The Underground Girls of Kabul Read online

  BUT IN A place where marriages are arranged and sex is about reproduction, shreds of romance still endure, as demonstrated by the giddy female wedding guests who find allure in what is most forbidden. Even though marriages for love are rare in Afghanistan, tales of them abound, and both women and men harbor fantasies of unions inspired by the appearance of adventurous and often tortured but passionate relationships in literature and poetry. The rush of a high school crush may have to last a lifetime here.

  Like many Afghan women, Shukria wears no wedding ring. But there is an intriguing bulky silver ring on a right-hand finger that she initially refuses to address. Until I dare suggest she may be the object of a secret crush by whoever gave her the ring. She denies it: No, no, it’s not like that.

  “I had a very good friend who was close to me. The ring is from him. But I have never been in love.”

  There are two identical rings. When her friend gave her the ring, he kept the other one. He, too, has worn it ever since.

  It sounds very romantic. I look to Setareh for support. She keeps her game face. To her, I’m the one who knows nothing of love. We have had a disagreement in the car. She has asked me to cover for her when she meets up with “a friend” from the university. Should her father call, I am to say that she’s with me. I tell her it’s much too dangerous. What if there is a blast, and I can’t tell her parents where she is? When I am responsible for her, we should be together, I insist. In turn, she has let me know I am a cold-hearted machine.

  I know Setareh will eventually just gamble and tell her father she is with me anyway, and I can only pray she doesn’t get caught or get too close to a suicide bomber. I know she fears neither.

  Shukria does not waver on the ring. There is no romance. Only the eight men she counts as friends. Her gang from childhood. They still stick together. When she gets sick, they come to visit, and they all check in regularly. Shukria is especially close to one of them—they went to school and later worked at the hospital together. His parents love her like their own child. He still calls her Shukur. To demonstrate how their bond has been misinterpreted before, Shukria recalls how his mother once thought that she was in love with him and arrived at Shukria’s parents’ house to make a marriage proposal on behalf of her son.

  “I was so upset. I went to his mother and said, you have misunderstood everything. We are not in love; I am a man and if I was together with your son we would be in fights all the time—is that what you want? I was very angry. And she said, ‘But I thought you were in love.’ ”

  Shukria laughs. The idea is too ridiculous. They were brothers! Not some sappy romantic couple. He eventually married, too, as she knew he would.

  Shukria is not entirely sure how love is defined.

  “He is my best friend, and sometimes I think that if something happened to him, how could I live? Maybe that is love.”

  She has tried to have civil conversations with God on the topic. But too often, they turn into silent, one-sided arguments. Perhaps she should be grateful; God made her both a man and a woman in one person. Yet she feels completely alone most of the time. The noise inside her head is painful, and only occasionally can she shut it down. It works best when she is at work, in her scrubs. It also feels good when she gets to be protective of other women, just as Shukur always was. Whenever she sees a woman being harassed by a man, she will jump in and forget all her womanly manners. She doesn’t pull a knife anymore, but she will not hesitate to shame any man by getting too close, waving her arms, and threatening to beat him up.

  Shukria has seen this dynamic played out in pirated American DVDs. There is always a hero and the woman he rescues. Even when the main character is a woman, she will fall in love with a man, who is always stronger. It gives Shukria a great deal of satisfaction to watch the men scoop up women in distress. And like every other woman with a television in Kabul seems to do, Shukria follows the soap operas from India and Turkey.

  “When you see stories of love, can you relate to the feeling?”

  “No. But I feel love for my children, my parents, my friends, and my coworkers. Love is not just for a partner, I think.”

  Perhaps the notion of romantic love is another social construct. Do we actually learn how to fall in love and expect certain behavior from those we fall for? If it’s reciprocated, we call it chemistry. Just as giddy Afghan teenage girls speak dreamily of marriage as presented in Bollywood movies, perhaps we, too, have read books and watched many movies to learn what romance looks like and how it should feel. We perform certain rituals we have been taught are romantic. Then we go about piecing together our own romantic comedy script in the best way possible, with the material we have already collected.

