldiers in uniform over the heart of Waziristan, only to
encounter fearless Wazir warriors who forced them back, massacring four
hundred British soldiers in a single afternoon, as my father once told me with
great smiling pride. To a guest in their home, Pashtuns will offer up their
every precious possession, but insult them once and they’ll have your severed..head in a sack before you so much as blink.
During my childhood, I saw no people but those of my blood, whom I
could recognize from just a glance. Even if they could get there, tourists
never visited my small thicketed-away portion of the world. Foreigners
wouldn’t manage a step onto our land before catching every dark Wazir eye.
Wazir people are heavyset and tall, with strong limbs and powerful wide
hands. In protecting their own, Wazir women are fearless, and their voices
thunder up and shake from deep inside their bodies. They used to say that
when a Wazir woman spoke, you had better listen. According to one legend,
our people are descendants of a famous Pashtun leader called Suleiman and
his son, Wazir. From their progeny, many tribes flourished and spread out in
vast human tributaries, consuming masses of land where they settled.
On a map, Waziristan appears like a patch sewn to the tattered edges of
Pakistan and straddling the Afghan frontier across the Preghal mountain
range. Shared bloodlines and an interwoven past, which began in the ancient
valleys of Afghanistan, spill across the border straight through the Khyber
Pass, part of the Silk Road. No boundary carved into stony ground by any
man with the muzzle of a rifle, or painted onto paper with the blood of
thousands, could ever cut deep enough to tear apart the tapestry of our
common lineage. Everywhere I went, my land, my people, my father
reminded me that I was a full-blooded Wazir. I am Wazir before all else.
Every memory I have of our first house, with its mud-covered pucca
bricks, begins the same way: a slow film opening in the silent morning, warm
sunshine thick over everything. In my home there seemed to be a magic in
the way the day was born, though it was always the same routine, like a
family anthem of activity playing out in every home and in every village. All
Pashtun mothers woke very early, before the first crow of the rooster. A tribal
mother required no alarm or even much forethought to go about her day. Her
duty—to set in motion the rhythm of the family—was as sacred and inborn a
task as the beating of her heart, and its momentum pried open her eyes,
however tired she might have been from the tedious domestic labor of the
previous day. In everything a Wazir mother did, she followed in the long,
rutted path of the mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers who
came before her. She was permitted no other way. She had no access to
television or newspapers or magazines, and even radios were scarce.
Knowledge itself was a stranger, not to be trusted—or even invited in.
I grew up with the accepted practice that a Pashtun woman remained in the home and only ventured out enveloped in head-to-toe garments called abayas
or burqas, or big shawls called chadors and with a male—even just a young
boy—watching at her side. To confine a woman in such a way—duty-bound
between four walls and hidden away inside her clothes—was known as
having her live in purdah, the conservative Muslim custom of secluding
women so that they may not be seen by men. This practice was never
questioned, in the same way a person would never question the direction of
the wind or the rising and setting of the sun. To outsiders, such a tradition
seemed like imprisonment, but to me, at least at that time, the women never
seemed unhappy dressed that way. There was a simple harmony in knowing
what we were all meant to do, where we all belonged. And we did belong—
to our station in the home and to our family’s position within the tribe. I
believed this until I stopped belonging.
I always imagined my mother’s waking imbued a living spirit into
everyone who woke after her—my father, my sister, my brothers, even me.
Before she rose to face her day, there was nothing at all but an infinite void:
no sky, no ground, no river, no spooned-out mountain valley to see. My
mother’s rising seemed to set the sun alight, just as she piled up wood and lit
the fires for cooking and fanned the smoke.
All through our mud house my family stirred in their dark, cool rooms that
smelled of earth, waking one after the other. For the good of the home, which
often contained several multigenerational families, Wazir mothers all rose
first and, like a gentle echo, the children next. Men, like long-slumbering
beasts, were always last to rouse. The younger men looked after the older
ones, shaving their leathery, time-creased faces and tending to their clothes
and hair. In Waziristan, many people lived in huge houses, walled-in
compounds with extended families all living together under a single roof—
aunts and uncles, cousins and grandparents, and, of course, the children. The
family always built the house together, and everyone had a position in its
hierarchy—the elders at the top—as though the family were a machine, each
person a moving part.
