The Underground Girls of Kabul Read online

  Sakina has done the hajj—the pilgrimage to Mecca—and proudly describes her journey as her daughters bring in glass plates of ripe, sugary melon and apple slices. Dark red curtains with heavy tassels give everything a pink glow as we sit on lush carpets, leaning back against brocade cushions lining the walls. Sakina is the daughter of a Pashtun general from one of the eastern provinces, and she has no regrets about growing up as the son her family called Najibullah.

  Sakina insists that many Afghan parents know bacha posh as good life training for daughters, as well as having magical benefits. It was the capacity she served in: Her own father took a wife who birthed only girls. He took another one, but the unfortunate streak of girls continued. A neighbor saw the family’s dilemma and recommended that Sakina’s mother, who was wife number two and pregnant with Sakina, present the child as a son the day she was born. The good luck arrived—a little brother was indeed born as the family’s next child.

  Still, her parents kept Sakina as Najibullah for many years.

  Her father, the general, taught her how to shoot a gun and how to ride a horse—to him, there was nothing young Najibullah was too weak, or too fragile, to master.

  The change came at a big party at the family estate on her twelfth birthday. The occasion was not celebrated for her birthday, but for her becoming a woman. She had not yet menstruated, but her parents wanted to make sure she changed back well in time for the onset of puberty. All their relatives had been invited. Food and bakery-made biscuits were brought out to a garden table crowned with a big pastel-colored cake. It was a day of eating and celebration: A lamb was slaughtered and burned in sacrifice, and there was dancing. Sakina’s ankle bracelet, just like the one her younger brother wore, was taken from her and a dress was prepared. She was dispatched to her mother’s quarters for the transition and stepped out in the yellow dress before the guests. She was prompted to parade around so everyone could get a good look at her. They applauded and congratulated her.

  “Were you happy to become a woman?”

  Sakina, now in her forties, ponders it for a moment. She was not unhappy. The right word might be confused.

  “I felt all right. It was my parents’ decision. I did not go outside anymore when I became a girl. That was the thing I was sad about. I stayed inside. By sixteen, I was married, so it was only three years that I really was a girl before I became a wife.”

  She laughs at the experience. “I was not an expert on the women’s things, like cooking and cleaning. But I was taught by my husband’s family.”

  Her father did not adapt as quickly. “I was his son; that’s how he’s always seen me. I am still the boy to him.” They still discuss politics and warfare, and Sakina even weighs in on money and finances; they are, she says, the kind of conversations that she will rarely have with her husband and never with her mother. Sakina has no lingering thoughts about difficulties in becoming a woman; it’s not like she had a choice. She has excelled at motherhood, she points out, with her seven children, both boys and girls. Her husband does lucrative business with the Americans, so the family leads a comfortable life. Sakina repeats that she considers herself lucky, as she nods to her four daughters peeking through the doorway.

  A SASSY RUNWAY parade of color and clothing dripping with rhinestones and sequins fills the room. The girls’ wide pants and long sheer tunics range from purple to red to lavender, and there is the sound of tinkling as they move around. These outfits are strictly for at-home use. Their eyes are lined with kohl to enhance perfectly chiseled features, with straight noses, impossibly long eyelashes, and sharp, elegant cheekbones. Sakina’s family lived as refugees in Pakistan for several years under the Taliban rule in Afghanistan, and the girls picked up some beauty tricks there. They are well aware that their looks are a bargaining tool when it comes time for their parents to negotiate good husbands for them. The girls seem excited; foreign visitors are few and far between, and almost always for their father. Almost in a chorus, they invite Setareh and me to stay for their afternoon tea party, with its teen agenda: gossip and beautification.

  A girl with large earrings and bushy eyebrows takes my nonwriting left hand and places it on her knee. With a slim paintbrush dipped in henna, she outlines delicate flowering loops along each finger, quickly growing on my hand, up, onto my forearm. The girls are around the same age as Zahra, but while she prefers to discuss martial arts movies and wrestling matches, the topics here are very different.

  Setareh and I soon realize that the only interviewing taking place is directed at us. When a few neighbor girls also drop in to join the party, they total eight. They all lob questions at me:

  How old am I? Over thirty, indeed? What cream do I use on my face? How many children do I have? Really—none? They offer condolences and smack their lips over my bad luck. My husband’s family must be very upset—I am married, of course? No? Again, they offer their regrets: a great shame that nobody wanted me. They understand—it is known to happen to some girls. Usually the very ugly or poor ones. Their concern extends to my parents: They must be unhappy, ashamed even, to have an old, unmarried daughter. And the relatives, horribly embarrassed, certainly?

  By now, I try to insist it may not be a complete disaster to be unmarried, but Setareh feels the need to intervene and freestyle the translation a little. She explains to the girls that, in her personal view, it is indeed a little tragic for my family. That concession renders sympathetic faces all around.

  When Sakina steps out of the room, questions become juicier: In the West, do I walk around almost naked in the streets? And have I “had relations” with a thousand men? Their Koran teacher has discreetly let it be known that every Western woman easily reaches that number. Setareh, too, looks relieved when I deny it being true with some emphasis.

