Interview with Zahra Paracha

Growing up in a world where US policy has destroyed the lives of her family, 14-yead-old Zahra Paracha speaks to Cageprisoners about her life following the incarceration of her father in Guantanamo Bay and the sentencing of her brother in the US. The account is a telling example of the way that innocents have been caught in a War of Terror where policies disregard the human side of the innocents who tragically are left with no recourse to justice.

Cageprisoners: Zahra the last time you spoke to us, you were about ten or eleven years old so can you tell us what’s been happening in terms of your own life since then? 

Zahra Paracha: Well, I’ve grown physically, mentally. I think though my sister says I haven’t, I think, yeah, I have and I feel I’ve become more emotionally strong in all, because all the bad news that comes from my brother’s case and my father’s case, I don’t take it as a very bad thing. One person once said ‘all of these kinda things they can either make you stronger or make you weaker’ and it just made me stronger. So basically, I think I am stronger than I was but I was a child and I don’t remember much but I do remember that my friends, (most of them still don’t know) back then they found it really hard to believe so I just decided not to tell them and basically, they still don’t know.

I know if I tell them, they’re gonna have loads of questions and I’ll have to tell them four years of experience and they still won’t believe it because I go to press conferences and I go to these kinda things, like this workshop and they just find it really hard to believe and they were like ‘don’t lie’ and it’s really hard to explain to them how I’m actually being truthful and how it’s actually the case and besides that, it’s just really hard because I mean Mum gives interviews all the time and sometimes when I sit with her and I hear her, you notice how she gets really cheerful and then she starts crying, emotional and she starts crying and I don’t know how to comfort her. This is like, like the only kinda mother I know, this is the only side of her I remember. I don’t remember what she was like before, people come, they go and are like ‘Your mother’s changed’, I don’t know what they mean by that. I just know that she was like this throughout my life, from when I can remember and this is all I remember and I don’t know how to stop her from crying, how to get revenge on the people who did all this to us but I just don’t know how to react.

I just do whatever I can to make my life as normal as possible up until now.

CP: Do you find it difficult then to enjoy yourself when you’re with your friends, thinking about everything that’s going on at home or do you just try and block it out? 

ZP: Actually, I am not really sure. When I’m having fun I know I am not having as much fun as I know that I would have had much more fun if I didn’t have any family problems but I’m not going to say anything because I do not know what my life was like before either. I do remember them a lot because my friends go like, they got really mad at their fathers for coming back home when they were supposed to come back at 8 o’clock at night but they came back at 11. They got really angry at their fathers. I was about 11 and I said to them, ‘at least your father can come home’ and I remember that after a very long time, I realised that I wouldn’t have said that if I was at this stage. I mean, this is something that you would just keep to yourself, I just actually said it out to them and they were also pretty young and did not know what to say after that.

CP: Can you just tell me recently, before your maternal grandmother passed away, I mean how did that effect you, effect your mother, how did it effect the whole balance within in the house?                           

ZP: Well, I should tell you the whole scene: My brother and my sister went to sleep and my mother she was just closing all the doors and she was getting ready to go to bed and then as soon as she lay down on the bed (I was right next to her), she just burst out into tears and she was sobbing and she said ‘I can’t believe she’s gone’ and I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to wake up my sister but I thought that maybe I should just handle this on my own and I tried. I don’t know if I helped her but I just stayed up for her, although I think I had some school work or something.

I did stay up with her because I knew that this was much more important than that and I just didn’t know how to comfort her because she just kept on crying and kept on crying and it was something that I knew I could not control and my sister tells me, sometimes she just lets her cry because otherwise she won’t let all of it out so I just left her and besides that, it has effected me because now my mother stays home because she feels bad that I have to stay alone. 

Once I was alone at home, it was the first time I actually realised what my mother was talking about; I was just left home alone and I was working on the computer and then I realised (just out of the blue) that, I just sensed it that I was all alone at home, anything could happen to me and the situation we were in, anything could happen. Someone could just come into my house, raid it and just shoot me there and then I got really, really scared and I started crying. I called up my sister and told her to come home as soon as possible; she came home after fifteen minutes but fifteen minutes seemed really, really long, about like a year or something.

CP: What was your relationship with your grandmother like?

ZP: I asked her a few questions before she died because I had a feeling that, I kinda expected it. I asked her which grandchild she would be the most proud of, (hoping it would be me but yeah that didn’t happen), she said Uzair Paracha and I said ‘really, why’, she said ‘because he suffered the most, he’s the most experienced grandson and I just wish I could see him once before I die’ and she knew she was going to die. I knew that because she would always just say ‘God please let me live’ although the condition she was in, I wouldn’t have done the same thing but she really wanted to see my father and brother. 

