The Underground Girls of Kabul Read online

  The young chain-smoking firefighters unload a large plastic sheet, two heavy Oriental rugs, and several large baskets and buckets from their trucks. They carry it all, plus guns and ammunition belts, across the pretty streams by jumping from stone to stone. When Mehran, dressed in white just like her father, falls and plunges knees-first into the water, she is swung back up and carried on his shoulders. She rides triumphantly, overlooking the procession at the tail end of which her sisters slip in their flat sandals, struggling to pick up the pace.

  The firefighters act as pathfinders, who after a half-hour trek settle on the perfect tree, unfurling large plastic sheets underneath it. In this traditional rite of spring, the tree soon begins to vibrate, and clusters of little white and red berries patter down on the plastic sheet, held by two of them. A third firefighter, who has climbed up to the top of the tree, and wrapped his legs around a thick branch, lets out a loud, satisfied laugh when he is asked to give the branch another shake. And the mulberries rain down again, making their way from the plastic sheet into baskets. Our caravan sets off again, and the loot is carried to the side of a river stream that holds another little secret. A hole has been carved into the ground and lined with stones, allowing water from the stream to flow in. Baskets are emptied into the bathtub-like reservoir filled with ice-cold, clear water, and everyone squats around the tub to greedily scoop up the dark purple berries, scarfing them down by the handful. When all have eaten more than they can really stomach, hand-knotted rugs are spread out on the grass. For the prescribed digestive routine, several of the berry eaters go from cross-legged to fully lying down while large containers of runny yogurt are passed around.

  AZITA’S HUSBAND OF thirteen years smiles broadly and turns his face toward the sun. In search of attention, Mehran crawls up onto him, only to be carefully pushed off his very full belly. It is rare for him to get out of Kabul, and to show his children much other than the apartment where they all spend most of their time.

  He tells me he married Azita because she was his cousin, but also because he loved her. But mostly, he explains, he did his uncle and his family a favor. Otherwise Azita could have been forced to marry a stranger in wartime.

  “That is why I stepped in. The whole family agreed it was the best thing.”

  “But you already had a wife?”

  “Yes. But Azita is the daughter of my uncle. Since I lost my father, he became like a father to me. When he said he did not want to lose her to another family, I wanted to help.”

  He looks at Mehran. “He is completely like a boy, don’t you think? He looks like a boy, and he behaves like a boy. He is a good son for us.”

  I look at Mehran, whose facial features resemble her father’s, especially when she wrinkles her forehead or frowns. Grinning, he agrees that Mehran is more pampered than his other children. But she is the youngest, so she just needs a little bit more love—one must remember that, too. It’s the same in every family. And Mehran will go back to being a girl; there is certainly no confusion about that. Ten or twelve may be a good age. Or a few years later, depending on how she looks. Her father is not entirely sure: “It is the first time we have done this. Let’s see what will happen.”

  He does not foresee any trouble for Mehran, or believe that her time as a boy will be confusing later on. Planning for or even thinking much about the future is best avoided. Through a turbulent history and several wars he has learned that trying to foresee the future is often just cause for disappointment. “This is the need for today, and I don’t know about tomorrow. She knows she is a girl, and when she grows up she will understand the difference better, too.”

  The deceit has worked so well he has almost fooled himself. “To be honest, I think of him as a boy. When I see him, I see my only son.”

  He fully expects Mehran to grow up to be a young woman, to marry and have children of her own. Anything else would be strange. “This is life in Afghanistan. Hopefully he will be lucky. Maybe it will be even easier for him since he is a boy now.”

  At the kebab lunch, Mehran is given the honorable placement between her father and the fire chief. She has become friendly with several of the firefighters, who allow her to hold each of their Kalashnikovs in a wobbly grip. If the firefighters have any clue of her real gender, they are too polite to say. Very politely, they also avert their eyes when the three other girls come their way, and they all make an effort to keep a distance, to avoid any physical collision. None of the other girls are offered a chance to hold the guns. After ingesting a large amount of food, the fire chief takes out a sweet-smelling hand-rolled cigarette and lights up. He offers it around to his circle of escorts, who happily put their guns on their laps and accept. It will make the drive back to Kabul a little less dull.

