The Underground Girls of Kabul Page 17

  WHAT WILL TAKE place later on this particular evening, after the bride and groom finally meet in the presence of their families and have spoken their very first words to each other, is shrouded in mystery for the teenage wedding guests.

  Most mothers will share nothing; they don’t want to risk tarnishing the mind of an unwed daughter. Instead, creative explanations on the origins of life are traded among the young girls. One has been told that as a baby, she was purchased by her parents from the market; another, that there is a man who distributes babies from a donkey. Those with married sisters have a clearer idea, since highly subjective information has been shared, of what the bodies of men look like and what the wedding night may entail. The idea of taking clothes off in front of a man, as one girl has been told she may need to do, is the first horror to process. Beyond that, no girl can risk starting a rumor that she is well-informed, so very few details—and often flawed ones—are what get around. Knowing too much can be detrimental for the wedding night, girls are cautioned. The husband may think she has experience. A telltale sign is also if she should express anything other than discomfort and pain in bed. If that should happen—and ideally, it should never—a new bride must make sure not to let it be known to her husband.

  Disaster stories are more generously shared, about newlyweds who have ended up at the hospital the next day, due to missteps when trying to consummate the marriage. But if the groom has a previous wife, or if he has taken a trip to visit prostitutes in Tajikistan (a popular weekend destination for wealthier Kabul men) or has had access to online pornography, the situation may be slightly improved, a few of the unmarried girls have been told.

  Shortly after the wedding, if no pregnancy occurs, discretion is no longer called for. By then, relatives can begin asking detailed questions about a couple’s frequency and mode of intercourse and disburse advice. If still nothing happens, Dr. Fareiba and her magic-making colleagues may be called in to produce results. Of the right sort, that is.

  WHEN I RETURN to my guesthouse where I rent a spare room, my legs numb after many hours of modestly sitting on my feet on the floor, I find two aid-worker friends cooing together in front of a Soviet-era television set. On the grainy screen, Kate Middleton’s white veil—a symbol of virginity—is being lifted as she is passed from her father to her husband-to-be, England’s royal prince. As the choir sings, they are joined in matrimony, blessed by the archbishop.

  As of that moment, when the future Duchess of Cambridge enters into marriage in Westminster Abbey, only one major thing is required of her: to bear a child. It will be another five months after the wedding before the rules of succession are changed by Queen Elizabeth II to allow a potential baby girl to inherit the throne. But the issue will remain unresolved throughout the Commonwealth, who may or may not recognize a female heir. And the demand for procreation is nonnegotiable. From this point onward, Kate Middleton’s body owes payment to entities and a tradition more important than herself and her husband.

  The dress, the virginal veil, and the modest expression on the future queen consort’s face delight millions of viewers all over the world. She is so thin, so beautiful, so dreamily perfect. It’s a fairy tale to aspire to for many of the two billion witnesses around the world watching on television. The bride has passed many levels of vetting as a very, very proper girl, whose womb will ensure the perpetuation of the British Empire.

  It’s very romantic.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE BODYGUARD

  Shukria

  IN THE END, the act itself was not as bad as she had been told. Her colleague, a married woman at the hospital, had warned her of something so painful and dehumanizing that she had begun to stutter as she described it. On the wedding night, she told Shukria, a bride did not only suffer excruciating pain—there was also a risk of permanent injury.

  “Where?” Shukria, who was soon to marry, asked. “Where will I be injured?” Her friend pursed her lips and closed her eyes. The unspeakable area. Of course.

  Twenty-year-old Shukria was embarrassed. She was to be married in only a week and she knew how babies were born, but she really had no specifics on how they were conceived. Indeed, she would be lucky not to end up at the hospital, her colleague continued. Shukria’s new husband would need medical care, too, if things went awry.

  “It made me so worried,” Shukria remembers. “I lost weight. What to do? I thought about it all the time. She told me such strange things that I did not understand.”

  But when the consummation of her marriage finally took place, Shukria escaped unharmed. It was a little weird, certainly. But “more okay” than what she had been told. It was the other thing that worried her more—that she ought perhaps to have been the one with a penis. Up until a month before her wedding night, Shukria had lived as a man.

  DR. FAREIBA HAD heard that her old classmate got married in the end, after having been a man for longer than most. After wondering for a while if there were women in Kabul who could shed light on what might be in store for Zahra—on what might happen on the other side of a forced marriage for an almost-grown-up bacha posh, I had convinced the elusive doctor to introduce me to her old friend from school. As always, there is no phone number, but together and on foot, we finally locate Shukria at one of Kabul’s busy hospitals.

  It is in a small garden behind the hospital that the story of Shukria’s former self is told for the first time. No one ever asked her about it before. She describes a cocky young man in jeans and a leather jacket, who always carried a knife in his back pocket in case he needed to defend his honor—or that of a girl. Shukria thinks of him in the past tense. Shukur. He is dead now.

