KARACHI: Javeria is 10 and her sister Sumaiyya eight. Both girls help their father Jamal run his little electronics repair shop in Qasba Colony near Kati Pahari.

Today Javeria, the older of the sisters, is busy repairing a car power amplifier. The customer, who brought it to her, ignores her father and instead requests her to kindly see what is wrong with it.

“Please can you see what is wrong with it,” he asks the child who quickly takes it and opens it up.

‘I want my daughters to stand tall and face the world on their own terms’

Moments later she is checking its circuit board with her multimeter. There is a little smile on her lips as she finds the problem among some components. She looks up from her cramped workstation at her father. She says something about a burst diode or capacitor followed by something about resistors, connectors and transistors. Her father then gestures for her to replace the damaged parts by pointing to the rows of boxes piled over each other in some shelves in a corner. She reaches out, takes what she needs from there and gets busy in the repair work, holding a soldering iron gun and soldering wire in her steady little hands.

“She is a very competent little electrician. She has fixed my other electronic appliances and gadgets also, and right here before my very eyes, too. Other people I used to go to earlier used to tell me to leave my speaker or juicer with them for a day or so and even then their work was not satisfactory. And here Javeria and her little sister Sumaiyya fix things just like that,” he snaps his fingers to show how fast and thorough the girls are with their repairs.

“And they are very reasonable. They don’t even charge too much,” he added while paying about Rs300 to the girl for a job well done.

“Thanks to my daughters, I also get women customers at my shop for repair work of irons, sewing machines, charging lights, juicers, food factories, etc,” the girls’ father tells Dawn.

A Pakhtun from Shangla, Swat, originally, Jamal says Javeria and Sumaiyya are his youngest daughters. “God Almighty has blessed me with eight daughters. I trained with my ustad [teacher] as a child and I passed on that training and everything I know to all my daughters. They are my shagird [students]. The older ones are married now but these two are with me and working hard. They also go to school, they read Quran with the guidance of their grandmother, they also learn how to sew and stitch from their mother. I am very proud of all my daughters,” he says beaming.

“I want my daughters to stand tall and face the world on their own terms. They should never think of themselves as second to boys. I also have one son, who is five and he also accompanies me to my shop with his sisters sometimes,” he smiles. “My wife also encourages my girls to accompany their father. Honestly, we need to change this habit of keeping our daughters inside or hiding them in the name of protection,” he says.

Someone then compared him to Malala Yousafzai’s father Ziauddin. “Well, his daughter is totally into education but my daughters are into technical work,” he offers his own comparison.

“I wish I had the resources to educate my daughters well, but I am not a rich man. Both Javeria and Sumaiyya dream of becoming electrical engineers one day. But I can only provide them with government school education. I cannot send them to technical colleges or an engineering university. But I wish the government or some NGO recognises their talent, their potential to come forward and lend my children a helping hand in making their future bright,” he sighs.

Published in Dawn, October 12th, 2021