The Underground Girls of Kabul Page 12

  Asma worries about her overgrown bacha posh daughter: “At first, I only had two daughters, and when Zahra wanted to wear boys’ clothing, I was pleased. I liked it, since we didn’t have a boy then.” She hesitates before continuing: “Now, we don’t really know.”

  Samir agrees it’s time for Zahra to change: “I have told her one thousand times that she needs to cover herself in long coats and let her hair grow out. But she says it’s her own choice. She’s even taller than her older sisters now. She refuses. Maybe she has some of me in her.” He says it with a father’s sense of pride.

  Asma is not amused by her husband’s relenting on Zahra’s appearance, and she is eager to convince Samir that something is not right any longer in how their daughter looks.

  I have told her that we have met many girls like Zahra, although so far, all have been younger. But what is it like in the West? Asma wonders, urging me to explain what the universal rules are for what women should look like. “If you walk in the street in your country and a girl had short hair and looked like a boy, do you think it’s shameful?”

  I weigh my words carefully, noting that Zahra is listening intently.

  “It’s very common for girls to have short hair and pants, and it’s not considered shameful.”

  Asma is not satisfied. “But what do you think?”

  “I have met many girls who live like boys here,” I say, trying to turn it back to her. “It is a choice within each family. But I am not sure if it is a good thing for the girls, or if it is a problem. Perhaps it can be both?”

  But Asma is not interested in psychological consequences. She is more concerned with the social ones. “It could maybe be a shame in Afghan culture, now that Zahra is older.” She pauses. It’s something she has been thinking a lot about lately. But there is no manual for this; Zahra certainly doesn’t look like a woman just yet. For some reason, she has not developed as quickly as her sisters, although she is physically normal, Asma explains: “She has what other girls have.”

  Zahra looks at her mother in astonishment. “Why are you telling them? It is personal business!”

  Asma rolls her eyes. It’s the truth that she is a woman; why would that be shameful?

  “In my view, it’s not too bad,” Asma continues, almost to herself. “It’s not like she has shaved her head or anything. She wears pants and she has short hair. But she is not too masculine. Zahra is something … in between, I think.”

  Her father just shakes his head. He doesn’t actually condone Zahra’s choice of clothes and haircut, but as he is away during the day, it’s hard to control. Today his daughter is in her usual outfit of pants and a baggy shirt. Her father does not seem to mind. But with one eye on Asma, he declares that Zahra does not respect her mother the way she should. And they do not allow her to go out in the evening anymore. Samir has always considered it a privilege to have an extra boy, even though Zahra is a little older now. There are still advantages; she can help with errands and other heavier tasks, he points out, in both his own and Zahra’s defense.

  His opinions about marriage and family extend to all of his daughters, including Zahra—every Afghan should get married and have children. It’s the natural course of life. It will happen, sooner or later. But right now, he admits he can get confused by her appearance. “All the time I am reminding myself that she is really my daughter. But she has made herself into so much of a boy, I can’t help it that I forget.”

  He laughs again. His daughter is just a little bit of a rebel, just like he is. Zahra smiles down on her plate of manto.

  LATER, ASMA BRINGS out a picture of herself as a glamorous, made-up young married woman. Looking serious before the camera, she is in a pale blue dress, with a tiny Zahra next to her on the sofa. In the photo, Zahra is barely two years old, in jeans and a tight little denim vest, with a short haircut—all by her own choice, Asma exclaims. Since Zahra had no older brothers at the time, the outfit must have been bought for her. I say that as far as I know, every bacha posh has been the result of the parents’ desire to have a son in the family.

  As Asma reveals her pregnancy history, the truth slowly comes out. After she had Zahra, her next pregnancy ended with a late-term miscarriage. It would have been a boy. The next year, she gave birth prematurely to a son who died. After having three surviving daughters but two sons who had died, Asma felt increasingly desperate. “Please, please God, give me a son,” she prayed. She needed some good luck to boost her prayer. Her relatives were prodding Asma to get pregnant again, and Zahra was being cared for by her cousins—one of whom had been turned into a bacha posh to ensure her mother’s next-born would be a son.

  Asma’s relatives urged her to try the same tactic. And what harm could it be? she thought. It had worked for others. It was also easier to have Zahra dressed as a boy, so she could move around with her cousins. If it had magical benefits beyond that, it would be a bonus. So before she turned two, Zahra became the family’s son.

  By the time she turned six, she would attempt to cut her own hair—or, rather, try to shave her head—and refuse to play with other girls. Zahra’s older cousin who had been a bacha posh moved to Europe, where she now lives with her husband and three children. She warned Asma that her path back to womanhood was very difficult. But Asma gave birth to four living sons after Zahra, so to her, no one can dispute the power of magic in bacha posh.

  THERE IS FURTHER, empirical evidence of benefits in the family, too. Turning girls into boys is a practice that has given them many sons through the generations, according to Samir’s white-haired mother, who shows up at the family’s apartment one day. The family has a long history of powerful women who took on the role of men, both in looks and tasks. In the grandmother’s view, there is no downside to Zahra remaining a bacha posh until she gets married. Zahra’s great-great-grandmother also dressed like a boy and lived as a young man for years.

