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?’

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

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.

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.

‘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.’

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.’