  Now thirty-five, or maybe a few years older—like many Afghans, she only estimates her age and shaves off a few years to her advantage—Shukria dresses in a full-length brown robe, or abaya, six mornings out of seven and puts on her small tinted eyeglasses. She carefully applies a thick beige foundation on her weathered face and draws a dark red lipstick over her lips, trying not to smudge it too much. It helps get her into the right state of mind. She even dabs on a little perfume from a small vial she treated herself to at the bazaar. The fragrance, named Royal After Shave, was “Made in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.” It is a dark, woodsy scent. She could not bear any of the more flowery options. Shukria told the vendor it was for her husband.

  Her dark curly hair is entirely tucked under a silk scarf. She owns several, in patterned silk, and she feels good putting one on. The scarf shows everybody which side of society she belongs to. She is with the women now. She needs to know it, feel it, herself.

  The mother of three then rides the bus to work at one of Kabul’s busiest hospitals, where she changes again, into her roomy light blue scrubs and a little cap. One style fits all; her male colleagues wear the same. The female nurses usually wear longer tunics, but Shukria always opts for the male shirt. She keeps the gold studs in her earlobes, a sole marker of femininity.

  In this outfit, for thirteen hours a day, she supports her children and her unemployed husband by working as an anesthesiology nurse. The hours are longer when the sparsely equipped surgical wing fills up with the injured from a blast somewhere around Kabul.

  They appreciate Shukria at the hospital, where she has been employed for more than a decade. At least she thinks so. They know she works fast and with little instruction. She rarely gets emotional, either, like some of the other nurses. It makes her useful.

  The jolt of adrenaline still happens, though. Especially when she feels the shock wave of a bomb from not far away. But moments later, she clicks right into the familiar routine of walking behind a doctor doing triage, noting how close to life or death each patient is and where he or she will go next—straight into surgery or onto one of the plastic-sheeted beds. Plastic, so the blood can be more easily hosed away later. After a blast, they can arrive by the dozens, on stretchers or carried by others. It happens that a parent and a child will share a stretcher.

  Shukria
never studied trauma medicine, but she has seen the human body destroyed in multiple ways, each a snapshot cataloged in her brain. The sharpest images are of small bodies without legs or arms, or gaping holes on thin torsos. She can still call up the faces of surprised children looking up at her. There is often screaming and crying, but later, there is no sound in her slide show. It is silent, but in color. In the operating theater, Shukria’s job is to make them silent.

  There’s never a “debrief,” or even much of a conversation after a day like that. The staff just carries on, and no one takes a break until the flow of victims begins to ebb. Shukria will wash off and take the bus back home again. In Kabul, everyone has experienced their own horrors, and most have seen a violent death.

  She keeps a few pictures of herself as a young man with big, curly hair and a serious mien. Never smiling. She smiles when she looks at the photos now, remembering what she now considers her “best time.” She sometimes gets angry with herself for not having enjoyed it more—never knowing, or perhaps acknowledging, that it would end so abruptly.

  WHEN SHUKRIA ARRIVED in the family, her parents were taking no more chances. Her training began the day she was born. It would have been ideal, of course, had she actually been born a boy. But it really did not matter for the task she had been assigned at birth: to protect her older brother.

  Her mother had been married at age thirteen to a man thirty years her senior. She was his second wife. His first wife had failed to conceive, but Shukria’s mother quickly became pregnant, to the joy of everyone except the childless first wife: Her shame was underscored and worsened by the newly arrived teenage bride’s fertility. But the new wife’s baby died after just a few months of life. So did the next one, the following year. When a third infant son fell ill, suspicion fell on the first wife that she had tried to poison him and had killed the two sons who had come before, since she had helped bottle-feed them formula.

  Shukria’s mother, the teenager, gradually settled upon wife number one as the culprit. One day a fight broke out, and each wife took aim at the other’s face with kitchen tools. When their husband entered and tore his bloodied first wife away, she dropped to the floor and cried uncontrollably, begging him to divorce her. “I will never give you a divorce,” he responded. Then he beat her with his fists until she lay silent and unconscious on the floor.

  It was never spoken of again in the family, but it was decided that day that the next child born should be given the task of safeguarding the remaining son, should he survive. Whether he had been poisoned or not, no one would ever know.

  That next child, arriving later in the year, happened to be a girl. She was given the formal name Shukria but introduced to the world as Shukur.

  Growing up, Shukur always knew her special role, and she felt proud to be her brother’s companion. Together, they became the two princes of the household, distinctly set apart from the five sisters who followed. Shukur shared a separate bedroom with her brother, while her mother, father, and six sisters all slept together in another room. It is common in an Afghan family to assign older siblings to take care of the younger ones, but Shukur had an even more specific task.

  She was to follow the family’s most precious asset—their son—at all times, as his guardian. They did everything together: They slept in the same bed. They prayed. They attended school. What she first ate, he then ate. What she first drank, he then drank. If there was a threat from another child, Shukur would shield his body with hers. She never questioned it; she was told it was an honor for her.

