In a large box in Bariz Shah’s Sandringham house were the contents of his life. When we spoke, he had yet to open it. It is, or parts of it are, like the mythical Pandora’s box. Open the lid and out will fly bad and harrowing things. There will be evil in there. He believes in evil. There is “the Whisper”, which is the devil and which gets inside your head and “if you’re not careful we will end up in the depths of hell by indulging ourselves to that Whisper.” He grew up believing that he carried the evil that is the Whisper within him. But like Pandora’s box, his also contains hope. Lots of it. Hope, and love, and Allah triumphs over evil, he believes. He should know.
But the real reason he hadn’t opened his box is that he was waiting for the return of his wife and their two young boys from a family trip to Australia. He wanted to make a video of their faces when he opened the box and, voilà, out into the world arrived his memoir: Beyond Hope: From an Auckland Prison to Changing Lives in Afghanistan. His face is on the cover. His boys, 3 and 1, pointed and said, “Daddy!” His wife, Saba, cried tears of joy. You can see why she might have. Inside that box of newly published books was a story of redemption, in more ways than one.
Shah, a former refugee from Afghanistan then Pakistan who arrived here as a nipper in 2001, was a student at Canterbury University at the time of the 2019 mosque attacks. Afterwards, he and Saba fundraised $20,000 and went to Afghanistan to set up 51 micro-businesses in memory of the 51 people who were killed. Among the beneficiaries was Marzia Meerjahan Shah, a 28-year-old mother of six who’d lost her husband in a suicide bomb attack. A skilled seamstress, she was given a sewing machine and materials to make reusable bags.
Shah was named Muslim New Zealander of the Year the following year. He has remained a prominent Muslim voice in the community and advocate for a safer New Zealand, acting as a ministerial adviser and continuing to fundraise for displaced people in Afghanistan.
And, as his book title implies, he is also a former inmate of Spring Hill prison, near Meremere in Waikato, where he did time for aggravated robbery in 2014. He was 18. He was sentenced to three years, two months, later reduced to 22 months. He is that rare creature: a reformed crim.
In his book, there is a photograph of him standing by the Spring Hill Corrections Facility sign holding two certificates. He graduated from Canterbury in 2021 with a BA honours in engineering and a diploma in humanitarian engineering. He writes, “It’s far from a traditional graduation photo. I never liked the look of those gowns anyway.”
Life and crimes
He now works as an engineer at Fletcher Construction. He hasn’t done too badly for a former jailbird – and the crime he was banged up for is the only one he says he didn’t intend to get involved in. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong mates. While he was posing with his certificates, a passing guard congratulated him for his perseverance.
One day in prison, he looked in a mirror and saw Gollum – The Lord of the Rings character who went to the dark side, seduced by the power of the ring – looking back at him. “Gollum is the worst side of me, too – the side that is a cheat, that has no honour, that wants to settle for less, that wants to procrastinate.”
I ask whether Gollum has now gone away and he says, “He’s under control at the moment … From time to time he pops his head out and makes little suggestions … with things I don’t want to do. It’s a lifelong pursuit. He never goes away. You just need to make him your friend.”
He is a bit skittery about what his parents will make of his book. There’s stuff in there that they have no idea about. An edited history of the life and crimes of a young bad ‘un: The holding up of a dairy while wielding a knife “borrowed” from the kitchen of one of his mates’ mothers; the drug-taking, the drug-dealing. He would drive about flogging his wares. He was Uber weed before there was Uber. “Yes, that is true. I was doing deliveries when most of my competition would just be in a house. I went a step further and I was doing quite well, actually.” He and his partners in crime would watch Police Ten 7 for “inspiration”.
He is also worried that his parents will judge his observations of their parenting as being critical, which was not his intention. But he does write about his father giving him a beating, which he deserved “100%”, he says. He was beyond being a brat. Even if his parents didn’t know exactly what he got up to, you suspect they might have had an inkling that whatever he was up to it was no good. “I mean, they knew I was in a bad place.”
He also writes about how, as a little kid, he hated his mother going to work. She has a degree in sociology, taught in Afghanistan and later in Pakistan, and did a lot of community work helping other refugees. Shah would be left at home with his grandmother, who had had a traumatic early life that resulted in her being one scary nana. She would chase the kids if they dared to use her bathroom. You imagine an old lady in a hijab chasing her wayward grandkids around the house, wielding, you can’t help but hope, her broom stick.
She would instigate physical altercations with her daughter-in-law. She sounds terrifying but she mellowed in later life and would stick up for her daughter-in-law if she thought the kids were giving her cheek.
He came here with his mum and four siblings under a family resettlement scheme. An uncle had sought asylum in 1999 and had been granted residency. On the plane, the kids worked out that if you pushed the little button you could ask for, and get, endless treats: “Chocolate, chips, ice cream, Coca-Cola, Fanta.” They pushed and re-pushed that little button. Not long after, he barfed in the aisle on a failed sprint to the loo.