  Just as I am warming to their prompts for an actual number, a young, skinny James Dean in low-slung jeans and a short-sleeved shirt walks in, flashing a smile at us before slumping down into a corner. It is Sakina’s youngest daughter, with the slouch and hip bones of an aspiring rock star. She is fourteen, and almost identical to her older sister, who also lived as a boy until a few years ago. She has pleaded with her parents to let her stay a boy for a little longer. There are sons in the family, but their mother wants to instill some strength in the girls by raising them as boys at first. That is the official reason. A little magical luck for the son making did not hurt either, a proud Sakina has let slip.

  I ask the youngest jean-clad sister if she will get married one day. She shrugs. Probably. She does not seem upset by the prospect, and if she is, this is not the place to show it. Her female cousins are either engaged or married by now. She is a top student at school, and if it were up to her, she would like to study to become a children’s doctor. But that will be in God’s hands. Or rather, her future husband’s. She politely explains how she hopes he will allow her to work.

  The features of her sister are strikingly similar, but the sister, three years older and now turned into a woman, is distinctly feminine, with a nose ring, a long braid down her back, and a red Punjabi dress. She already has a future husband picked out for her, someone whom she has never met and knows little about.

  As Sakina reenters the room, she admits that they are “a little late” with their youngest daughter. Her father and brothers have already begun to demand she wear a head scarf more often. And her body is just at the beginning of becoming a woman, so she does not have much time left now. But as long as she is turned back before puberty, no harm will have been done. She will follow a long tradition of girls in her family who have become excellent wives and mothers. As a bonus, she will have spent her youth cultivating an assertive, confident kind of womanhood.

  The young rock star in the corner listens to her mother but says nothing. She just looks at her hands resting in her lap. Her rough hands have not been offered any henna painting, and her nails are chewed down to the quick.

  WHEN I INSIST to Setareh that we splurge on an actual lunch b
reak between visiting families, we are soon reminded it is not what women do in this residential part of Kabul. We settle on the only option—a hole-in-the-wall where kebabs are grilled over whitening coal outside in the sun—and try to look confident as we enter and endure the stares from the all-male clientele. A nervous waiter ushers us into the back of the restaurant, into a room that doubles as a storage space. As we sink into an overused leather sofa covered in plastic, we are surprised to discover that two other women are already there, seated by the opposite wall. They seem to be in their twenties, and one of them immediately looks down before our eyes can meet. The other, well covered with a black scarf conservatively tucked and pinned around her face, looks straight back at me.

  I recognize the steady gaze.

  But Setareh has strong opinions about the way I frequently strike up conversations with strangers, so I study the kebab options in Dari on my greasy menu some more. When I look up again, the young woman is smiling at me.

  “You are American, yes?” she asks. “I like to practice speaking English when I meet foreigners.”

  “I’m Swedish, actually,” I say, returning her smile. “But we can practice together if you want.”

  Setareh gently touches my hand in warning. The chatty American is the side of me she likes the least. It is both impolite and potentially dangerous, she has let me know several times. But I go on, telling our lunch companions that we are working on a little project where we are meeting girls who grow up as boys. In fact, we have interviewed a few dozen by now. The shy girl looks up at her confident friend in bewilderment. Setareh almost chokes. The conservative-looking girl just laughs.

  “Yes. Yes. I am one of them. I was a boy.”

  “I had a feeling.”

  We grin widely at each other.

  Her nickname is Spoz, and she is the youngest of six sisters in her family. They have just one brother, who arrived as number three. Before he was born, the family needed some magic, and once he was born, he needed a friend to play with. So the three younger sisters took turns, each playing the role of a boy for the first decade of their respective lives. Spoz says she had fun under the Taliban, roaming around outside and playing football, with her hair cut short. She learned to challenge boys in sports, fights, and conversation. Right before her tenth birthday, she was turned back. Now she is nineteen, and sees nothing but opportunity beyond her studies at Kabul University.

  It makes her a very unusual young woman, as she is one of a few thousand female university students in the entire country. Many fathers do not allow their daughters to be educated beyond the ages of ten or twelve. Economic and security factors are most often cited, but some also say that it’s just not “necessary” to educate a girl who will be married anyway. Too much education can potentially make a girl less attractive as a spouse, as she may develop plans to work or simply become too opinionated.

  But Spoz’s father, just as Azita’s once did with his daughter, has taught her to dream big for herself: “I am happy God made me a girl, so I can become a mother. In my heart I am still a boy, but it is my choice to wear women’s clothing now. It’s only important to be a bacha posh in the head, to know you can do anything.”

  Now that she is a woman, she would never want to be anywhere other than in this part of the world, she says. Why? Women in the West “have relations” with thousands of men, and that is just wrong, she believes—a woman should be with only one man.

  Setareh is mortified again, and I hasten to mention that I don’t think that is true where I come from, or most anywhere for that matter. The pious former bacha posh interrupts me, offering a reassuring compliment of my all-black styling by Setareh: “No, no. I can see you are different from how you dress.”

