The Underground Girls of Kabul Page 2

  Azita pushes her emerald green head scarf back to reveal a short black ponytail, and rubs her hair. I shake off my scarf, too, and let it fall down on my neck. She looks at me for a moment, where we sit in her bedroom. “I never want my daughters to suffer in the ways I have suffered. I had to kill many of my dreams. I have four daughters. I am very happy for that.”

  Four daughters. Only four daughters? What is going on in this family? I hold my breath for a moment, hoping Azita will take the lead and help me understand.

  And she does.

  “Would you like to see our family album?”

  WE MOVE BACK into the living room, where she pulls out two albums from under a rickety little desk. The children look at these photos often. They tell the story of how Azita’s family came to be.

  First: a series of shots from Azita’s engagement party in the summer of 1997. Azita’s first cousin, whom she is to marry, is young and lanky. On his face, small patches of hair are still struggling to meet in the middle as a full beard; a requirement under Taliban rule at that time. The fiancé wears a turban and a brown wool vest over a traditional white peran tonban—a long shirt and loose pants. None of the one hundred or so guests are smiling. By Afghan standards, where a party can number more than a thousand, it was a small and unimpressive gathering. It is a snapshot of the city meeting the village. Azita is the elite-educated daughter of a Kabul University professor. Her husband-to-be: the illiterate son of a farmer.

  A few staged moments are captured. The fiancé attempts to feed his future wife some of the pink and yellow cake. She turns her head away. At nineteen, Azita is a thinner and more serious version of her later self, in a cobalt blue silk caftan with rounded shoulder pads. Her fingernails have been painted a bright red to match crimson lips, set off by a white-powdered face that reads as a mask. Her hair is a hard, sprayed bird’s nest. In another shot, her future husband offers her a celebratory goblet from which she is expected to drink. She stares into the camera. Her matte, powdery face is streaked with vertical lines running from dark brown eyes.

  A few album pages later, the twins pose with Azita’s mother, a woman with high cheekbones and a strong nose in a deeply lined face. Both Benafsha and Beheshta blow kisses onto their bibi-jan, who still lives with their grandfather in the northwest of Afghanistan. Soon, a third little girl makes her appearance in the photos. Middle sister Mehrangis has pigtails and a slightly rounder face. She poses next to the twin mini-Azitas, who suddenly look very grown up in their white ruffle dresses.

  Azita flips the page: Nowruz, the Persian New Year, in 2005. Four little girls in cream-colored dresses. All ordered by size. The shortest has a bow in her hair. It is Mehran. Azita puts her finger on the picture. Without looking up, she says: “You know my youngest is also a girl, yes? We dress her like a boy.”

  I glance in the direction of Mehran, who has been skidding around the periphery as we have talked. She has hopped into another chair and is talking to the plastic figurine again.

  “They gossip about my family. When you have no sons, it is a big missing, and everyone feels sad for you.”

  Azita says this as if it is a simple explanation.

  Having at least one son is mandatory for good standing and reputation here. A family is not only incomplete without one; in a country lacking rule of law, it is also seen as weak and vulnerable. So it is incumbent upon every married woman to quickly bear a son–it is her absolute purpose in life, and if she does not fulfill it, there is clearly something wrong with her in the eyes of others. She could be dismissed as a dokhtar zai, or “she who only brings daughters.” Still, this is not as grave an insult as what an entirely childless woman could be called—a sanda or khoshk, meaning “dry” in Dari. But a woman who cannot birth a son in a patrilineal culture is—in the eyes of society and often herself—fundamentally flawed.

  The literacy rate is no more than 10 percent in most areas, and many unfounded truths swirl around without being challenged. Among them is the commonly held belief that a woman can choose the sex of her unborn baby simply by making up her mind about it. As a consequence, a woman’s inability to bear sons does not elicit much sympathy. Instead, she is condemned both by society and her own husband as someone who has just not desired a son strongly enough. Women, too, often resort to blaming their own bodies and weak minds for failing to deliver sons.