  On the way home, Mehran falls asleep on her father’s shoulder, as the task of driving is turned over to a firefighter with droopy eyelids. Mehran has a few more years before the life of an Afghan woman begins. For now, she is on the side of privilege.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE TOMBOY

  Zahra

  STANDING ON TOP of a table, she was an animal on display. There was cheering and loud laughter. Her body was frozen, and she could not move. When tears rolled down her cheeks she did not lift her hands to wipe them off. That she cried engaged them even more. “Look, look.” And she was looked at some more. Some clapped their hands with excitement. Finally, she buried her face in her hands, screaming, to block out the sound.

  It would become one of her first very illuminated memories, and she would later describe it: “I made the world dark. I thought that when I could not see the world, the world could not see me.”

  Arriving at kindergarten in Peshawar in the standard uniform for boys had been a mistake. Her mother had brought it to her, and Zahra had managed for a few days before the other children figured her out. The older ones began to taunt her: She was not a real boy, so why would she want to look like one? One of them ran for the teacher, who was not pleased to hear about the charade. Zahra’s parents were called over and quietly sat through a lecture about the importance of discipline and obedience in children from a young age. That was both the kindergarten’s and the school’s mission, and it was not to be made fun of. The parents would need to get a proper girl’s uniform for their daughter before she would be allowed to return.

  At home, Zahra cried and tried to wriggle out of the blue skirt and white blouse. It was when she returned to school that she was put on a table, to serve as an example before the others.

  “This is a girl,” the teacher announced. “Look at her. This is what a girl looks like. Do you see? She was never a boy. You will all remember this now.”

  ALMOST TEN YEARS later, standing in the doorway of her family’s apartment in Kabul, Zahra has chosen her own outfit: a boxy black jacket, a buttoned-up shirt, and dark pants. She has the look of an elegant young man, walking a fine line on gender, with her round face, full lips, long eyelashes, and a shiny black Tom Cruise hairstyle with a neat side parting. She does not greet us with a smile. Nor does she lower her gaze, an impulse ingrained in most Afghan girls. She is unafraid, looking me straight in the eyes, resting one hand on her hip. And why would she not? Her exterior is of the ruling gender; mine is not.

  Through another chain of rumors and introductions, I have found fifteen-year-old Zahra and her family. They are from Andkhoy in the northern Faryab province. There, according to several carpet dealers in Kabul, girls are commonly dressed like boys in order to help out as weavers in carpet production. But Zahra was never a bacha posh who did hard labor. Instead, her parents say their daughter just always wanted to be a boy. They had nothing to do with it. And just as with many stories of bacha posh I have encountered by now, that will turn out to be not entirely true.

  Zahra is coming of a dangerous age.

  An Afghan girl who is no longer a child but on her way to becoming a woman should immediately be shielded and protected to ensure her virginity and reputation for a fu
ture marriage. No matter how athletic, boyish, and buoyant the spirit of a bacha posh may have been, puberty—or, according to Dr. Fareiba, ideally sometime before—is the time when the curtain necessarily comes down for most girls. It is when they must be undone, otherwise a bacha posh can become “a little strange in the head,” in Dr. Fareiba’s words, if she presents as something else going into puberty, when gender segregation goes into full effect. For this reason, by remaining in male disguise at fifteen, Zahra is slowly treading into far more complicated territory than a younger bacha posh. By her age, girls are commonly taught to focus on becoming proper, shy, and very quiet young women.

  But Zahra lacks most traditional feminine traits and speaks for herself right away. She has lived as a boy for as long as she can remember and has no intention of changing. She does not ever want to become an Afghan woman. They are second-class citizens, she explains to me, always beholden to and ruled by men. So why would she want to join them?

  “People use bad words for girls; they scream at them on the streets,” she says. “When I see that, I don’t want to be a girl. When I am a boy, they don’t speak to me like that.”