I remember that my brother, she used to send letters and used to go, like as soon as you come back, I’m gonna take you ice-skating and I don’t know how that will be possible in Karachi but he said that. I remember my grandmother, she never ever took this personally, she never ever used to like think that can’t happen; she always stayed optimistic. I remember when my mother used to go to the office, my grandmother took the walker, she couldn’t walk, she took the walker and she used to try to climb down one step at a time on the stairs; that was very difficult because she had very brittle bones and she just kept on trying to and I used to watch and encourage her and I didn’t realise that it was very dangerous and when I told my mother…

Mustafa Paracha: She used to try and climb down the stairs and walk and one day mum found out somehow…

ZP: I told her because I thought she would be happy.

MP: And she was like ‘how did this happen, why is this happening’ and she found out that it was because my grandmother wanted to be able to walk, wanted to be able to take her steps until the car because when my brother would come back, she wanted to go for dinner. After that her bones began to become more brittle and then she wasn’t able, I mean…

ZP: Suffering osteoporosis.

CP: How much do you remember about your father?

ZP: Only a few instances. Like I remember once, there was some tennis lessons my school had advertised for tennis lessons at this club and I really, really wanted to go because one of my friends (my best friends) was going and that was the only reason I wanted to go, not because I wanted to play tennis so I kept on pestering my father. The admission fees were five hundred, not even including the monthly fee, ‘I have to go Dad, I have to’ and he said, ‘no, you’re not going.’ I said ‘Why?’ and he said, ‘because you’re not going to stick to them and going to quit them after one lesson’. Getting to the point, he was right, that after like one lesson... well…after that I thought that is was because of financial problems so I went to my best friend and I told her ‘I can’t, I don’t have the money’ and then she gathered up like ten rupee notes and she used to just gather up and made five hundred and I told my father ‘now can I join the tennis lesson’, he said ‘Child, that’s not the problem’ and he took out his wallet and took a five hundred note, dropped it on the table and he said, ‘You’re not gonna stick to them’ and I remember then he just, he got it to me and he said ‘You watch’ and I did, it happened, he was right.

CP: What are your memories of your brother, Uzair? 

ZP: Not much. I mean, he used to be out of the house. He was thirteen years older than me and that is a really big age difference so he used to be out of the house a lot. I remember sometimes, he used to go to his friends' house and if I was really bored at home then he would take me along. Then even when the friends used to say like ‘why did you let your sister along’, he would go like ‘because she was bored, she wanted to go out’. He never used to say stuff like 'I’m so embarrassed of her'. His girlfriend, Muneeza, she also said that 'he used to talk about you and Mustafa all the time'; this was really, really hard to believe because you know.

I also have, my mother once told me of this incident, she said that I was very scared of him because he was like this really strict role model or something and she said…

Muneeza Paracha: Not strict but he would make you do things                      

ZP: I think I was really, really, I used to be a brat when I was young like at the age of two or three and he made…I had like long hair because I didn’t let anybody cut it because I didn’t like combing and stuff, I was a really a ‘jungli’ [wild] person at that time and I grew it up to my shoulders and my mother said ‘oh my god, you should let me cut it’ and I said ‘no’ and my brother, he made me sit on the sink and he said ‘you move and you watch’ and he cut it.

Muneeza Paracha: He was watching Ninja Turtle (you know the Urdu translation) and she wasn’t very good with English and he was watching that, me and Uzair sitting at the back cutting and was going on ‘what’s going on’ and we were like, ‘Nothing, watch, watch’.

ZP: He cut it half way and mum said he forgot about the other half and said ‘Leave it, it looks fine’. Besides that I don’t remember anything about him,. All I remember is of his letters and of all the incidents which mum tells the reporters. I listen to it and I’ve been told I’m a lot like him. I’ve been told in physical feature I’m a lot like him and sometimes like once I remember there was a home bill that came and my mother would never let go of that phone bill, she gave it to me and she said ‘you save it and when you grow older, I will take it as something against you’. I actually spent about four thousand on phone calls and she said ‘you’re just like him’ and that was really embarrassing because she took a highlighter and she highlighted all the numbers that I had, she took a calculator and she actually calculated everything and that’s what I remember, she said I was just like him. When I hear stuff like that, I just want to really know about him. He also wanted to learn the guitar.

 CP: How does that feel that you have to campaign for someone that you don’t really know that well?

ZP: It feels, I don’t know, I’m not really sure. There was one letter which mum wrote to my brother that Mustafa doesn’t study or something like that and brother said something like ‘Mustafa I wish I was there next to you grabbing those ears to finely tune them’ and I laughed so much because I mean, it’s somebody I don’t know yet I love him, I know him. It’s a really weird relationship I have with my father and my brother because I know my father is a really nice man and all but I don’t know, everybody says my father’s a really nice man. Something with my father that everybody said was that he was a really nice man, some people would have said something like even the people who tried to do fraud with my mother, even they said he was a nice man and they said my mother was going against my father which is very, very ridiculous. Anyways, that was all I remember.

