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  This same pink blush on her cheeks was there in August 2017, when four out of five of our family visited Lady Margaret Hall, at Oxford. We were elated and excited, having received the news that Malala had achieved her required grades and was able to take up her place at LMH eight weeks later.

  Malala was nervous, I could tell. It was the first time Toor Pekai, her brother Khushal, and I had seen Lady Margaret Hall, with its imposing redbrick facade and its row upon row of arched windows. The beauty of Oxford University never ceases to fill me with awe. Nothing had prepared us for this, no former visits, no special Student Union speaker status. This time, Malala was simply the student and I was simply her father.

  Two students gave us a tour, which Toor Pekai and I welcomed: the library was vast, with its high shelving containing book after book. The quantity alone was overwhelming. As a teacher, I have dedicated eighteen years of my life to learning and to helping others learn; how could I not feel emotional over these books? The Taliban had burned hundreds of schools, with books, and banned girls’ education. It had threatened my life with words and almost taken my daughter’s life with bullets, for being a girl who wanted to learn, to read. Look at us now; this was God’s plan. Man proposes, God disposes. Malala had not only survived being shot for wanting an education, but she had shown the resilience to recover, heal, and continue to learn so that she could now be admitted to study at Oxford. I am an emotional man. Seeing my daughter about to fulfill her dream to study for a degree was overwhelming. “But Ziauddin,” I told myself, “hold on to your tears for now.”

  After the tour, the principal of the college led us into a large drawing room with high ceilings; there was so much space and air for learning. I could feel the horizons widening within the four walls. Small clusters of people gathered around chairs and sofas, chatting in low voices. The motto of LMH is Souvent me Souviens: I often remember.

  Across the room, I saw the principal make his way over to the tea-making machine. What would my father have made of such an invention? The principal picked up a cup, dropped in a tea bag from a nearby container, and placed the cup under the machine, filling the cup with hot water. After a few seconds, he placed the cup on a saucer and poured in some milk. After stirring the tea and throwing out the tea bag, he picked up the cup and saucer and crossed the room with this one cup of tea. There were lots of us who did not have a cup to hold, but he continued until he reached his destination and at that point, he handed the cup to Malala.

  Souvent me Souviens. Only then I started to cry.

  And so if you ask me now, “Ziauddin, what is your proudest moment to date?” I will say to you, it was when the male principal of Lady Margaret Hall made and served Malala a cup of tea. It was a moment so natural, so normal, and therefore more beautiful and powerful for me than any audience Malala might have had with a king or a queen or a president. It proved what I have believed for so long: when you stand for a change, that change comes.

  This cup of tea was brewed in a Western way so alien to us. My father would have refused to drink the kind of tea being handed to Malala. My father would have dismissed it, and a female member of the family would have quickly lifted it out of his hands and carried it away, chastened that he had been disappointed. But this moment of tea-taking was made all the sweeter for the fact that had my father been with us in that high and grand room, the cup would not have been his to reject. The cup would have passed him by on its route towards his granddaughter.

  As a child, I grew up believing society’s patriarchal ideas. Only in my teenage years did I begin to question everything I had taken for granted. This is what my life has felt like: reaching towards something else, finding it, and learning it from scratch. What was this thing I yearned for long before Malala was born? And then wanted for her, and for my own wife, and then for my girl students, and then for all girls and all women on God’s beautiful earth? I did not articulate it, initially, as feminism. This is a valuable label that I would later learn in the West, but I was unaware of feminism then. For more than forty years, I had no idea what it meant. When it was explained to me, I said, “Oh, I have been a feminist for most of my life, almost from the beginning!” While living in Pakistan, I saw my own shifting ideas to be based more on love, decency, and humanity. I simply wanted, and continue to want, for girls everywhere to live in a world that treats them with love and meets them with open arms. I wanted then and still want the end of patriarchy, of a man-made system of ideas that thrives on fear, that dresses up suppression and hatred as the tenets of religion, and that at its heart fails to understand the beauty to be had for us all in living in a truly equal society.

  This is why I shed my tears over a simple cup of tea, because it symbolized the end of a fight I had waged for two decades to ensure equality for Malala. Malala is an adult now, old enough, and experienced enough, and brave enough to fight her own fight. But the fight for all girls, all over the world, is not yet over. All girls, all women, deserve the respect men have automatically. All girls should be offered a cup of tea in their learned institution—be it in Pakistan, in Nigeria, in India, in America, in the UK—both for its own sake, and for all that it symbolizes.

  The road towards experiencing the kind of deep love and joy I feel when I see that my daughter is truly equal is not always an easy one for those of us who have been brought up in patriarchal societies. In learning these new ways of life, I had to unlearn all that came before. The first person I came across blocking my way was far more dangerous to me than any ancient Pashtun warrior with shield and dagger. It was me, my old self, the old Ziauddin, whispering in my ear, “Where are you going? Turn back! Do not be so foolish. It’s cold and lonely on this path and everything you need to feel comfortable is back from where you came.”