  Besides, it gave her an opportunity to explore life beyond the confinement her sisters endured. Not that she had much idea what they did with their days. Shukur and her brother never spent a minute more than necessary inside the house. There, they would always eat first, speak first, and never be bothered with any of the mundane things that were expected of the sisters, such as washing, cleaning, and cooking. That was not for boys.

  Together, they owned the world outside, climbing trees and exploring the hillsides around Kabul. Shukur’s friends of both sexes always knew she had been born a girl. So did the rest of her extended family and most of the neighbors. But it was not out of the ordinary—one of her female classmates was also passing as a boy. It was another family, with its own reasons; no one would pry further.

  As the brothers grew into teenagers, they would have even less contact with girls as they learned that mingling too much with the fairer sex would appear unmanly and invite weakness into their hearts. The brothers joined a gang of eight young men who roamed the town in Fonzie-style short leather jackets and tight jeans, their hair groomed to look Western.

  To impress one another, and to cultivate their honor, they would pick fights with opposing gangs. What she lacked in raw strength Shukur made up for by being quick on her feet. Never once did she consider presenting herself as a girl when she was challenged. That would have meant immediate defeat—and shame.

  At prayer hours, she prayed in the men’s section at the mosque with the others, placing her hands on her stomach like the men, instead of on her chest, the way women are supposed to do. To her friends she was accepted and respected as an honorary young man. On the bus once, Shukur pulled a knife on a boy who sat down and attempted to harass a female student. It wasn’t something she needed to consider; it was a reflex. Women should be protected from men by other men; she knew it was how society was arranged and it was for the best.

  At times, Shukur’s little gang was guilty of mild harassment, too. More than once, they roamed dangerously close to girls, who pleaded with them to stay away so that their parents would not be upset. The gang did not care so much about the girls; the point was to provoke the girls’ brothers.

  The boys knew about love, but it was not something they liked to spend their time thinking about. They knew girls did, though, and the boys would play along sometimes, just to see how far the girls would go—how much they were willing to risk. Shukria learned early that love was something that could distort one’s head and that should be left to the weaker sex. The minds of women were especially susceptible to being led astray by poetry and books. The minds of men, on the other hand, were more focused and better equipped for solving important problems and building things. Or so she was taught.

  With the privileges attached to being her father’s second son came responsibility. Running to the bazaar, buying food and supplies, hauling heavy bags of flour and cans of cooking oil—it all fell upon her. The eldest son was spared—he always enjoyed a higher status than the family’s bacha posh—but Shukur was made to do hard physical labor. It was especially onerous when she got her period. Mentioning the event to her father was unthinkable: It would paint her as a woman, and worse, the bleeding would mark her as impure and weak. So beginning in the late summer and early fall of her fifteenth year, Shukur contended with stomach cramps as she filled a wheelbarrow full of mud at a nearby pit and ran it to the house to prepare the roof for winter. During the summer, the mud roof usually dried and cracked, so in the months leading up to each icy, cruel winter, it had to be patched up again. Between the mud runs, Shukur would squat down and hug her legs, trying to block out the pain and warm her stomach. Her mother never asked, and her father could never know. Shukur loved her father and wanted to do anything she could to please him by being a perfect son.

  She is grateful her period came late; her younger sisters started their menses far earlier, in their early teens. But when Shukur turned thirteen, just like Zahra, her hips did not round out below her waist. She forced her voice to take a turn for the deeper, just like those of the other boys. Her chest remained flat.

  She had learned from her mother that a child comes from a woman’s body. The actual birth seemed disturbing to her. Her mother, like many other Afghan mothers, told her that the baby would suddenly burst out from a hole in a woman’s stomach. It was just one of the reasons Shukur was relieved to think that she would never get married—confident that she was needed more by her fa
mily. Shukur imagined she would take over from her father the task of providing for them all. Her father, a security officer at the airport, retired when she was barely fourteen, and Shukur decided to pursue an education to become a nurse. She had really wanted to become a doctor, but it required several more years of study and would be costlier. She would need to work and earn an income so she could remain a son to her father and a brother to her sisters.

  That was the plan.

  SOON DANGERS BEGAN to present themselves. As Azita’s life radically changed around this time, in the early 1990s, so did Shukur’s. But her family remained in Kabul throughout the civil war that followed the Communist rule. Shukur was seventeen on the day three mujahideen arrived at the door. Stricter dress codes for women had just been instituted in Kabul, with mandatory head coverings. The fighters had heard stories of a woman who dressed like a man and they had set out to correct the abomination. Shukur was at home in the Darulaman neighborhood where she had grown up, in jeans, a slouchy shirt, and the Afro-like hairstyle she had cultivated. The fighters stood by the door and demanded to see the cross-dressing criminal they had been told lived at the house. At first, her father would not budge. But Shukur stepped forward and plainly said she was likely who they were looking for. The two men studied her and exchanged looks before one spoke up, in an authoritative tone: “Okay. You look like a boy and you are completely like a boy. So we will call you a boy.”