雙語暢銷書《我是馬拉拉》第3章11:夥伴

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?’

但他卻忘了通知他的夥伴。當父親帶着妻子回到明戈拉時，希達亞圖拉簡直驚呆了。“我們根本沒有能力養家，”他告訴父親，“她要住在哪裏？”

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

“沒關係的，”父親答道，“她可以幫我們煮飯和洗衣服。”

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.

搬到明戈拉來令我的母親感到很興奮。對她來說，明戈拉是個很現代的城鎮。很小的時候，她跟朋友們在河邊談論未來的夢想。大多數女孩子的願望就是結婚生孩子，爲丈夫做飯。輪到母親時，她說：“我想要住在城市裏，可以不用煮飯，要吃飯就出去買烤肉和麪包。”然而，人生並未如她所願。棚屋只有兩個房間，一間是希達亞圖拉和我父親的臥房，另一間則是小小的辦公室。沒有廚房，也沒有自來水。當我母親搬入時，希達亞圖拉只得搬進那間小辦公室，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.

父親與我母親討論所有的事。“託.貝凱，幫我想想這個問題怎麼解決。”他會這麼說。她甚至還幫忙粉刷學校，在斷電後挑着油燈讓他們可以繼續刷油漆。

‘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.’

“齊亞烏丁是個很愛家的男人，而且他們兩個異常親近。”希達亞圖拉說，“我們大部分人都沒辦法和妻子住在一起，他卻離不開她。”

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.’

幾個月後，我的母親就懷孕了。他們的第一個孩子在1995年出生，是個女孩，但出生時已是死胎。“我覺得是我們住的那個溼地的衛生有問題，”父親說，“女人不去醫院也一樣可以順利生產，就像我的母親和姐妹們一樣。我母親就是這樣生了十個孩子。”