There was little to do in my father’s village. It was too narrow even for a cricket pitch and only one family had a television. On Fridays the brothers would creep into the mosque and watch in wonder as my grandfather stood in the pulpit and preached to the congregation for an hour or so, waiting for the moment when his voice would rise and practically shake the rafters.

父亲的村子里没什么娱乐可言。那里实在太狭窄，连打个板球的地方都没有，村子里只有一户人家里有电视。每周五，他们兄弟俩就会偷偷溜进清真寺，崇拜地看着我的祖父站在讲台上，对着信众传教，等待着听到他的音量提高到几乎震动了梁柱的那一刻。

My country may not be very old but unfortunately it already has a history of military coups, and when my father was eight a general called Zia ul-Haq seized power. There are still many pictures of him around. He was a scary man with dark panda shadows around his eyes, large teeth that seemed to stand to attention and hair pomaded flat on his head. He arrested our elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and had him tried for treason then hanged from a scaffold in Rawalpindi jail. Even today people talk of Mr Bhutto as a man of great charisma. They say he was the first Pakistani leader to stand up for the common people, though he himself was a feudal lord with vast estates of mango fields. His execution shocked everybody and made Pakistan look bad all around the world. The Americans cut off aid.

我的祖国虽然立国不久，但已经不幸地拥有军人执政的历史。我父亲八岁的时候，一位叫作齐亚.哈克的将军夺下了政权。至今，很多地方还张贴着他的照片。他是个很恐怖的人，有着很深的熊猫眼，大而突出的牙齿，头发梳得油亮，贴在头顶上。他把我们选出来的总理佐.布托抓了起来，指控他叛国，并在拉瓦尔品第把他处以绞刑。直至今日，人们仍然传颂着布托先生的超凡领袖魅力。大家都说虽然他自己是封建地主，坐拥辽阔的杧果园，但却是第一位真正为平民百姓代言的巴基斯坦领袖。他被处死的消息震惊了所有人，而且损害了巴基斯坦的国际形象。美国因此停止了对巴基斯坦的援助。

Under Zia’s regime life for women in Pakistan became much more restricted. Jinnah said, ‘No struggle can ever succeed without women participating side by side with men. There are two powers in the world; one is the sword and the other is the pen. There is a third power stronger than both, that of women.’ But General Zia brought in Islamic laws which reduced a woman’s evidence in court to count for only half that of a man’s. Soon our prisons were full of cases like that of a thirteen-year-old girl who was raped and become pregnant and was then sent to prison for adultery because she couldn’t produce four male witnesses to prove it was a crime. A woman couldn’t even open a bank account without a man’s permission. As a nation we have always been good at hockey, but Zia made our female hockey players wear baggy trousers instead of shorts, and stopped women playing some sports altogether.

在齐亚.哈克的统治下，巴基斯坦妇女受到更加严苛的生活限制。真纳说：“如果女人无法与男人肩并肩地参与事务，那么所有的困境都不会有突破的一日了。世界上有两种力量，一种是剑，另一种则是笔。其实还有第三种力量，比这两种还要强大，那就是女性的力量。”但是齐亚.哈克将军采用了伊斯兰律法。在法庭上，如果被告是女性，那么她的证言只有一半能被采信。很快地，监狱里充斥着这样的案例：一个13岁的女孩被强暴导致怀孕，却因为奸淫罪被关，只因为她没有办法找到四位男性证人来证明她是受害者。如果没有男性的批准，妇女连在银行开户都无法被核准。我们曾是曲棍球的强国，但齐亚.哈克禁止女性球员穿短裤，必须改穿累赘的长裤，并直接禁止女性从事其他数种运动。