  She aspires to become an engineer, and says her deep faith has strengthened her grasp of women’s rights. But a bacha posh upbringing does not necessarily lead to liberal views on all things gender. Spoz is only one example of how an Afghan girl who is very religious and from a conservative family can have a firm grasp of women’s rights while still advocating strict rules for them. She believes girls approaching puberty should absolutely not look like boys, and that women absolutely need to be well covered in Afghanistan.

  “We are two kinds of humans,” she explains this belief. “We are too different. But only in the body. Nothing else. A woman is a very beautiful thing. In order to protect something beautiful, you should cover it. Like a diamond. You cannot just put it on the street, because everyone would just come and take it.”

  At the same time, she is sure that if Afghanistan would become more modern, clothing would matter less. “I’m a Muslim, and I hate this kind of clothing,” she says, pointing to her black coverage. She would wear the head scarf anywhere to respect and demonstrate her faith, but she wears the full covering only because it is necessary in her conservative country. “We have been in war for thirty years. We are not very developed here. This is not the time to experiment with clothing.”

  WE MEET AT the cramped offices of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, of which Dr. Sima Samar is the chairwoman.

  A former minister for women’s affairs, Dr. Samar walks in wearing a white peran tonban and flat sandals, set off by white pearl-drop earrings peeking out from under her thick gray hair. The muted colors of her clothes match her office. Plush leather chairs are draped in Indian paisley throws. Her latest-model BlackBerry rattles on vibrate mode on a side table.

  Sima Samar’s longtime work as a doctor and as an advocate has taken her around the world to accept awards and speak as an authority on some of the worst human rights crimes in Afghanistan: domestic violence, self-mutilation, rape, and child marriage. She is the country’s perhaps most respected advocate for women and children, and I am eager to talk with her about my research.

  By now, I have arrived at the conclusion that it can in fact be an empowering experience for a girl to live like a boy for a few years, as more such examples of successful women, resembling the stories of Azita, Sakina, and Spoz have surfaced: In the northern Balkh province, a female official says that spending a few years as a boy child later helped her make the decision to go into politics. The female principal of a Kabul boarding school described how it was a way for her to get an education under the Taliban and allowed her to go to university once they were gone. For those whose lives are not solely devoted to survival, where creating a bacha posh is primarily a way of adding to the family income, it seems clear that some time on the other side can benefit both ambition and self-confidence.

  However, no one can agree on when the boy years should precisely end before a girl is at risk of becoming “strange in the head,” when the charade may have gone too far. So are there any risks at all? And is anyone looking out for these children, or are they always at the mercy of their parents’ arbitrary judgment?

  There are few universally recognized rights for children on gender. The word itself is not mentioned once in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which lists other rights, such as those to education and freedom of expression. The concept of a “childhood,” and what it should entail, is a fairly new one, even in the Western world. And gender is rarely discussed in the context of customary law or in international conventions; it is one of those seemingly untouchable issues, since religion and culture vastly differ among countries and conservatives lobby hard against anything that could potentially question heterosexuality as the norm. The right to live and present as a specific gender, at any given time, is nowhere specified. And perhaps it shouldn’t be.

  When I have probed those with knowledge of the area, including several Afghans working with women and children for the United Nations and international NGOs, about how bacha posh can exist right under the surface in Kabul, they have told me that they would never dream of advancing the issue on their organizations’ agendas. Not only is it the private business of Afghans, but it would also potentially be too confusing to the foreign aid workers who love to help little girls—wh
o look like girls.

  “The foreigners like to teach us about gender,” one longtime local Afghan UN employee put it when I inquired as to why she had never mentioned this practice in her work, which is focused on women and children. The UN official even had personal experience: Her own daughter has asked to wear pants and get a short haircut so she can play outside more with some other boys and bacha posh in the neighborhood. So far, her mother has not allowed it.

  My hope in meeting Dr. Samar is to finally learn whether Afghanistan’s bacha posh are of any concern to those protecting the human rights of women and children. Or if they ought to be.

  But like most other Afghans I have asked, Sima Samar is certain: There is nothing strange about girls pretending to be boys. Probably nothing harmful either. Her own childhood friend from Helmand lived as a boy for many years before immigrating to the United States. Samar’s colleague at the commission also had a bacha posh who was turned back to a girl at age sixteen, and who now, a few years later, thrives at Kabul University. Much like Carol le Duc also suggested, bacha posh is logical in Afghanistan, Samar declares. To her, it is not a human rights issue of any sort. Ideally, of course, children should choose what they wear, she says, although few do in Afghanistan. She hedges her comment by adding that if cross-dressing had the potential to confuse a girl she would discourage it, since, in her words, “girls are confused enough in this country.”

  Still, bacha posh was never part of that confusion, to her knowledge.

  “Are you interested in this?” I ask, at last.

  Ever the diplomat, Dr. Samar smiles. “Why are you interested in this?”

  I pause, considering that the last thing I want to do is to inspire a new human rights issue where there is none or draw government attention to bacha posh. Or any of their parents. Instead, using a recent argument from Azita, I suggest that the fact that girls live in disguise is perhaps another symptom of a deeply dysfunctional society. Maybe it is also a little troubling that nobody knows what consequences it may have for the minds of children. And doesn’t the need to hide your birth sex have everything to do with a person’s rights?