The Breadwinner

DEBORAH ELLIS

To the children of war

“I can read that letter as well as Father can,” Parvana
whispered into the folds of her chador. “Well, almost.”

She didn't dare say those words out loud. The man sitting beside her
father would not want to hear her voice. Nor would anyone else in the Kabul market.
Parvana was there only to help her father walk to the market and back home again after
work. She sat well back on the blanket, her head and most of her face covered by her
chador.

She wasn't really supposed to be outside at all. The Taliban had
ordered all the girls and women in Afghanistan to stay inside their homes. They even
forbade girls to go to school. Parvana had had to leave her sixth grade class, and her
sister Nooria was not allowed to go to her high school. Their mother had been kicked out
of her job as a writer for a Kabul radio station. For more than a year now, they had all
been stuck inside one room, along with five-year-old Maryam and
two-year-old Ali.

Parvana did get out for a few hours most days to help her father walk. She
was always glad to go outside, even though it meant sitting for hours on a blanket
spread over the hard ground of the marketplace. At least it was something to do. She had
even got used to holding her tongue and hiding her face.

She was small for her eleven years. As a small girl, she could usually get
away with being outside without being questioned.

“I need this girl to help me walk,” her father would tell any
Talib who asked, pointing to his leg. He had lost the lower part of his leg when the
high school he was teaching in was bombed. His insides had been hurt somehow, too. He
was often tired.

“I have no son at home, except for an infant,” he would
explain. Parvana would slump down further on the blanket and try to make herself look
smaller. She was afraid to look up at the soldiers. She had seen what they did,
especially to women, the way they would whip and beat someone they thought should be
punished.

Sitting in the marketplace day after day, she had seen
a lot. When the Taliban were around, what she wanted most of all was to be
invisible.

Now the customer asked her father to read his letter again. “Read it
slowly, so that I can remember it for my family.”

Parvana would have liked to get a letter. Mail delivery had recently
started again in Afghanistan, after years of being disrupted by war. Many of her friends
had fled the country with their families. She thought they were in Pakistan, but she
wasn't sure, so she couldn't write to them. Her own family had moved so
often because of the bombing that her friends no longer knew where she was.
“Afghans cover the earth like stars cover the sky,” her father often
said.

Her father finished reading the man's letter a second time. The
customer thanked him and paid. “I will look for you when it is time to write a
reply.”

Most people in Afghanistan could not read or write. Parvana was one of the
lucky ones. Both of her parents had been to university, and they believed in education
for everyone, even girls.

Customers came and went as the afternoon wore on. Most
spoke Dari, the same language Parvana spoke best. When a customer spoke Pashtu, she
could recognize most of it, but not all. Her parents could speak English, too. Her
father had gone to university in England. That was a long time ago.

The market was a very busy place. Men shopped for their families, and
peddlers hawked their goods and services. Some, like the tea shop, had their own stalls.
With such a big urn and so many trays of cups, it had to stay in one place. Tea boys ran
back and forth into the labyrinth of the marketplace, carrying tea to customers who
couldn't leave their own shops, then running back again with the empty cups.

“I could do that,” Parvana whispered. She'd like to be
able to run around in the market, to know its winding streets as well as she knew the
four walls of her home.

Her father turned to look at her. “I'd rather see you running
around a school yard.” He turned around again to call out to the passing men.
“Anything written! Anything read! Pashtu and Dari! Wonderful items for
sale!”

Parvana frowned. It wasn't her fault she
wasn't in school! She would rather be there, too, instead of sitting on this
uncomfortable blanket, her back and bottom getting sore. She missed her friends, her
blue-and-white school uniform, and doing new things each day.

History was her favorite subject, especially Afghan history. Everybody had
come to Afghanistan. The Persians came four thousand years ago. Alexander the Great
came, too, followed by the Greeks, Arabs, Turks, British, and finally the Soviets. One
of the conquerors, Tamerlane from Samarkand, cut off the heads of his enemies and
stacked them in huge piles, like melons at a fruit stand. All these people had come to
Parvana's beautiful country to try to take it over, and the Afghans had kicked
them all out again!

But now the country was ruled by the Taliban militia. They were Afghans,
and they had very definite ideas about how things should be run. When they first took
over the capital city of Kabul and forbade girls to go to school, Parvana wasn't
terribly unhappy. She had a test coming up in arithmetic that she hadn't prepared
for, and she was in trouble for talking in class again. The teacher was going to
send a note to her mother, but the Taliban took over first.

“What are you crying for?” she had asked Nooria, who
couldn't stop sobbing. “I think a holiday is very nice.” Parvana was
sure the Taliban would let them go back to school in a few days. By then her teacher
would have forgotten all about sending a tattletale note to her mother.

“You're just stupid!” Nooria screamed at her.
“Leave me alone!”

One of the difficulties of living with your whole family in one room was
that it was impossible to really leave anyone alone. Wherever Nooria went, there was
Parvana. And wherever Parvana went, there was Nooria.

Both of Parvana's parents had come from old respected Afghan
families. With their education, they had earned high salaries. They had had a big house
with a courtyard, a couple of servants, a television set, a refrigerator, a car. Nooria
had had her own room. Parvana had shared a room with her little sister, Maryam. Maryam
chattered a lot, but she thought Parvana was wonderful. It had certainly been wonderful
to get away from Nooria sometimes.

That house had been destroyed by a bomb. The family
had moved several times since then. Each time, they moved to a smaller place. Every time
their house was bombed, they lost more of their things. With each bomb, they got poorer.
Now they lived together in one small room.