Even the birds, which we revered, had a special place among us. We
removed a single pucca brick from the wall of our front porch so that a
pigeon could make its nest there, and one always came and perched, finding
its place among us by some instinct that I never understood. Someone always
had the duty to break up the hard leftover bread into tiny pieces and feed it to
the bird so that it would stay.home and only ventured out enveloped in head-to-toe garments called abayas
or burqas, or big shawls called chadors and with a male—even just a young
boy—watching at her side. To confine a woman in such a way—duty-bound
between four walls and hidden away inside her clothes—was known as
having her live in purdah, the conservative Muslim custom of secluding
women so that they may not be seen by men. This practice was never
questioned, in the same way a person would never question the direction of
the wind or the rising and setting of the sun. To outsiders, such a tradition
seemed like imprisonment, but to me, at least at that time, the women never
seemed unhappy dressed that way. There was a simple harmony in knowing
what we were all meant to do, where we all belonged. And we did belong—
to our station in the home and to our family’s position within the tribe. I
believed this until I stopped belonging.
I always imagined my mother’s waking imbued a living spirit into
everyone who woke after her—my father, my sister, my brothers, even me.
Before she rose to face her day, there was nothing at all but an infinite void:
no sky, no ground, no river, no spooned-out mountain valley to see. My
mother’s rising seemed to set the sun alight, just as she piled up wood and lit
the fires for cooking and fanned the smoke.
All through our mud house my family stirred in their dark, cool rooms that
smelled of earth, waking one after the other. For the good of the home, which
often contained several multigenerational families, Wazir mothers all rose
first and, like a gentle echo, the children next. Men, like long-slumbering
beasts, were always last to rouse. The younger men looked after the older
ones, shaving their leathery, time-creased faces and tending to their clothes
and hair. In Waziristan, many people lived in huge houses, walled-in
compounds with extended families all living together under a single roof—
aunts and uncles, cousins and grandparents, and, of course, the children. The
family always built the house together, and everyone had a position in its
hierarchy—the elders at the top—as though the family were a machine, each
person a moving part.
Even the birds, which we revered, had a special place among us. We
removed a single pucca brick from the wall of our front porch so that a
pigeon could make its nest there, and one always came and perched, finding
its place among us by some instinct that I never understood. Someone always
had the duty to break up the hard leftover bread into tiny pieces and feed it to
the bird so that it would stay.In my village, every child had a simple task to complete. The girls always
looked after the youngest children before they themselves could eat breakfast.
Some walked with big buckets fully half their height to the stream that
wandered in a silver thread, bubbling with cool water, past the village. I
sometimes ran with my metal bucket, banging it with a broken stick, dry dust
from the hot ground swarming around my sandal-clad feet. In the high white
sun of summer afternoons, we went to the mountain stream in small,
chattering groups and jumped into the rippling water. Lotus-like flowers
adorned the surface, floating like delicate teacups.
By the time I came back to our house with the full bucket, heavy and
spilling over, my mother would already have finished preparing a breakfast
yogurt drink, made from churning fresh milk inside a barrel. There was the
smell of fresh naan bread, chopped mint, steaming pots of black tea. As soon
as the last men arose, the entire family assembled, the children all happy and
loud. The fathers sat quietly on silk mats against the walls. The women
moved among the group, slipping between sitting bodies like the stream into
whose cold current I’d just lowered my bucket, serving fresh, simple food,
such as small bowls of sliced fruit—all of us in the big warm kitchen that was
the heart of our house.
But the thing I loved best of all about morning in Waziristan was a quiet
ceremony that unfolded the moment I handed over the fresh water, having
played my part, which I think of now almost as a sacred duty. With this
water, my mother would dampen the earthen floor of our home, dunking her
hands in the bucket and letting big silver drops rain down with quick flicks of
her fingertips. Once the ground drank in the cool mountain water and it
softened, she would sweep and tamp it down, releasing a sweet, clean
fragrance from the moist clay. The soft perfume rose and traveled through
our house, its invisible beauty telling everyone that the long day had begun.
But before I was old enough to know that anything existed beyond our
idyll, we would have to leave it. My family moved out of that sprawling
house with its big airy rooms, far away from the hard-minded certainty.