  Zahra would rather work, support herself, and make her own decisions, without being under the guardianship of a husband, following that of her father, as Afghan culture dictates for women. Other teenage Kabul girls will say similar things as a joking fantasy, as defying one’s parents is rarely an option in Afghan culture. But Zahra is serious, and she speaks of the usual path for Afghan women as unthinkable to her. She does not want a family, nor does she desire children of her own. “For always, I want to be a boy and a boy and a boy,” she says.

  There are no other bacha posh in her school, but she has come to this conclusion on her own, through observations of her neighborhood, and her own family. There, eleven people share three rooms, and Zahra sleeps with her sisters. As in many other Afghan households, moments of privacy extend, at most, to the bathroom. One of her eight siblings is always banging on the door to get in, or just banging on the door as they run by.

  WITH THE PERMISSION of Zahra’s parents, my female translator Setareh and I begin to stroll around Zahra’s Kabul neighborhood with her on some afternoons after she has finished school. She has an exaggerated and clunky way of walking, as if there were something between her legs. With high, tense shoulders, and hands hanging by the thumbs in her pockets, she strides forward in broad, duck-footed steps, in her preferred outfit of an oversize hooded plaid shirt, jeans, and flip-flops. She keeps her head low, face close to her chest, and looks up only if someone directly calls her name. She knows her power is in the exterior, and her walk successfully signals that she is a typical teenage boy with some attitude.

  Through this small masquerade, Zahra constitutes a provocation and a challenge to the order of her entire society.

  Fashion has always been a way to communicate class, gender, and power. In Afghanistan, gender and power are one and the same. A pair of pants, a haircut, the right walk, and a teenage girl can reach for all kinds of things she is not supposed to have. Just as the Taliban strictly controlled how both men and women looked during their reign—when women could appear in public only when covered from head to toe—specific rules on clothing have been used throughout history by those who want to make sure the patriarchal order stays in place.

  King James I of England denounced women dressing like men during his reign in the 1600s to ensure women did not see any undue advantages. France implemented a law in 1800 that said women could not wear pants; it was not formally removed until 2013. The Taliban explicitly forbade women wearing men’s clothing, and also for girls to dress as boys, which may indicate that there were enough transgressions of Zahra’s kind, and enough bacha posh, for them to see a need to ban the practice. Today, there is no official decree that makes any mention of dressing girls as boys.

  The Taliban’s dress police is also gone, but dress codes for women from puberty onward are still subjected to a strict social control, with many freelance enforcers. A woman must clearly signal her gender through her dress, but there are fluid limits to how much of a woman she is allowed to be.

  One day just outside Zahra’s house, a teenager rides by us on his bike, smacking his lips, uttering something in Dari. Setareh’s face twitches in an impulse to yell back, but instead she pulls back, lowering her gaze like a good girl. But Zahra’s reaction is swift: First, she hurls some profanities after the biker. Then she turns to Setareh and apologizes profusely on the cyclist’s behalf. Both of them refuse to translate the original insult, but soon it creeps out that the offensive line was “I can see the shape of your body,” followed by speculation about what kind of woman Setareh might be. No feminine shape should be noticeable when she moves, and her dark green, loose Punjabi-style pants, tunic, and scarf cover everything but her face and her hands. But her tunic is cut with the slightest hint of a waist in the middle, and the ensemble, which is not unusual for a current-day Kabul woman in her twenties, is less conservative than an all-black cloak. Adding to that, in the eyes of the cyclist, she is a lone woman in the company of a foreigner and a young boy—in other words, both suspect and possibly inappropriate company.

  I look down at my wide black pants and knee-length black trench coat. “So what am I? Not another woman?”

  Zahra and Setareh both look at me. “You,” they agree, “are just a foreigner. Nobody cares about you. It is Afghan women they harass. Even the small boys are like the religious police, trained in telling women what they should wear.”