  The character flaws often add up about such a woman in the eyes of others: She is surely difficult and obnoxious. Perhaps even evil. The fact that the father actually determines the sex of a child, as the male sperm carries the chromosome makeup for each child and determines whether a boy or a girl will be born, is unknown to most.

  For Azita, the lack of a son stood to impede all she was trying to accomplish as a politician. When she arrived with her family in Kabul in 2005, sneers and suspicion about her lack of a son soon inevitably extended to her abilities as a lawmaker and a public figure. Her visitors would offer their condolences when they learned about her four daughters. She found herself being cast as an incomplete woman. Fellow parliamentarians, constituents, and her own extended family were unsympathetic: How could she be trusted to accomplish anything at all in politics when she could not even give her husband a son? Without a boy to show off to the constant stream of visiting political power brokers, her husband also grew increasingly embarrassed.

  Azita and her husband approached their youngest daughter with a proposition: “Do you want to look like a boy and dress like a boy, and do more fun things like boys do, like bicycling, soccer, and cricket? And would you like to be like your father?”

  She absolutely did. It was a splendid offer.

  All it took was a haircut, a pair of pants from the bazaar, and a denim shirt with “superstar” printed on the back. In a single afternoon, the family went from having four daughters to being blessed with three little girls and a spiky-haired boy. Their youngest would no longer answer to Mahnoush, meaning “moonlight,” but to the boy’s name Mehran. To the outside world—and especially to Azita’s constituents back in Badghis—the family was finally complete.

  Some, of course, knew the truth. But they, too, congratulated Azita. Having a made-up son was better than none, and people complimented her on her ingenuity. When Azita traveled back to her province—a more conservative place than Kabul—she took Mehran with her. In the company of her six-year-old son, she found she was met with more approval.

  The switch also satisfied Azita’s husband. Tongues would now cease to wag about this unlucky man burdened with four daughters, who would need to find husbands for all of them, and have his line end with him. In Pashto, Afghanistan’s second official language, there is even a deprecating name for a man who has no sons: He is a meraat, referring to the system where an inheritance, such as land assets, is almost exclusively passed on through a male lineage. But since the family’s youngest took on the role of a son the child has become a source of pride to her father. Mehran’s revised status has also afforded her siblings considerably more freedom, as they can leave the house, go to the playground, and even wander to the next block, if Mehran is along as an escort.

  There was one additional reason for the transition. Azita says it with a burst of low laughter, leaning in a little closer to disclose her small act of rebellion: “I wanted to show my youngest what life is like on the other side.”

  That life can include flying a kite, running as fast as you can, laughing hysterically, jumping up and down because it feels good, climbing trees to feel the thrill of hanging on. It is to speak to another boy, to sit with your father and his friends, to ride in the front seat of a car and watch people out on the street. To look them in the eye. To speak up without fear and to be listened to, and rarely have anyone question why you are out on your own in comfortable clothes that allow for any kind of movement. All unthinkable for an Afghan girl.

  But what will happen when puberty hits?

  “You mean when he grows up?” Azita says, her hands tracing the shape of a wom
an in the air. “It’s not a problem. We change her into a girl again.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE FOREIGNER

  Carol

  THERE IS A small restaurant favored by Kabul’s unlikely ladies who lunch, where local riffs on quiche lorraine and delicate little sandwiches are served as a war rages on unseen in the provinces. The yellow house with a small garden is tucked into a small alleyway behind a government ministry and flanked by enough roadblocks to make it an acceptable outing for foreign diplomats and aid professionals. As in many other places, the electricity goes out every half hour or so, but guests quickly pick up the habit of carrying on their conversations in absolute darkness until the switch between generators brings the small lamps up again—all while keeping calm when small creatures occasionally skitter past their feet under the table. I had come here to meet the grande dame of Kabul expatriates in the hope that she could shed some light on what seemed to be yet another of Afghanistan’s many secrets.