Shah imagined that New Zealand would perhaps be like New York, or maybe London. “But it felt like there was hardly anybody around. The same feeling you get when you travel from a big city through a small town for a stopover. Quiet, slow and full of unfamiliar faces. ‘What a deserted place,’ we thought. ‘Where is everybody?’”
His dad remained in Afghanistan for another four years. When he rejoined the family, he was virtually a stranger. Shah called him “uncle”.
Having no paternal influence for those years could go some way to explaining why he went so spectacularly off the rails. “Back in Pakistan, if we were naughty, we got smacked. Sometimes we were made to sit in front of the class ‘like a chicken’. If you were the chicken – which I was, often – the other kids would scrunch up pieces of paper and throw them under your bottom and shout, ‘Hey! He’s laid an egg!’ and everyone would laugh.”
It is the sharing of some of these stories (not the chicken one; that’s there for comic effect) that is giving him a few wobbles. He loves his parents. He doesn’t want them to think he’s intimating that they didn’t do the best for him. In Afghan culture, it is not done to spill family stories publicly.
He has one other concern and that is he is worried that I might portray him as the “stereotypical misogynist” Muslim man. He’s not, so of course I’m not about to, but it’s probably my fault for asking him if he cleans the loo. “Of course I help my wife round the house! There is an expectation on both sides. We commit to helping each other willingly.”
Muslim tinder
He says he knows he has no control over how his book will be read. He’s prepared for it. He’s spent much of his life being prepared for how people will judge him. He describes his propensity for rebellion as a personality trait that “runs through my father’s family tree like climbing vines with bad intentions”. He describes himself as an “edge walker”. He says he still is and thinks he always will be. “But I’m okay with it.” He doesn’t mind walking on the edges and looking in. It gives him a sort of freedom to observe the world he’s inhabiting. “To look at it through a different lens, yeah.”
Arranged marriages are viewed through another lens, by Western eyes. It turns out it’s easy as. When you decide it’s time for a wife in your life, just ask your mum. This is the Muslim equivalent of Tinder, he says. His mum said, “What about Saba?” who they had known in Pakistan. They got engaged on the phone. He recounts their first meeting. He was understandably nervous. “She was nervous, too, and she noticed me avoiding her eyes. At the same time, I was busy wondering if I was allowed to speak to her. Now, we laugh about it, but at the time, it was a very strange feeling for both of us. Married at First Sight vibes. We were so nervous and so young. I was just 22 and she was 21.”
In 2017, they had a big traditional wedding in Pakistan, which wasn’t really their style or what they would have chosen. For their first wedding anniversary, they returned to Pakistan, where he had organised a little surprise party in an orphanage where they talked to the kids and shouted them cake. Saba loved it, he says.
He later sent a sweet text about Saba: “I am in awe of my wife’s character. Despite being under constant threat, she fearlessly chooses to wear her hijab. Or the fact that she is choosing to fully invest her time right now to ensure she is raising healthy children in society. I love my wife.”
They both, obviously, swiped right on his mum’s version of Tinder. “Our values aligned.” He says he and Saba came to an agreement that, while the kids were little, she would stay at home with them.
“We’re not being guilt-tripped by society. Somehow she understands her importance as a mother … And to me, that’s amazing. Because, at times, it feels like she’s going against the entire society’s expectations. And that’s very beautiful to me.”
He says the problem with pockets of Islam in Afghan society is that some “tend to follow culture instead of referring to the tenets of religion”. He means, by way of example, “… the idea of shutting down schools as a right for young women. That is absolutely against Islam.” Islam dictates that you should acquire as much education as you can, he says.
That 2021 Muslim New Zealander of the Year Award? He still doesn’t think he deserved it. “I’m far from a good Muslim. My shortcomings make me feel like a fraud.”
Oddly, at least to a non-Muslim, even when he was living his life of crime he retained his beliefs, although you might say he was a bit casual, which is to say, he didn’t give a stuff about the obligatory five-times-a-day prayer rituals. Well, he was pretty busy, what with all that Uber weeding.
He doesn’t do things by halves. To paraphrase the Longfellow rhyme: When he was good he was very, very good. When he was bad he was horrid. If he was going to be a dope dealer he would be the best dope dealer. If he was going to be a proper Muslim he would be the best proper Muslim he could be.
Shah believes in service to community, as do his parents. So those particular climbing vines of his family tree have good intentions.
When he was in the clink, he worked out hard and he worked hard at becoming a proper Muslim. As I say, he doesn’t do things by halves, which might be one benefit of being born stubborn.
His life story might be summed up thus: boy goes off the rails; man gets back on the rails, takes on that bad ass Gollum and goes on to write a very good book about his adventures along the way. Not bad for an ex-chicken.
Beyond Hope: From an Auckland Prison to Changing Lives in Afghanistan by Bariz Shah (HarperCollins, $36.99) is on sale now.