  AS A FOREIGN, non-Muslim female, I am by definition a different species. Therefore, I am in some ways a neuter, which may be just as well under these circumstances. But what I wear still matters, and I am expertly styled to draw a minimum of attention to myself. A few days before the street incident, Setareh had given me a loving makeover. After observing me on our various excursions throughout Kabul, she finally decided to offer some commentary. My clothes were simply not loose enough, or wide enough, or dark enough. The sleeves were a little too short, showing a hint of wrist, and the delicate fabric of my tunic tended to cling to my thighs when I walked. Plus, bare feet in sandals? Everybody was looking at my white feet.

  Ten minutes later, after we had dived into my sparse closet, all that was deemed sexual had been removed, and I had been fully turned into a black blob. I had to look almost Afghan? I wondered. Not exactly, Setareh scoffed: “You will never look Afghan.”

  Even though the new look is much better, it is still decidedly foreign, she explained. The fabrics I wear look too expensive: Afghans wear shiny polyester, imported from Pakistan. My black coat is okay, but the cut is too modern, and not boxy enough. The pants are the worst—made from a high-tech breathable fabric, they look sporty. Since when does a proper Afghan woman practice sports? That is a men’s thing.

  Even if I hid under a burka, my body language would give me away as all but an Afghan woman, Setareh warned. “You wave your hands around when you speak. You sound aggressive. Like you demand something. You put your hands on your hips, like you want to challenge people. It looks very rude for a woman to do that. You walk fast, and you don’t look down. You look into people’s faces as it pleases you.”

  She smiled again—as what came next was almost too obvious—the black backpack I sometimes carry my camera in is just as bad as my khaki shoulder bag. They are both such Western giveaways—like I am about to go mountain climbing. No, Setareh explained: A modern Kabul woman strives to look cosmopolitan, like those in advertisements from Dubai, Pakistan, or Iran. She puts on makeup and carries a decent, feminine handbag, and wears heels—not so high that she could get stuck on rainy days when Kabul’s dust instantly turns to mud or be unable to jump over sewers, but still delicate enough to be feminine. Practicality in dress is for uncivilized people. And for men.

  But the point is not to look good, or for me to resemble an Afghan. In order to work efficiently, we need to blend in and just be as close to nothings—but still wom
en—as possible. Show respect. Afghans make a sport of spotting foreign men in trimmed beards and traditional village garb who ride around together in groups of two or three in regular taxis as they give the native look their best shot. Their expensive sunglasses and hiking boots always give them away. Trying too hard is the ultimate embarrassment, in Setareh’s view.

  Her friends all spend much time tweaking and trying to expand upon the female dress code, in which they must look like women, but at the same time, not to the point that they seem to be inviting any attention from men.

  The hidden body is all about sex—which does not officially exist, other than in marriage for the purpose of procreation. It is why the smallest slip of a fabric can send a provocative signal. When most of the body is hidden, what follows is also that much more becomes sexualized. In an environment where sex is never discussed, where men and women are strictly separated, sex is, ironically and perhaps unfortunately, on everybody’s mind all the time. Body parts, fabric, gestures that elsewhere would never seem sexual become loaded. This frustrating contradiction means everyone must be hyperaware.

  As a woman, you must shrink both your physical body and any energy that surrounds it, in speech, movement, and gaze. Touching someone of the opposite sex in public, by mistake or as a friendly gesture, must always be avoided. A Swedish diplomat had thoroughly rejected my attempt to grab his arm the week before: Such frivolous affection between foreigners of the opposite sex would be misinterpreted, and send the wrong signals. Afghan male friends, however, are frequently spotted holding hands in Kabul, often while holding the strap to a gun in the other hand.

  The responsibility for men’s behavior, indeed for civilization itself, rests entirely with women here, and in how they dress and behave. Men’s animalistic impulses are presumed to be overwhelming and uncontrollable. And as men are brutal, brainless savages, women must hide their bodies to avoid being assaulted. In most societies, a respectable woman, to varying degrees, is expected to cover up. If she doesn’t, she is inviting assault. Any woman who gets into “trouble” by drawing too much attention from men will have only herself to blame.