The other principals took paying bribes for granted, but my father argued that if all the schools joined together they could resist. ‘Running a school is not a crime,’ he told them. ‘Why should you be paying bribes? You are not running brothels; you are educating children! Government officials are not your bosses,’ he reminded them; ‘they are your servants. They are taking salaries and have to serve you. You are the ones educating their children.’
He soon became president of the organisation and expanded it until it included 400 principals. Suddenly the school owners were in a position of power. But my father has always been a romantic rather than a businessman and in the meantime he and Hidayatullah were in such desperate straits that they ran out of credit with the local shopkeeper and could not even buy tea or sugar. To try and boost their income they ran a tuck shop at school, going off in the mornings and buying snacks to sell to the children. My father would buy maize and stay up late at night making and bagging popcorn.
‘I would get very depressed and sometimes collapse seeing the problems all around us,’ said Hidayatullah, ‘but when Ziauddin is in a crisis he becomes strong and his spirits high.’
My father insisted that they needed to think big. One day Hidayatullah came back from trying to enrol pupils to find my father sitting in the office talking about advertising with the local head of Pakistan TV. As soon as the man had gone, Hidayatullah burst into laughter. ‘Ziauddin, we don’t even have a TV,’ he pointed out. ‘If we advertise we won’t be able to watch it.’ But my father is an optimistic man and never deterred by practicalities.
One day my father told Hidayatullah he was going back to his village for a few days. He was actually getting married, but he didn’t tell any of his friends in Mingora as he could not afford to entertain them. Our weddings go on for several days of feasting. In fact, as my mother often reminds my father, he was not present for the actual ceremony. He was only there for the last day, when family members held a Quran and a shawl over their heads and held a mirror for them to look into. For many couples in arranged marriages this is the first time they see each other’s faces. A small boy was brought to sit on their laps to encourage the birth of a son.
It is our tradition for the bride to receive furniture or perhaps a fridge from her family and some gold from the groom’s family. My grandfather would not buy enough gold so my father had to borrow more money to buy bangles. After the wedding my mother moved in with my grandfather and my uncle. My father returned to the village every two or three weeks to see her. The plan was to get his school going then, once it was successful, send for his wife. But Baba kept complaining about the drain on his income and made my mother’s life miserable. She had a little money of her own so they used it to hire a van and she moved to Mingora. They had no idea how they would manage. ‘We just knew my father didn’t want us there,’ said my father. ‘At that time I was unhappy with my family, but later I was grateful as it made me more independent.’
He had however neglected to tell his partner. Hidayatullah was horrified when my father returned to Mingora with a wife. ‘We’re not in a position to support a family,’ he told my father. ‘Where will she live?’
‘It’s OK,’ replied my father. ‘She will cook and wash for us.’
My mother was excited to be in Mingora. To her it was a modern town. When she and her friends had discussed their dreams as young girls by the river, most had just said they wanted to marry and have children and cook for their husbands. When it was my mother’s turn she said, ‘I want to live in the city and be able to send out for kebabs and naan instead of cooking it myself.’ However, life wasn’t quite what she expected. The shack had just two rooms, one where Hidayatullah and my father slept and one which was a small office. There was no kitchen, no plumbing. When my mother arrived, Hidayatullah had to move into the office and sleep on a hard wooden chair.
My father consulted my mother on everything. ‘Pekai, help me resolve my confusion on this’, he would say. She even helped whitewash the school walls, holding up the lanterns so they could paint when the light went off in power cuts.
‘Ziauddin was a family man and they were unusually close,’ said Hidayatullah. ‘While most of us can’t live with our wives, he couldn’t be without his.’
Within a few months my mother was expecting. Their first child, born in 1995, was a girl and stillborn. ‘I think there was some problem with hygiene in that muddy place,’ says my father. ‘I assumed women could give birth without going to hospital, as my mother and my sisters had in the village. My mother gave birth to ten children in this way.’
The school continued to lose money. Months would pass and they could not pay the teachers’ wages or the school rent. The goldsmith kept coming and demanding his money for my mother’s wedding bangles. My father would make him good tea and offer him biscuits in the hope that would keep him satisfied. Hidayatullah laughed. ‘You think he will be happy with tea? He wants his money.’
The situation became so dire that my father was forced to sell the gold bangles. In our culture wedding jewellery is a bond between the couple. Often women sell their jewellery to help set up their husbands in business or to pay their fares to go abroad. My mother had already offered her bangles to pay for my father’s nephew to go to college, which my father had rashly promised to fund – fortunately, my father’s cousin Jehan Sher Khan had stepped in – and she did not realise the bangles were only partly paid for. She was then furious when she learned that my father did not get a good price for them.
Just when it seemed matters could not get worse, the area was hit by flash floods. There was a day when it did not stop raining and in the late afternoon there was a warning of flooding. Everyone had to leave the district. My mother was away and Hidayatullah needed my father to help him move everything up to the first floor, safe from the fast-rising waters, but he couldn’t find him anywhere. He went outside, shouting ‘Ziauddin, Ziauddin!’ The search almost cost Hidayatullah his life. The narrow street outside the school was totally flooded and he was soon up to his neck in water. There were live electric cables hanging loose and swaying in the wind. He watched paralysed with fear as they almost touched the water. Had they done so, he would have been electrocuted.
When he finally found my father, he learned that he had heard a woman crying that her husband was trapped in their house and he had rushed in to save him. Then he helped them save their fridge. Hidayatullah was furious. ‘You saved this woman’s husband but not your own house!’ he said. ‘Was it because of the cry of a woman?’
When the waters receded, they found their home and school destroyed: their furniture, carpets, books, clothes and the audio system entirely caked in thick foul-smelling mud. They had nowhere to sleep and no clean clothes to change into. Luckily, a neighbour called Mr Aman-ud-din took them in for the night. It took them a week to clear the debris. They were both away when, ten days later, there was a second flood and the building again filled with mud. Shortly afterwards they had a visit from an official of WAPDA, the water and power company, who claimed their meter was rigged and demanded a bribe. When my father refused, a bill arrived with a large fine. There was no way they could pay this so my father asked one of his political friends to use his influence.
It started to feel as though the school was not meant to be, but my father would not give up on his dream so easily. Besides, he had a family to provide for. I was born on 12 July 1997. My mother was helped by a neighbour who had delivered babies before. My father was in the school waiting and when he heard the news he came running. My mother was worried about telling him he had a daughter not a son, but he says he looked into my eyes and was delighted.