The Breadwinner by Deborah Ellis

Eleven-year-old Parvana is sitting with her father on a blanket in the Kabul marketplace. Her head and shoulders are completely covered by her chador. She is there to help her father walk from home to the market. Parvana lives in Kabul with her mother Fatana and her father, her older sister Nooria, and her younger siblings, five-year-old Maryam and two-year-old Ali. 

Her parents are well educated having attended university; her father attended university in England and both her parents speak English. They came from well respected families and earned good money. This meant that "...they had a big house with a courtyard, a couple of servants, a television set, a refrigerator, a car."  Her father had taught in a  high school while her mother had been a writer for a Kabul radio station. Parvana had been in the sixth grade while Nooria attended high school. All that changed with the coming of the Taliban.

Before the Taliban, Afghanistan had been invaded by the Persians, Greeks,, Arabs, Turks, British and then Soviet Russia. War had been ongoing for more than twenty years. Parvana was born the year the Soviets left Afghanistan. The Taliban now ruled the country except for the northern regions. In Kabul they forced girls out of the schools, her mother was forced to leave her job and all girls and women in Afghanistan had to stay home. They were not even allowed out to shop.

Parvana's family had lost their beautiful home and had moved several times, each time to a smaller place. Now they lived in one small room with the possessions they managed to save from the bombings. Her father had lost his lower leg when his school was bombed but he had sold his wooden leg. So now Parvana helps her father walk to the market each day where he tries to sell some of their remaining possessions or reads letters for a fee. Most Afghans cannot read or write. Parvana can speak Dari and understand some Pashtu and because she has received an education, like her father she can read the letters.

They make their way home, her father leaning on Parvana. They now live on the third floor of a bomb-damaged building. To reach their apartment, Parvana and her father must use the damaged stairs on the outside of the building. Upon arriving home Parvana is sent out to get water, a task that means five trips to the outside tap. The single room they all share contains a tall wooden cupboard and two toshaks. The beautiful Afghan carpets and all their furniture has been destroyed in the bombings of their previous homes. What survived from the bombings Parvana's mother kept in the cupboard. This includes a parcel of Hossain's clothing. He was Parvana's older brother who was killed by a land mine when he was fourteen. Nooria has told Parvana how he loved to carry her around and play with her.

After their family meal, her father in his good white shalwar kameez begins telling a story from history. He was a history teacher at the time his school was bombed. The story is set in 1880 when the British attempted to take over Afghanistan and a young Afghan girl urged her country's soldiers on to defeat the British. Suddenly their joyful family moment is broken when four Taliban burst into their home. Two soldiers seize Parvana's father and drag him out while the other two ransack the wooden cupboard. They leave but not before beating Parvana as she tries to distract them from discovering her father's books hidden in the secret compartment at the base of the cupboard.

The next day Parvana and her mother set out to walk to the prison to free her father. Along the way her mother stops frequently to show a photograph of her father. Photographs are illegal but people just shake their heads. At the prison, Parvana's mother is initially ignored by the Taliban but when they both begin shouting for him to be released, the Taliban beat Parvana's mother and tear up the photograph. 

Parvana and her mother arrive at home, their feet bloodied and raw from the long walk. Her mother collapses on the toshak and weeps herself to sleep. For four days Parvana's mother doesn't get up. The room begins to smell from Ali's unwashed diapers and they finally run out of food. Parvana is sent out by Nooria to buy food. She is able to buy nan at the first stand but when she reaches the vegetable stand, Parvana is attacked by a Talib. After he strikes her, Parvana runs in terror, clutching the nan bread and runs straight into Mrs. Weera. In response to Mrs. Weera's question as to why she's running, she tells her she's running from the Taliban.

Mrs. Weera and Parvana's mother had been in the Afghan Women's Union and she has been meaning to visit to get her help with the women's magazine. She and her granddaughter accompany Parvana home. There Mrs. Weera manages to get Parvana's mother up, washed and dressed. The next morning, Parvana is stunned to learn that they are asking her to pretend to be a boy so that she can go to the market. The plan is that Parvana will cut her hair, change her name to Kaseem and pretend to be their cousin from Jalalabad. And if anyone asks her family where Parvana has gone, they will tell them she is visiting her aunt in Kunduz. Mrs. Weera tells Parvana, "It has to be your decision...We can force you to cut off your hair, but you're still the one who has to go outside and act the part. We know this is a big thing we're asking, but I think you can do it..."

Parvana agrees and with her hair cut short and dressed in Hossain's clothing, she ventures out to the market to buy food for her family. This time she is not harassed and she becomes the "breadwinner" for her family. Mrs. Weera decides to move in with Parvana's family so she and Parvana's mother can work on the women's magazine. But for Parvana, dressing as a boy offers her not only freedom but the unexpected friendship of another "boy".

