WHEN I WAS born, people in our village commiserated with my mother and nobody congratulated my
father. I arrived at dawn as the last star blinked out. We Pashtuns see this as an auspicious sign. My
father didn’t have any money for the hospital or for a midwife so a neighbour helped at my birth. My
parents’ first child was stillborn but I popped out kicking and screaming. I was a girl in a land where
rifles are fired in celebration of a son, while daughters are hidden away behind a curtain, their role in
life simply to prepare food and give birth to children.