  The great-great-grandmother rode horses just like the famous warrior Malalai of Maiwand, an Afghan equivalent to Joan of Arc who helped drive the British army out of Afghanistan in the 1880s. Zahra’s foremother held the prestigious male position of a land inspector during King Habībullāh’s time, when the female guards in Nancy Duprée’s photo also dressed as men. She married at age thirty-eight and bore four children. She had switched over to women’s dress by then, after holding out as a man longer than most. But it certainly did not do her any harm to live as a boy for a few years, says Zahra’s grandmother.

  Finding a suitable husband for a bacha posh was never an issue, either, as far as she knows. Living as a man a little longer is nothing unusual in the family; there will be plenty of time to get married later on. Afghans of an Uzbek heritage are liberal, independent people who don’t care what people think of them, the grandmother says. She supports her son in not strictly enforcing Zahra’s transition right now, and she can’t see why Asma fusses over it. Eventually, Zahra will marry, like everyone else. She is certain of it.

  To the grandmother, there is something distinctly Afghan about bacha posh: “It is our tradition from a long time ago. Afghan girls dressed as boys when there were no weapons, only bows and arrows.”

  She has never read it in a book, but everybody has heard tales of girls who grew up as boys and later lead brave and unusual lives as women. And, she adds, it was not just the fearless Malalai who drove out invaders. Other Afghan women warriors came both before and after Malalai; the grandmother heard their stories many times growing up.

  Different tricks have always been employed, too, for producing sons, according to the grandmother. “Our mothers would tell us about the bacha posh and then we told our own families,” she says. “It was before Islam even came to Afghanistan. We always knew about it.”

  “Before Islam” would be sometime before the seventh century and more than 1,400 years ago. Islam is just the latest religion to take hold in Afghanistan, where Louis Duprée’s excavations revealed settlements as old as 35,000 years, and where modern oil and gas exploration
s regularly uncover evidence of ancient civilizations. As conquerors came in over the mountains from different directions, they brought with them new religions, practices, and beliefs. Some were erased by those who came after, and others have stuck to this day. Afghanistan, believed by anthropologists to be one of the original historical meeting places between the East and the West, has in fact seen and often tolerated most known religions as well as an influx of believers in such faiths as Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, and Christianity. Even with the advent and dominance of Islam, other religions were still practiced freely by minorities in Kabul up until the 1980s.

  But through decades of war and with every wave of refugees, the most educated Afghans have usually been the first ones to leave, and with every shift of villagers into urban areas, more conservative elements have crept into society, bringing with them stricter rules and far-flung tribal customs and rules from isolated provinces.

  I finally understand that Zahra’s grandmother is trying to steer me in the same direction as Dr. Fareiba’s gathering of health workers, without saying it out loud. They speak of an entirely different time. The old woman just cannot spell it out to me: Beliefs and practices for producing sons from a time predating Islam are still very much alive in one of the most conservative Muslim countries on earth. It means that the trail of Afghan bacha posh could go much further back than to the Taliban, or even to Zahra’s great-great-grandmother.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE CANDIDATE

  Azita

  SHE TRIES ON a few different faces in the mirror: A furrowed brow and a clenched jaw read as resolute. Lips pressed together: wise, serious. The slippery silk head scarf needs another pin; it keeps sliding down into the pasty foundation on her forehead.

  She is having her picture taken today.

  Azita’s living room has become the campaign headquarters for “the Lioness of Badghis”—the name she was given by supporters in the previous election and which she has now adopted for her posters as she lobbies for her 2010 reelection. Her campaign moniker is a not-so-subtle reference to the legendary Ahmad Shah Massoud, “the Lion of Panjshir,” a mujahideen warrior who fought the Soviets. He also later stood against the Taliban’s rule with the Northern Alliance before he was assassinated.

  When Azita emerges from the bathroom, she is met by an appeal for a puppy; the girls have just seen one in a cartoon. She tells them she is not sure what the neighbors would think—keeping a domesticated dog is a Western thing. Here, dogs are wild. But she promises to think about it, if they will all go and play in their own room. A small argument over who gets to use Azita’s laptop has already broken out between Mehran and one of her sisters. When Mehran slaps her sister in the face, she gets a threat in return: “If you do that again,” Mehrangis says, glancing toward the photographer and then back again at Mehran, “I won’t call you my brother anymore.”

  With that, Mehran stalks off as her mother sighs behind her. Azita smiles apologetically to the photographer and his assistant, who are setting up a large theatrical-looking light on a metal tripod in the living room. Azita’s husband, dressed in all white, tries hard to be a good host, serving tea and then struggling to move a large plastic fan back and forth on the floor. Each guest gets a few moments of fan air straight in the face.

  “He is my house husband,” Azita jokes with the young photographer. He looks back at her with a blank expression.

  She poses by the yellow-painted cement wall and the photographer snaps his camera a few times. It takes only seconds, and suddenly he is finished and pulls up the images on his laptop. Most are out of focus or overexposed, leaving Azita’s face flat. But that’s a good thing—so long as the scarf is in place and her face betrays no happiness, it works. The best shot has her showing a hint of a smile, but that one is wasted: A smiling woman translates as frivolous and lightweight.

