Father of Daughters
He who has not been blessed with daughters has not had his fill of tenderness, nor tasted sweetness… so what, then, of a father of daughters?
The village where I was born, in the heart of Upper Egypt in those days, had its own customs. If a man was granted a son, his back straightened and he stood supported; relatives and friends would fire celebratory gunshots, animals would be slaughtered, decorations hung. But if he was granted a daughter, he would walk in sorrow, dragging the hems of disappointment, hiding his face from people because of what he had been given.
I used to see men with pale faces before the hour of their wives’ labor, beseeching God not to disappoint their hopes and to grant them a son. That is why I was surprised at myself, and people were surprised at me, when I soared with joy at my first newborn, “Ghada.” She was radiant and beautiful like the moon. No one who saw her that day could believe she was only hours old; her size and face gave the impression that she was at least two months old. Ghada was—and still is—a seven-month baby, but God Almighty granted her an unparalleled intelligence and a beauty that all the girls of her generation in the family envy. I considered Ghada my little friend. Even when she was still learning to crawl, I would sit with her and tell her everything—my dreams, my ambitions, my stumbles… even my biggest problems in life, I would recount to her.
When she laughed, the world laughed for me; when she fell ill or frowned, the world darkened in my eyes. I wanted to be happy with her for as long as possible, so I asked my wife to wait a long time before becoming pregnant again, to give me the chance to enjoy a special upbringing with my beloved daughter. And because the mother was Upper Egyptian, and because we were living in Upper Egypt at the time, in 1984, the pressure on her was intense—from her family and mine alike. “Catch him with a boy before he slips away, Wafaa,” they said. They did not know that Ghada, to me, was worth a thousand sons by their reckoning. She was my daughter, my friend, my beloved—and she still is.
And since God Almighty cannot be defied, my wife became pregnant with a boy. But God willed that the pregnancy not be completed safely; it failed in the sixth month. Fate then had my wife conceive again in the same month, and nine months later she brought me my second beloved, “Dalia.” Dalia was born physically weak, unlike Ghada, because she came after a miscarriage, as the doctors told me. It was not meant to happen that way, but it was God’s will. Dalia did not receive from me, in the early period, the same attention as Ghada, because I left her in her first week and traveled to Moscow to study. I returned to find that Dalia had grown; I held her in my arms for a full year, unable to part from her for a single moment, until the time came for my departure to Cairo, where I was appointed a journalist at Al-Ahali newspaper. I would spend five days in Cairo and return to spend two days with the family in Minya. Soon enough, the pressure on my wife resumed, from everyone once again, with the arrival of my third beloved, “Shahanda.”
Shahanda was the “naughtiest” girl in the house—always moving, breaking everything her hands fell upon. My wife would become extremely angry with her, but I would compensate her with new things in place of what was broken so she would not be punished. When I noticed that some family members tried to call her a boy rather than a girl, I went mad and cut them off; they did not know that the three blossoms had become my entire life. I wanted nothing from the world but them. When I returned home frowning, they would gather around me, telling me what had happened to them during the day and what they had done. We would laugh, play, sing, and dance, and my life would turn into a garden of roses.
A paradise—through which I forgot the fatigue of the day and all the troubles of work and life.
Yet the dream continued to dominate the mother, by virtue of her Upper Egyptian makeup. The three girls were—and still are—my whole life. We had all moved to Cairo, and I could not give up playing with them; I would seat them on my knees when I returned from work to listen to their little stories. We went together to every place in the capital, and we flew together to every place I could take them to. My happiness was never complete unless they were by my side.
I remember that when “Ghada” got married, I followed her wherever she went on her honeymoon, until I became the talk of family and friends. I could not imagine—even in imagination—that my daughter and beloved would leave my arms and my home to live with another man, even if he was her husband.
Soon my wife told me she was pregnant, and that she was carrying a boy. We quarreled that day; she believed that this news would finally bring joy to my heart, as she said. She did not realize that these girls had become my entire life, and that the completion of their number as four, with the arrival of Nour, had planted the square of my life with jasmine, and that I had become content with them, independent of the whole world.
Then came Khaled, the only one born in Cairo. He was my brother and my friend, but he never—not even a single atom—took away from my passion for girls. Even he came to know that, appreciate it, and respect it. He even inherited that passion for his sisters from me, becoming a brother, a father, and a friend to them. Ghada, his elder sister, considers him her son; and to his sisters, Dalia and Shahanda, he is the brother, the friend, and the support.
Khaled and I have continued to sniff them like little cats. Every year, I still smell in them the scent of my mother’s bread and my mother’s coffee, and I feel with them the warmth of my country’s sun in winter. And I still take pride—despite Khaled’s presence in my life—in the title:
Father of Daughters.
Geneva: five o’clock in the afternoon, Cairo time.
