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?’

但他却忘了通知他的伙伴。当父亲带着妻子回到明戈拉时，希达亚图拉简直惊呆了。“我们根本没有能力养家，”他告诉父亲，“她要住在哪里？”

‘It’s OK, ’ replied my father. ‘She will cook and wash for us.’

“没关系的，”父亲答道，“她可以帮我们煮饭和洗衣服。”

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.

搬到明戈拉来令我的母亲感到很兴奋。对她来说，明戈拉是个很现代的城镇。很小的时候，她跟朋友们在河边谈论未来的梦想。大多数女孩子的愿望就是结婚生孩子，为丈夫做饭。轮到母亲时，她说：“我想要住在城市里，可以不用煮饭，要吃饭就出去买烤肉和面包。”然而，人生并未如她所愿。棚屋只有两个房间，一间是希达亚图拉和我父亲的卧房，另一间则是小小的办公室。没有厨房，也没有自来水。当我母亲搬入时，希达亚图拉只得搬进那间小办公室，睡在硬木椅上。

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.

父亲与我母亲讨论所有的事。“托.贝凯，帮我想想这个问题怎么解决。”他会这么说。她甚至还帮忙粉刷学校，在断电后挑着油灯让他们可以继续刷油漆。

‘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.’

“齐亚乌丁是个很爱家的男人，而且他们两个异常亲近。”希达亚图拉说，“我们大部分人都没办法和妻子住在一起，他却离不开她。”

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.’

几个月后，我的母亲就怀孕了。他们的第一个孩子在1995年出生，是个女孩，但出生时已是死胎。“我觉得是我们住的那个湿地的卫生有问题，”父亲说，“女人不去医院也一样可以顺利生产，就像我的母亲和姐妹们一样。我母亲就是这样生了十个孩子。”