Discussion

The Breadwinner is the first novel in the series about an Afghan girl named Parvana living under Taliban rule in Afghanistan. The story is narrated by Parvana who is eleven-years-old. Under Soviet and then Taliban rule, her family has suffered significant loss. Her family, once flourishing and well off, has lost their home, most of the possessions, and their son and brother, Hossain. 

Afghanistan has had a complicated and violent history but especially so in the twentieth century. The country was invaded in 1979 by the Soviets who wished to install a communist, Soviet-backed government. The Afghanis fought this takeover with help from the United States and Pakistan. In 1989, the Soviets had had enough and left the country in a chaotic state that led to another civil war. In the early 1990s, a new Sunni Islamist movement called the Taliban began to develop in the religious schools or madarasas in Pakistan and southern Afghanistan. This movement spread throughout the southern provinces and in 1996, the Taliban captured the city of Kabul, killing the president of Afghanistan and establishing the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. 

In the Islamic state, the Taliban implemented Sharia Law under which women have almost no rights. The Taliban banned girls and women from attending school or studying, they are not allowed to work, they can only leave the house with a male chaperone and if they do so they must be fully covered with a burkha. They are not allowed to show any skin in public. Women cannot be involved in public speaking or politics. The ground floor windows of the home must be covered so that the women inside cannot be seen by passersby. Relatives who advocate for women or who help them break any of these rules are at risk of being punished by the Taliban. Women also cannot access health care provided by men. 

It is in this world that Parvana lives. Author Deborah Ellis effectively portrays to her young readers the devastating effect the civil war and the rise of the Taliban has had on Parvana's family. Although the term "Sharia Law" is not mentioned in the novel, this is what Parvana and her family have lived under for the last year and half.  Her mother, once a writer for a radio station in Kabul, cannot work and must stay home. Nooria and Parvana can no longer attend school. The family, once prosperous, has lost their home and most of their belongings. Their oldest son, Hossain died after stepping on a land mine, and Parvana's father has lost his lower leg during the bombing of the school where he taught. Civil war and the Taliban have impoverished them to the point that they must resort to selling their possessions in the Kabul market.

The Taliban also have a brutal punishment system for crimes based on a strict interpretation of Sharia law. These punishments can include flogging, amputations and executions that are often carried out in public spaces such as stadiums. Ellis portrays this in The Breadwinner when Parvana and her friend Shauzia slip into the stadium believing they are attending a soccer game. Instead they witness the gruesome amputation of  the hands of men accused being theives. The experience is traumatizing for the two girls.

Although no dates are given in the novel Parvana notes that they have lived under Taliban rule for the last year and a half and that her mother and Nooria have not been outside their home during that time. This likely places the novel in the early in the year of 1998. Near the end of the novel, Parvana and her father learn that Mazar-i-Sharif has been overtaken by the Taliban. This event happened in August of 1998.

Parvana and her friend Shauzia realistically portray the reality of life for girls during war and under Taliban rule. The two girls must worry about things that no child should have to worry about. But because they are girls living under Sharia Law, they have no voice and few choices. Parvana is in a better situation because her parents are well educated and they support girls being educated. Nevertheless, Parvana finds her situation stressful and she longs to just be a child. "Parvana was tired. She wanted to sit in a classroom and be bored by a geography lesson. She wanted to be with her friends and talk about homework and games and what to do on school holidays. She didn't want to know any more about death or blood or pain." Parvana sees the starving women in burquas begging and the hungry and sick. "And there was no end to it. This wasn't a summer vacation that would end and the life would get back to normal. This was normal, and Parvana was tired of it."

Shauzia's situaton is difficult too. Her father has died, her brother left for Iran and her mother is sick all the time. Shauzia, her mother and her two little sisters live with her father's parents who do not believe in girls being educated. She tells Parvana that everyone fights in the house. The situation is so difficult that Shauzia is planning to leave Afghanistan and hopes to travel to France. She hopes to leave by the spring when she will have saved enough money. However, Shauzia worries that she may have left it too late as her body is now beginning to change. Leaving her family means leaving them to starve as she is their only means of support. She tells Parvana, "I just have to get out of here. I know that makes me a bad person, but what else can I do? I'll die if I have to stay here!"  Later on Shauzia reveals to Parvana that her grandfather is looking for a husband for her because as a young girl she will "fetch a good bride price and they will have lots of money to live on." Such a view is extremely common in strict Islamic cultures. When Parvana asks how Shauzia's mother will eat, Shauzia's dilemma to save her mother or herself is revealed. Shauzia responds, "What can I do?" Shauzia asked, the question coming out as a wail. "If I stay here and get married, my life will be over. If I leave, maybe I'll have a chance. There must be some place in this world where I can live. Am I wrong to think like this?"

