The Favored Daughter by Fawzia Koofi

Here I was, dressed in a burqa, while being led on a horse. I felt like I had regressed to my mother’s or grandmother’s generation. At that moment it looked like neither my country nor my life was ever going to progress into something better.
    We rode out of Faizabad and on to my brother’s house. It was several days’ riding and the roads were very poor, barely even dirt tracks. I had taken control of the horse, so I was pleased with myself. The burqa still made it difficult for me to ride, especially when trying to steer the horse around corners. With my restricted vision I was very disoriented. And if the horse stumbled in a hole it was very hard to retain my balance.
    As night fell we came to a village where we could rest. Although we had only been traveling a day, already I could see the differences in the people. The village women were very welcoming and were eager to talk to the new arrivals. As we spoke I noticed how filthy their hands were, black with dirt from long, hard days working in the fields and irregular bathing. Their clothes were those of simple rural peasants, which I suppose shouldn’t have surprised me, but I just couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow I had gone back in time. First the burqa, then the horse, and now the dirty village women who lived their lives in much the same way as their grandmothers and their grandmothers before them—it was like watching my country’s future unravel before my eyes.
    When I woke I found I was very stiff and sore. Horse riding can create aches in places you never thought possible. But I was still pleased with myself to be riding unassisted through such tough country after such a long time out of the saddle. You need to be skilled to ride in this part of Afghanistan. Sometimes your life depends on it.
    I had been living with Nadir and his family for two weeks when we went to visit an uncle and some of my other distant family in a nearby village. I was sitting with a woman who knew my mother when she asked me if I was in Kabul when my brother Muqim had been killed. I was completely shocked because I hadn’t heard anything about this. Everybody in the room could see the look of horror on my face and they realized I didn’t know. My uncle was first to react. His instinct was to deflect the subject, and he tried to suggest the woman was asking about another of my half-brothers who had been killed by the mujahideen 15 years previously.
    That brother had been among a group of village men who helped fight off the mujahideen when they attacked the town of Kohan. He spent all night firing out of a small bathroom window in his house, armed with just a pistol. In order to reach the high window, his poor wife had to crouch on all fours and he stood on her back. Both he and his wife survived that battle, but he was a marked man after that. He fled to Takjikistan for a while but eventually tried to sneak back into Afghanistan. That was when they caught him. In another sign of the strength of the extended family, my mother spent the night going from local commander to local commander, begging for his release. He wasn’t her blood son, but like all the other wives’ children, she loved him as her own. But she failed and he was executed with a bullet to the head the following morning at dawn.
    But I knew all about this story. And I was only a little girl when it had happened. So why would she ask me if I was there? Despite what the family said to the contrary, I was sick with worry that they were really talking about my brother Muqim. He lived in Kabul and I feared it was he who had been killed. I was in shock. I felt like I was having a heart attack. I didn’t want to eat anything. I felt sick. I just wanted to sprout wings and fly to Kabul to check if he was alright.
    On the way back to his house, Nadir continued to protect me, saying that the lady had made a mistake. I knew in my heart he was wrong, but I chose to believe the