  It has been a journey, a traumatic one not without sacrifice; I almost lost the very person for whom I began the fight. But Malala is alive and educated. I am alive, her mother is alive, her brothers are alive, and in so many different ways, we are all being educated, Malala and her brothers by books, their mother, Toor Pekai, too. I hope I continue to learn lessons from life itself, with all its rewards and disappointments, its deep joys and its many challenges.

  I have written this book in the hope that one day it might provide some support and encouragement to women, girls, men, and boys everywhere who are courageous enough to demand equality, just as our family does.

  For only when a girl like Malala, from the soil and the mountains, is handed a cup of tea by the principal of a college in a once patriarchal society, only when through a quality education does she grow up to be that principal herself, only then will our work be done.

  Father

  Our Autumn House

  WHEN I WAS barely old enough to write my name, with a pen fashioned from bamboo and ink drained from a carbon battery, my mother crept to my cot bed early one morning full of hope and purpose: “Ziauddin,” she whispered, “wake up!” The room in our mud house was full of my sleeping sisters.

  “Beybey?” I asked her, our word for “mama.”

  “Ziauddin, wake up!” she repeated. “We are going on a journey.” I could see she was already dressed in her thick gray paroonay. “With School Kaka?” I asked her sleepily, about my father. “With School Kaka?” I repeated. “No,” she said, “not with School Kaka. Your father is taking daily prayers, as usual, and teaching in the school. Fazli Hakeem, your father’s cousin, will come with us. We are going up Shalmano Mountain. You must try to be strong because it is a long walk to the top, but it will be worth it because when we get there, it will help you achieve your dreams.”

  I did not know what my dreams were, but I knew that my mother and my father had big ones for me. And I knew they did not have them for anybody else. If Beybey and School Kaka thought something was at the top of that mountain, then I wanted to go up there.

  Every morning in Barkana, our village deep in the Shangla district of northern Pakistan, the cocks would crow outside our house and our two buf
faloes in the fields a mile away would stir in anticipation of my brother’s bucket of feed. My brother’s principal role in life was to feed and fatten these creatures, and to support my father and the family further. My brother seemed so happy, cultivating these prized female creatures and following my father in his own simple life: “When a man is happy, his wife gives birth to boy children and his buffalo gives birth to a female,” my father would say. This was particularly bad for my poor mother, very bad. In our small muddy house there were nine of us in two rooms. My brother moved later to an add-on room behind with his new bride. The buffaloes he tended did not always have girl buffaloes. My father would meticulously log their issues in a book, which he kept with his diaries and journals on a shelf in the house.

  My mother bore my father’s children seven times and she provided a prized boy child only twice. The first time was with my brother, and then again with me. In between us, there were three daughters, and there would be two more to come. Their names are Hameeda Bano, Najma Bibi, Bakhti Mahal, Gul Raina, and Naseem Akhtar. I name them here because during my childhood I never once saw their names written down. They were described only in relation to men: daughters of my father, sisters of Ziauddin and Saeed Ramzan. They were never named in their own right. It was the same when I saw my mother described: wife of Rohul Amin, mother of Ziauddin or Saeed Ramzan.

  That our family was weighted towards females was made worse by the boy-heavy family in the mud house next door.

  Our cousins—my uncle’s family—lived there, with its mud roof laid on top, just like ours. The roofs formed a sort of small rooftop playground, called a chum, where we young children would play our games, boys and girls together, shouting and hopping and rolling our marbles. My girl playmates were the preadolescent females of Barkana, carefree and careless, not yet considered old enough to invite shame or challenge honor. These same little girls in playful games of mimicry would sometimes drape their mothers’ or older sisters’ shawls over their faces, covering their small noses and soft cheeks, obscuring all but their eyes, wanting to be just like these female role models whom they loved. Within a few years, when my playmates were around the age of twelve or thirteen, the shawls would become theirs to wear all the time. The need to protect their honor in their adolescence would pull them down off their rooftop playgrounds and away from the streets where they had once run from house to house, to live in purdah within four muddy walls. Once above, now below, my former playmates—my younger sisters, too—could hear the thumping childish feet on the roof above them, a reminder of their past freedom. I and the rest of the boys would carry on playing cricket. As I grew up, girls fell away from sight like this, like bright stars falling from the sky, and I never once questioned it. They would be under my feet, cooking and gossiping, and within a few years they would be married and pregnant, or if still single, heavy with dread at the prospect of being married off.

  My mother took great care of the mud walls of our house. Once a year, she would spread new fresh mud over the insides of them, smoothing and re-smoothing as she went, with as much pride and patience as one restoring the finest walls of the finest grand house. But my mother’s attention to the walls that confined her and my sisters could not stop my uncle’s good fortune seeping through. As my male cousins kept arriving, the women of the village congregating around my aunt, offering their congratulations, my father’s frustration would deepen at his misfortune in fathering so many daughters. “Why is there always spring in their house and autumn in ours?” he would ask.

  We Pashtuns are a feuding race. Sons mean a man has an army. Fights, usually verbal, and conflicts were frequent. If fathers fought with their brothers, the sons of these men fought and competed, too. If uncles were at war, cousins followed. We two boys were not enough in terms of our father’s army. My sisters were no resource at all. There were a few things that put my father in a bad mood. Jealousy was one of them.