  Thus far, I had mostly met resistance.

  After my first visit to Azita’s family, I scoured the Internet and newspaper archives, thinking that I had missed something fundamental in my homework on the country. But my searches turned up nothing on any other girls who dressed as boys in Afghanistan. Was Azita just an unusually creative woman? Or could it be, as I still suspected, that more Afghan families turned their daughters into sons, as a way of both conceding to and defying an impossibly rigid society?

  I had also consulted the experts. There were many to choose from.

  Girls and women had become one of several urgent causes to the international aid community after the fall of the Taliban, with numerous specialists on the topic of Afghan women shuttling in and out of the country on short-term rotations from Washington, D.C., and various European capitals. Since many donor countries required development projects—from agriculture to politics—to consider specifically how the lives of Afghan women were to be improved, Kabul had turned into a place brimming with “gender experts”—a term encompassing many of the foreign-born aid workers, sociologists, consultants, and researchers with degrees in everything from conflict resolution to feminist theory.

  After observing, but largely ignoring, the Taliban’s vicious treatment of women for years, consensus among foreigners now converged on the need to quickly usher Afghan women closer to a Western version of equality. A “gender workshop” seemed to be taking place at every upscale hotel in Kabul, where European and American women in ethnic jewelry and embroidered tunics held seminars and drew circles on whiteboards around words like “empowerment” and “awareness.” Throughout Afghanistan, hundreds of disparate aid projects were under way, whose euphemistically stated goals were to enlighten Afghans on topics such as “gender mainstreaming” and “gender dialogue.”

  But senior officials at the United Nations and experts from both government and independent aid organizations delivered a unanimous dismissal when I approached them: Afghans did not dress daughters as sons to counter their segregated society. Why would they ever do that? Had more girls like Mehran existed, these experts, heavily invested in the plight of Afghan women, would certainly know about it, I was told. Anthropologists, psychologists, and historians would surely also have taken note, as such a thing would seem to go against the common understanding of Afghanistan’s culture, where one dresses strictly according to gender. Books would have been written and academic studies would have been made. Ergo, such a practice—if it was really a practice and not just an oddity—must not exist. Gender segregation in Afghanistan is among the strictest in the world, I was repeatedly told, making such an act unthinkable. Dangerous, even.

  But persistent inquiries among Afghans offered a different, if muddled, view. My male translator casually remarked that he had heard of a distant girl cousin who dressed as a boy, but had never understood or thought much of it. Other Afghans echoed occasional rumors of such girls but uniformly advised that I better leave it alone; poking into the private affairs and traditions of families was never a good idea for a foreigner.

  An Afghan diplomat eventually offered a firsthand sighting, remembering a friend on his neighborhood football team during the Taliban era in the 1990s. One day the friend just disappeared and a number of his teammates went to his house in search of the boy. His father stepped out of the doorway and said that unfortunately their friend would not be returning. She had changed back to being a girl. The team’s twelve-year-olds on the street outside were stunned.

  This, however, was an anomaly, the diplomat assured me. Any such desperate and uncivilized measures could be blamed solely on the horrors of the Taliban era. A 2003 Afghan feature film, Osama, had actually told a story of a young girl who disguised herself as a boy under Taliban rule. But that was fiction, of course. And besides, these were new, enlightened times in Afghanistan, the diplomat said.

  But were they really?

  To a reporter, the aggressive pushback by expert foreigners and Afghans alike was intriguing. What if this pointed to something bigger than just Azita’s family—something that might raise questions about what else we were missing in our decade-long quest to understand Afghanistan and its culture?

  I was hoping Carol le Duc might have some input on the topic. With her red hair and jewel-toned silk shalwars, Carol never seemed to offer the same confident and often-repeated theses about Afghans or what their country needed in terms of basic understanding of Western values. “I would never call myself a feminist,” she had said, for instance, when I first met her. “No, no, I leave that to the others.”