CP: So how did it feel when you found out Uzair was sentenced to thirty years in prison?  

ZP: I remember the scene. I always keep note of these types of scenes. What happened was that we actually didn’t get an email, we were awake all night and we were looking at Google and kept on refreshing the pages to get the article and finally when we saw it, we just kept on reading it. It was like the beginning was that the judge was in favour of my brother and it kept on going like that, like the judge said he was sentenced to thirty years in prison and my mother read that; she was just silent for like three seconds and she just went like this and she just started crying and she just wouldn’t stop.

I went outside, I started crying and kept on crying for about ten minutes and the I realised that crying won’t really help and then I thought that this won’t mean, this isn’t the world that’s gonna stop me from trying to help my brother to get out. I thought that I’ve been through obstacles and this is just one of them and I’m going to be with my brother whether they like it or not and then I realised I’m gonna stop crying ad realised that I’m gonna act all optimistic so that my family doesn’t realise that I was upset but my family were much more upset. It was just really, really emotional because it was around fajr time and we had to start praying and about to go to sleep. When I was praying, I was like as soon as I started praying, I just started crying (just burst out). I didn’t know how to stop. I didn’t sleep well that night because the next day, people used to come over, they used to go like ‘We’re so sorry’ and I realised that they were more sad than me. I felt guilty because why are they more sad than me when he is my blood relative; it was really weird.

CP: After what happened to your father and your brother, has that forced you or made you want to actually read more about other people’s cases as well or… 

ZP: Yeah.

I thought even this Maajid Khan, I thought that he was this really, really, big, huge terrorist in the beginning because all I thought was that my brother was innocent and anyone else he was associated with was a terrorist and then I just read about him and I was like oh my God, maybe he’s the same, maybe he’s just like my brother, maybe he’s also stuck in this situation. When I saw his picture, I thought he was the most innocent twenty six year old that I had ever seen aside from my brother. Well he was, he looked, he so does not look like a terrorist. He had a small beard, it was not a beard in fact. When I met his wife, his wife said sorry to my mother which I found a little weird but I wouldn’t blame her (she might be feeling a little guilty too). When I heard about his daughter and she is three and he has never seen his daughter, it just broke my heart. I was like how can that happen, how can they just stand there and watch all of this and there are other cases too. I read about one on Cageprisoners about a man who was abducted and then he was tortured to death and then they just said that he died of natural causes or something like that and I saw the body and it was very evident that he was tortured because of the marks but they didn’t say anything, they just kept on denying it because they think they’re God.

CP: So do you think that your life in some ways is very surreal compared to other fourteen year old kid? 

ZP: Yes. Yes. Yes. My friends are all occupied in stuff like ‘does this shawl look good on me’ and they model in front of the mirror for like hours and go like ‘hi’, try to pretend how to say hi to people and it’s just materialistic and it’s just ridiculous and they love shopping, I don’t know why. Something wrong with them, something seriously wrong with them, they should go to a psychiatrist. I’m looking at stuff like Lebanon and Israel war and I know if I ever mention it to them, they will have the dumbest look on this planet because they won’t know a single thing I’m talking about. The first reaction will be ‘will I still be able to go shopping’ stuff like that and I know they can find their own spaces and I wouldn’t blame them because they’re not really that old, they are only fourteen and when I realise that only fourteen then I realise there is something wrong with me.

It was just really weird. I told my friend I am supposed to go to Islamabad, there’s this workshop, I have to go to a press conference and she said ‘What’, I said ‘Yeah’ 'You’re crazy’ and I said ‘You’re crazy’…in my head of course. Then she said ‘How come you’re going to such huge things and you’re only fourteen’ and I said, I thought in my head fourteen doesn’t mean only fourteen, fourteen is an ideal age to start but according to her fourteen is shawls and shopping and stuff like that. I’m also into music but I live a balanced life, I don’t know how.               

CP: Balanced?

ZP: A guitar, school and this. Socialising also but I don’t like socialising either. My friends just bore me, they took about shopping all the time that’s why; that’s the only thing they ever think about and guys.

CP: I mean just to end with, do you have any kind of message that you would like to give to our readers?

ZP: Basically never lose hope because whether or not the Americans the American government get punished or not doing all this in this life, the next they go, they are going to get punished anyhow. They’re going to get punished whether they like it or not, whether they have enough money to get out of it, whether they have billions and trillions of dollars, God won’t care, God will be like ‘you did this, you’re dead’ and they won’t have anywhere to go. They can’t commit suicide because it will be dead and they can’t just escape, it’s gonna be there so I’m just gonna give the message just be optimistic because something or another will happen and justice will be served.

CP: Zahra, thank you for speaking to us.