Parvana suggests that Shauzia should accompany Mrs. Weera and her granddaughter when they travel to Pakistan. However, Mrs. Weera suggests that Shauzia is deserting her family just because things are tough but does she really understand the situation Shauzia is in. Mrs. Weera was able to have an education and become a teacher. That future or most any other is no longer open to Shauzia if she stays in Afghanistan. Mrs. Weera seems to have forgotten that Shauzia is a child who has the right to be safe, to make some choices about her future and that includes the right to be educated. It is a dilemma that Parvana, at this time, cannot resolve.

The novel ends with Parvana and her father ready to begin a journey to Mazar which is now under the control of the Taliban, to find her mother, Nooria and Ali. This leads nicely into the second novel in the series, Parvana's Journey.

Book Details:

The Breadwiinner by Deborah Ellis

Toronto: Groundwood Books/House of Ansai Press     2021

176 pp.

No Ordinary Day by Deborah Ellis

Valli is a coal picker in Jharia, that is someone who picks up the coal that falls from the baskets carried by the women out of the coal pit. As she walks along the railway tracks picking up bits of coal, Valli spies the "monsters" on the other side of the track and throws a stone at them. They are unclean, some missing a nose, or fingers. As her cousin Sanjay and the other boys continue throwing stones at the group on the other side of the tracks, Valli bends down and steals one of the boys' bag of coal and runs. But Valli doesn't get far and the boys grab her and throw her over the tracks and into the group of monsters on the other side. 

Valli lives with her aunt and uncle and her cousin Elamma. After escaping the monsters, Valli tries to sit and listen to the teacher who comes to the village to give free lessons to the students. Valli is smart and learns quickly but today her cousin Elamma spies her and drives her away from where the teacher is and forces her to go back to the monsters to retrieve her coal bag which was left there.

It is during this altercation that Elamma reveals that Valli is not family, that Valli's mother was sickly and that her grandparents were neighbours who paid Elamma's parents to take Valli. Valli's grandparents moved away because her mother had no husband and therefore had shamed the family. 

Valli goes back to picking coal but is certain Elamma is lying because she was always told that her parents had died. However, Valli decides to go find her aunt who is working in the coal pit and when she comes out to dump her coal, Valli questions her about her mother. While she is doing this, Valli burns her leg on a hot coal but doesn't feel anything. Auntie confirms what Elamma told her. This new knowledge makes Valli realize that she has no family and no friends and therefore, no reason to stay. Her future will be that of her "auntie", working in the coal pit. So she jumps into the back of the coal truck as it's leaving. She can do this because Valli has "magic feet" that do not feel "the rough points and edges of hard chunks of coal." 

The next morning Valli is discovered by Raj and Kam, the two men who were driving the truck. After the men argue about what to do with her, Kam tells her that after they unload the coal they are going to take her to Mrs. Mukerjee in Kolkata. Mrs. Mukerjee agrees to take in Valli who doesn't yet understand where she has been taken. After a meal while locked in the shed, Mrs. Mukerjee takes Valli downstairs and has her bathed and cleaned. However when they try to wash her feet, they see that they are scarred and badly blistered. Valli tells them not to worry because she cannot feel anything on her feet. But when Mrs. Mukerjee examines Valli more closely she sees white patches on her back and legs and realized that Valli is "unclean". After giving Valli and kurta and trousers she is made to leave.

Valli lives on the street for months: she borrows blankets from the unlocked cupboard of the Metropole Hotel, she begs money from tourists, reads the discarded books she finds on the streets of Kolkata, even learning bits of German and Spanish. Valli even tried three times to attend school. Then one day Valli goes to the Ganges to search for coins thrown into the river. After stealing some coins, Valli encounters a woman who is saying prayers for a man who died outside the hospital where she works. When Valli steps into the cremation pit and doesn't seem to notice the woman inspects her feet more closely as well as the white patches on her skin. She tells Valli her name is Indra and that she is a doctor and offers for Valli to come to the hospital for a check-up and a meal. Valli agrees to go but refuses to get into the taxi and so they walk to the hospital.  

At the hospital Valli is fed a delicious meal, has a blood sample taken and her feet treated and bandaged. Dr. Indra tells Valli that she has Hansen's Disease or leprosy. This is the reason Valli's "magic feet" do not feel anything. Dr. Indra explains that what she has is not a punishment but is from being infected by a bacteria. She tells Valli that she can stay at the hospital and be cured. Dr. Indra recognizes that Valli is very intelligent,  and that she is naturally inquisitive about the human body. However, Valli doesn't trust anyone and she is terribly frightened when she wakes in the hospital surrounded by people who also have leprosy and whom she calls "monsters". So she runs away.

