Deborah Ellis - The Breadwinner Trilogy

Copyright 2009 by Deborah Ellis

(The Breadwinner first published in 2000; Parvanas Journey, 2002; Mud City, 2003)

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This edition published in 2011 by
House of Anansi Press Inc.
www.houseofanansi.com

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Ellis, Deborah
The breadwinner trilogy / Deborah Ellis.
Contents: The breadwinner Parvanas journey Mud city.
eISBN 978-1-55498-184-7
1. GirlsAfghanistanJuvenile fiction. 2. WomenAfghanistanJuvenile fiction. I. Title. II. Title: The breadwinner. III. Title: Parvanas journey.
IV. Title: Mud city.
PS8559.L5494B74 2009 jC813.54 C2009-902745-3

Cover photo by Laurent Rappa
Cover design by Alysia Shewchuk
Text design by Michael Solomon

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

Dear Readers:

I am thrilled at the elease of this new edition of the Breadwinner trilogy. It brings back memories of all the women and children I met in the refugee camps in Pakistan their courage, their pain, and their hopes for a better future.

A decade has passed since the first book came out. During this time, new wars have started, old ones have continued, and refugee camps have emptied out, only to fill up again somewhere else. The Afghan people cannot be blamed for their situation. Outsiders bear an enormous responsibility for all of this.

And ten years from now?

Thank you to all who have shared their stories with me. Thank you to all who have opened one of my books and looked inside. And thank you most of all to those who continue to survive, against all odds, and who remind us that we are capable of better decisions.

Deborah Ellis

2009

To the children of war

I can read that letter as well as Father can, Parvana whispered into the folds of her chador. Well, almost.

She didnt dare say those words out loud. The man sitting beside her father would not want to hear her voice. Nor would anyone else in the Kabul market. Parvana was there only to help her father walk to the market and back home again after work. She sat well back on the blanket, her head and most of her face covered by her chador.

She wasnt really supposed to be outside at all. The Taliban had ordered all the girls and women in Afghanistan to stay inside their homes. They even forbade girls to go to school. Parvana had had to leave her sixth grade class, and her sister Nooria was not allowed to go to her high school. Their mother had been kicked out of her job as a writer for a Kabul radio station. For more than a year now, they had all been stuck inside one room, along with five-year-old Maryam and two-year-old Ali.

Parvana did get out for a few hours most days to help her father walk. She was always glad to go outside, even though it meant sitting for hours on a blanket spread over the hard ground of the marketplace. At least it was something to do. She had even got used to holding her tongue and hiding her face.

She was small for her eleven years. As a small girl, she could usually get away with being outside without being questioned.

I need this girl to help me walk, her father would tell any Talib who asked, pointing to his leg. He had lost the lower part of his leg when the high school he was teaching in was bombed. His insides had been hurt somehow, too. He was often tired.

I have no son at home, except for an infant, he would explain. Parvana would slump down further on the blanket and try to make herself look smaller. She was afraid to look up at the soldiers. She had seen what they did, especially to women, the way they would whip and beat someone they thought should be punished.

Sitting in the marketplace day after day, she had seen a lot. When the Taliban were around, what she wanted most of all was to be invisible.

Now the customer asked her father to read his letter again. Read it slowly, so that I can remember it for my family.

Parvana would have liked to get a letter. Mail delivery had recently started again in Afghanistan, after years of being disrupted by war. Many of her friends had fled the country with their families. She thought they were in Pakistan, but she wasnt sure, so she couldnt write to them. Her own family had moved so often because of the bombing that her friends no longer knew where she was. Afghans cover the earth like stars cover the sky, her father often said.

Her father finished reading the mans letter a second time. The customer thanked him and paid. I will look for you when it is time to write a reply.

Most people in Afghanistan could not read or write. Parvana was one of the lucky ones. Both of her parents had been to university, and they believed in education for everyone, even girls.

Customers came and went as the afternoon wore on. Most spoke Dari, the same language Parvana spoke best. When a customer spoke Pashtu, she could recognize most of it, but not all. Her parents could speak English, too. Her father had gone to university in England. That was a long time ago.

The market was a very busy place. Men shopped for their families, and peddlers hawked their goods and services. Some, like the tea shop, had their own stalls. With such a big urn and so many trays of cups, it had to stay in one place. Tea boys ran back and forth into the labyrinth of the marketplace, carrying tea to customers who couldnt leave their own shops, then running back again with the empty cups.

I could do that, Parvana whispered. Shed like to be able to run around in the market, to know its winding streets as well as she knew the four walls of her home.

Her father turned to look at her. Id rather see you running around a school yard. He turned around again to call out to the passing men. Anything written! Anything read! Pashtu and Dari! Wonderful items for sale!

Parvana frowned. It wasnt her fault she wasnt in school! She would rather be there, too, instead of sitting on this uncomfortable blanket, her back and bottom getting sore. She missed her friends, her blue-and-white school uniform, and doing new things each day.

History was her favorite subject, especially Afghan history. Everybody had come to Afghanistan. The Persians came four thousand years ago. Alexander the Great came, too, followed by the Greeks, Arabs, Turks, British, and finally the Soviets. One of the conquerors, Tamerlane from Samarkand, cut off the heads of his enemies and stacked them in huge piles, like melons at a fruit stand. All these people had come to Parvanas beautiful country to try to take it over, and the Afghans had kicked them all out again!