  Instead, Carol is of a kind that eschews the expat crowd, preferring to socialize with the Afghan families she befriended many years ago, when fewer foreigners were allowed into the country under Taliban rule. She is believed by many to have the sharpest institutional memory in Kabul and is famous for having been one of few women to have negotiated with the Taliban when they were in power.

  Carol arrived in this part of the world in 1989 after a divorce. She could have been perfectly comfortable back in England for the rest of her life. But she chose not to. “I hate traveling and passing through places. I like to get to know people. To go deeper,” she had told me. “And I realized I was a completely free woman at forty-nine.” In her almost two decades in Afghanistan and Pakistan since, she has worked for nongovernmental organizations and as a consultant to government ministries. With a degree in anthropology from Oxford, she has been involved in many studies involving Afghan women, children, and politics.

  Holding a firm belief that tea scented with crushed cardamom served in fine bone china cups makes any disaster—and Kabul has seen its share—a little more bearable, she lives in modest grandeur in a peach-colored stone house surrounded by a well-tended garden with two peacocks “because they are beautiful to look at.” In winter, her fireplace is a rare find in Kabul; it actually works. And in summer, her large rattan chairs under a slow-moving ceiling fan render August slightly more livable. Every Afghan working for the taxi services that cater to foreigners in residence knows her walled home on a muddy Kabul street simply as “the Carol House,” and locals speak of her with a fondness and respect reserved for those who have come to be part of their own history, reaching further back than the most recent war.

  At times, though, Kabul becomes a bit much even for Carol, and she hops on a flight to her “country cottage” in Peshawar, a violent Pakistani city formerly under British control, where the Afghan king used to summer. Today Peshawar is considered one of the most dangerous places in the world. It is so infested by Islamic extremists that few Westerners visit voluntarily, and when they do, it is usually with military-grade protection. But to Carol, accustomed to walking Kabul by foot with absolute disregard for what foreigners call “security,” and refusing to contain her firecracker hair under a head scarf, Peshawar offers only a marginally more complicated existence. The airport, of course, is a “huge kerfuffle,” in her words, where, in place of a hospitality desk, a “Mr. Intelligenc
e” will always approach, presuming she is American. And each time, Carol takes great pleasure in stating she is British. And nothing else.

  “NOW, WOULD YOU like the special white tea, or should we try the special red?” she asks me at the restaurant, after listening to my quandary. After a nod from Carol, the server pours the illegal red wine from a chubby blue teapot.

  That an Afghan girl is being brought up as a boy makes complete sense to Carol: “As a woman, why wouldn’t you want to cross over to the other side, in a country like Afghanistan?” she exclaims. In fact, she is entertained by the idea; it appeals to her contrarian side.

  While she has never observed the practice among children, she does recall a field trip several years prior with a small team of aid workers to Ghazni province, a Taliban stronghold. The men and women of one tribal village lived strictly separated, and when Carol was invited for tea in the women’s quarters, she was surprised to find a man living among them. The women called him “Uncle,” and he appeared to enjoy a special status in the village. The women served his tea and treated him with great respect. Uncle’s appearance was rugged, but he had a slightly softer face than the other men. It took a while, as well as a few helpful whispers, for Carol to understand that Uncle was actually an adult woman in a turban and men’s clothing.

  In the small village, Uncle functioned as an intermediary between men and women, and served as an honorary male who could convey messages and escort other women when they needed to travel, posing no threat because she herself was a woman.

  Like Azita’s daughter Mehran, Uncle had been raised as a boy, Carol was told. It was the local mullah’s doing, apparently: Uncle had been born as the seventh daughter in a family of no sons. As the spiritual leader of the village, the mullah had taken pity on the parents. So he simply designated the infant girl to be her parents’ son only hours after she was born. He gave the child a boy’s name, and then promptly dispatched her parents to present what was now their son. The mullah’s official proclamation that a son had been born was gratefully accepted by the parents—it both heightened their status and released them from the inevitable scorn of their village.