Her life doesn't get better though. In the weeks following her visit to the hospital, Valli lives at the Sealdah Railway Station where she helps a young girl named Bharati. However, Valli notices that all the niceness has left her: she doesn't want to keep caring for Bharati, and she laughs after painting Mr. Vishwas toenails.  After seeing herself in the window of a book store, and looking more closely at her feet which now smell bad and look terrible, Valli realizes that her future is like the woman beggar she sees with a starving baby.. She knows she has to make a choice; either stay on the streets and become sicker or go to the hospital and hope that she can make a new and better life for herself.

Discussion

No Ordinary Day tackles the difficult subject of the desperately poor street children of Kolkata. Accomplished author, Deborah Ellis uses the character of Valli, a poor, unwanted orphan who leaves her home of Jharia, a neighbourhood in the city of Dhanbad, to live in Kolkata. The novel focuses not only the desperate poverty of India's poor but also on the prevalence of leprosy in this population.

Valli is an engaging and delightful character, whose intelligence, kindness and innocence is evident throughout the story.  Valli manages to survive on the streets by taking the advice of an old man who is also a beggar. He tells her that she is on an adventure and that without it, it would simply be another ordinary day. He also explains that Valli has more than she realizes and that this makes her rich. "You have a lovely green kurta...You have a beautiful long braid down the middle of your back. To someone without clothes and without hair, you are a millionaire." The man also encourages Valli to share whatever she has with others. This helps Valli in the first few weeks she is on the street. 

In putting into practice what the elderly man has advised, Valli gives a family the soap that she took from Mrs. Mukerjee and in turn they give her some of their food. Valli correctly states that  "Nobody really owns anything. We give back our bodies at the end of our lives. We own our thoughts, but everything else is just borrowed. We use it for a while, then pass it on."  With this mindset, Valli is able to survive for months on the street, "borrowing" and then passing on what she borrows. 

Ellis captures the life of a street child in a way that feels realistic.  When she begs money from Dr. Indra, Valli won't get into a taxi with Dr. Indra because she knows about children who have gone into taxis with strangers and are never seen again. She has learned not to trust people, even doctors. "He smiled at me. He seemed friendly, but I had learned that you couldn't always trust smiles. Some smiles were lies. Some smiles were followed by hands grabbing at you and pulling you into an alley."  When she is given food at the hospital, more than she could ever pay for, Valli decides to eat it all very fast before they take it away from her.

Dr. Indra quickly understands that Valli is very intelligent and so when she takes Valli to the hospital, she spends time explaining what she is doing. She lets Valli listen to her heart with the stethoscope, explains why she is sick. These small actions captivate Valli but not enough to make her stay. She also doesn't understand that she can be cured. 

After running away from the hospital Valli feels that she has thrown away the one chance she had in life. She realizes that she wants more than what she has, which is nothing. 

"I wanted clean bandages again. 

But I wanted more than that.
I wanted to be like Dr. Indra.

I wanted to know things and to speak about things so that people would listen to me. I wanted to have a purse with rupees in it -- enough rupees that I could pay for extra things, if I wanted to, just to be nice... And I wanted to have so many dupattas that I could cut one in half and give it away without even thinking about it." 

Eventually Valli is able to make the decision to help herself. It is only when she has gone hungry for a few days, when she finds herself getting mean, and when she realizes that her feet are very infected that she is able to return to the hospital. 

Ellis uses Valli's illness to explain that leprosy, now known as Hansen's Disease, is due to a bacteria and is not a punishment, a belief that dates back to Biblical times, if not earlier. It is likely that leprosy originated in India based on archeological evidence. Ellis captures the stigma that those with leprosy face as well as the lack of Dr. Indra explains this to Valli and tells her that she can be cured of the disease but she needs to stay in the hospital and take the medicine. At this point, Valli is not ready yet to do this. She only makes this choice when her life continues to get worse, days without food and her feet become increasingly infected and she begins to wonder if she could lose her feet or even die.

No Ordinary Day also portrays the effect the stigma unwed mothers in India experience: the grinding poverty for women and children and to the abuse of girls. Valli learns that her mother was not married and pregnant with her. She is told she has no father and she doesn't know if her father is alive or dead. Her mother's unplanned pregnancy created so much shame for her grandparents that they sold her to "auntie" and then moved away. This led to Valli's abuse: she was given the scraps of food that her "cousin" Sanjay left on his plate and was abused by her "uncle".

Overall this short novel should capture the interest of middle graders who are interested in social issues in the developing world.

Book Details:

No Ordinary Day by Deborah Ellis
Toronto: Groundwood Books    2011
159 pp.