  Azita picks one where she has on a hand-embroidered Tajik coat, another where she is wearing a red striped Turkoman jacket. She needs to play to all sides of the complicated ethnic patchwork of her province, while still maintaining her own Aimaq heritage on her father’s side, which is a Sunni Persian tribe with a Hazara dialect. Lineage is always determined by the father’s ethnicity, but as a minority that has been both ignored and persecuted over time, the Aimaq have traditionally been lumped together with the Tajiks in Azita’s home province. That determination is to her benefit, as Tajiks have formed an alliance with many of the Pashtuns in Badghis. To Azita, ethnicity is mostly a reminder of war and of Afghan infighting. To anyone who asks about her ethnicity, she usually says that she’s Afghan.

  Her tagline on the posters is “I am fighting for your best life.” The message is expanded on the audiocassettes she plans to distribute: “I don’t want power and I don’t want money in my pocket. I only want to represent you and bring your problems to our central government. I want to raise your voice to Kabul.”

  It builds on her first campaign. What Badghis lacked, she would try to snare from Kabul. That means—in the most basic sense—almost everything. Life in Badghis is much the same as it was when she lived there as a teenager. Except for those in the few Badghis towns with wells, most residents collect snow and rainwater in a hole as their supply of drinking water. In the summer, they walk long distances to collect water, and hope that government tank trucks filled with drinking water will reach them. Azita now takes credit for a few of those trucks reaching Badghis. And she has mediated between those who make their livelihood off the pistachio forests and those who keep chopping them down to heat their houses.

  Azita tries to get the message out that she operates with a campaign budget of only $40,000 and is not from a rich family, but that she is running as an independent and is not beholden to many people. Her wealthier competition is backed by several powerful businessmen in Badghis, but Azita has secured only a few pistachio farmers on her side. She has also accepted office supplies and smaller monetary contributions from an Afghan defense contractor in Herat and an Afghan pharmaceutical company, both of which support the other candidates too. Most of her campaign contributions go toward food for a few hundred people each day at her house in Qala-e-Naw. Good hospitality, which must include good cooking, is as important for the campaign as her political message.

  The photographer suggests they do a little something extra with one of her images. It’s special, and it has been popular with some of the other candidates he has worked with, he explains. He pulls up a photo of an empty podium with lots of press microphones attached to it. The image of her could be Photoshopped in there, to make her look important. He would throw it in for free. Azita hesitates—she has plenty of authentic images of herself in front of microphones. But why not? If it’s something the others have done … She decides she needs all the help she can get.

  AFTER PAYING THE photographer one hundred dollars in cash—just as in many other unstable countries, the U.S. dollar is the currency that buys most things—Azita puts out fresh tea and cookies in preparation for her next visitor. The UN office called earlier in the day; their gender unit has offered to coach her on campaigning. It’s not the first time Azita has heard from them, but every house call has been canceled in the course of her five years in parliament. Azita knows the UN rotation schedule better than most: Each time they call, it’s a new articulate woman on the phone, saying she wants to “reach out,” offering to teach Azita the basics of the parliamentary system, the importance of female participation in the election process, and how women can gain more self-confidence to do so.

  A few hours later, when the official has yet to show up, there is another call. The United Nations is under “lockdown” and its staff have a strict curfew after a drive-by shooting in another part of Kabul. No “internationals” are allowed to exit the fortified compounds as long as the “White City” status is in effect. But a local employee, an assistant, will be available to come over the next day, the caller says.

  “Because it doesn’t matter if Afghans are shot,” Azita mu
tters as she hangs up, showing a flash of temper toward those whom she usually welcomes. “They all say they want to help women politicians, but they never say how. And I never hear back from them.”

  Or, rather, she feels there is little follow-through.

  At one point, Azita imagined she would have more power and perhaps be recognized as a real player on the political stage in Kabul. But Badghis, with its Pashtun minority, never held much interest for the national stage. The reality is that she represents a small province and she lacks a powerful lineage and a personal fortune: the two most important ingredients for getting things done in Kabul. And she is a woman—a provocation to many of her colleagues, who would rather she not be there at all. Still, she sometimes fantasizes about being the minister of the interior.

  A female minister does run the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, which foreign delegations often ask to tour. But those involved in Afghan politics pay little attention to it. The Ministry of Interior Affairs, on the other hand, is what aims to hold the country together, as it controls security for the government, as well as the national police and their counternarcotics division. The problem with any man—and it is always a man—holding the post, in Azita’s view, is that he inevitably owes someone favors. The Taliban may not be openly represented in Afghanistan’s top leadership, but unofficially, many politicians are well connected to the Taliban as well as organized crime through their business dealings. Lucrative arrangements have made it possible for multiple well-known officials and elected politicians to secure both capital and visas for an escape to Dubai or to Europe, for vacations or more permanent stays. That is considered by many politicians to be a reasonable safety precaution and a necessary privilege, should the government be as short-lived as those in previous decades.