  “You will never be happy in your life,” my mother once said to him as we all watched openmouthed in astonishment. “When you are in paradise, you will say, ‘Oh, the next-door paradise is better.’”

  My father regularly moaned about the good fortune of our cousins. Years later, when I had left his home both spiritually and geographically, he said, “Why has my nephew got a car? Why have not my own sons got a car? Why have I been failed by my boys in this way?” Cars had been in our village for some while by the time this happened and he had never once expressed envy about them. I—much older by then—said to him, “School Kaka, be pleased. You will never have to walk home again. When your nephew sees you on the road, he will be obliged to stop and give you a lift. You will never again have to travel on foot because it is your position as an elder to be given a lift.” I was trying to make him see that there were benefits for him in his nephew’s good fortune. It was poor consolation. He did not want a lift in his nephew’s car.

  How I hated these jealousies, hated them! And the corrosive power they had to eat away at love and happiness. But if these feudal jealousies pained me, it was nothing to the injustice of my sisters’ lives compared with my own.

  I occupied a unique position in the family. From a very young age, both my father and my mother talked of me as being something different, a child who could soar above our fairly low social status, fulfilling expectations never once placed on any of my sisters and not even my brother before me. They said they had spotted in me a spark, which invited the possibility of a better life, the climbing up towards a new social class. The ladder was education. Had they looked for this spark in my sisters, I am sure they would have seen it there. But they did not look for it.

  I understand what they mean about this spark in a child, because I saw the same thing in Malala when she was small. It is a quality that marks the child as different, an intensity, perhaps. At the very least it is a child who invites you—allows you—to encourage them to greatness. Why was it that they had these dreams for me and not my brother? I think perhaps it is because he wanted a simple life. Every night, my father laid out three almonds. “Ziauddin, please eat these nuts.” They were to improve my brain. I ate them readily. Another privilege.

  If we ever journeyed beyond Barkana, my mother would point to the fine bungalows, which, compared with our mud hut, seemed like palaces to me. “Who lives there, Beybey?” I would ask her, my small hand threaded through hers. I, a small boy child barely up to her waist, was her chaperone rather than she mine. And my mother would say as we moved through the street, “Ziauddin, educated people live there. If you work hard, you can live there, too.” We were not feudal lords, or people of business or industry. My parents understood that if they were to propel me to this better life, it would have to be through education. We had no money. We had no connections. We had no industry. Education was my only chance.

  At the start of each day, my father, brother, and I were given the cream from the milk. At the day’s close, the juiciest parts of the chicken would be ours, too. My mother liked to make my father his favorite omelet, flavoring it with diced cucumbers and tomatoes gathered from the fields. She mixed the eggs up with cream from the milk. When it came to eating our food, my mother and my sisters were not at our table. They ate in another room. My sisters’ shoes were patched, frayed, and often falling apart, but mine were new, their leather straps strong and firm against my feet.

  Only once did I ever hear a sister complain. Najma Bibi, one of my older sisters, said to my mother, “If you are so fond of boys, why did you have us?” And my mother replied, “It was not in my power. I could not help it.” My mother seemed angry, and I saw a sort of confusion in my sister’s face, too.

  My father was a maulana (religious scholar) in our village, leading prayers five times a day in Barkana’s lower mosque, also made of mud, as opposed to its bigger, higher mosque, to which I would later gravitate. He was also a teacher of boys in the next village.

  The relatively low status of being a religious cleric contributed to his sometimes unpredicta
ble temper and anxiety about money. While his clearly defined religious role placed him outside the caste system and brought a degree of respect, it had a stigma attached to it, the unspoken but acknowledged truth that my father needed the job because he needed the money.

  Maulanas receive a stipend from the community they serve for the role they perform. My father did not need to be a maulana even though he was well qualified to be one. He was already a theology teacher in a public school, but he led prayers to boost his income.

  Fear of my father’s temper jostled with my deep love for him. He shouted about small things, like lost chickens or spilled grain, and these outbursts were never predictable. But I was never in any doubt that my father loved me. He loved me so much—this I knew. He would take me into his lap and lull me in such a gentle way. When I was a small child, his hair was still black, but hair and beard both were flecked with age, hints of the later whiteness that would form my resounding memory of him: my father the maulana, the teacher, the orator, in his long white robes, with his white hair and white beard, white skullcap or a white turban for Friday prayers. He gave me so much of his time and his energy. He was always reading to me and trying to enrich my mind. It was he who instilled in me a lifelong love of learning.

  My father was eloquent and passionate, so that when he preached the villagers began recording him so they could listen to him in their homes.

  Eleven years after my father’s death, I love and respect his departed soul with as much intensity as I did when I was in his lap or listening to him read me Iqbal and Saadi, I his golden child, the focus of all his patriarchal hopes and dreams. My love for him is unconditional. Just as I was to go on a long journey with my mother up a mountain, my father, decades later, would go on a journey, too, one that began with Malala’s birth and was to bring him much closer to me—to all of us—by the time of his death.