  Biological anthropologist Helen Fisher at Stanford University has defined three different forms of love: Lust, which is mainly sexual attraction. Romantic attraction, defined by an intense yearning for another person, not unlike a substance addiction, where the affected craves someone or something. The wanting is the key feeling, just as a heroin addict needs a fix. Finally attachment, signified by a calm feeling of deep union with another person.

  Shukria has no answers as to why romance never appealed to her. But she knows why she enjoys her television so much. Even though the concept of romance between the protagonists feels foreign to her, it still excites her to follow a love-struck couple for a very specific reason: “I like happy endings.”

  That may be what is truly universal.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE DRIVER

  Nader

  BY LAW, WOMEN are allowed to drive in Afghanistan. Just as they are formally allowed to inherit property and divorce their husbands. They just don’t, most of the time.

  Nader wore a head scarf while driving once, just to please her brothers and to humor what they insist God requires from her. It nearly got several people killed, herself included. At the sight of a covered head behind the wheel at one of Kabul’s many checkpoints, there ensued a traffic jam, with other drivers honking their horns, yelling, and throwing their fists in the air. They hollered out from their windows and thrust their cars toward her. Others pulled ahead, hitting the brakes in front of her, trying to trap her like a little mouse.

  “You shameful woman, you should not drive!”

  “A car is not for you. You will destroy it!”

  “Your husband should beat you!”

  “Stop the car! Or we will force you!”

  When she did not yield to any of their warnings, it made them angrier. She did not feel defiant so much as scared. She had to focus hard to shut out their loud words and just stare ahead, to keep her wobbling Toyota Corolla away from the curb as she drove away. By the time she finally reached Jalalabad Road, most other cars had scattered in other directions. But one car seemed determined to race her, driving up next to her, roaring his engine for effect. As the others had failed to stop her or run her off the road, he would at least teach her a lesson by showing he was faster.

  So fragile apparently is the power they hold in this country where men are born to almost all the privileges society confers, that this one felt a need to immediately rebuff a woman out of place and demonstrate strength and superiority before her. By getting into a car by herself, Nader had reached for a privilege that was not hers to be had.

  She did not want to race him, but she did not slow down, either. She just kept her eyes on the road and drove faster than she really was comfortable with. When her challenger gave up after a while, she tore off the head scarf and threw it on the passenger’s seat. Nadia was not meant to be a driver.

  Nader looked at herself in the rearview mirror. Her short, curly hair had been flattened by the scarf, and she ran a hand through it. Then she put her sunglasses back on and drove back to the house, without any more drama. Her brothers could yell at her all they wanted. It was her car. After all, she had fixed the engine herself. She had lived as a man for all of her thirty years.

  LIKE SO MANY of the other girls, Nader was design
ated her family’s bacha posh at birth, to ensure that sons would follow. Her two older brothers had just joined the army, so the need for more sons had become acute, for her parents feared their older children would be killed in their dangerous jobs. For the parents to be left with only girls was a risk they did not want to take. They also needed a helper at home, to run errands and help shuttle the younger ones around. Nader’s mother had been told by several neighbors it was guaranteed to work—dressing her newborn daughter as a son would render magical results.

  The magic arrived when two more boys were born, in addition to another four girls. The older brothers soon argued that Nader should go back to being a girl before she came of age as a woman, so as not to embarrass them before friends and relatives.

  But Nader’s life, where she was a Mehran, and later a Zahra, never took the turn of Shukria’s: Nader did not marry. She did not become a woman. In the circle of life of a bacha posh, Nader is one of the exceptions. Her life veered in a different direction.

  Her father had watched her grow up, and had seen his girl be her happiest in pants and a turban. He thought she should decide for herself what she wanted to wear: “Do what you feel good about and what you are comfortable with. It is your own choice in this life,” he kept telling her when she was a teenager and throughout her twenties.

  There was another reason to maintain the status quo: Under the Taliban, women were mostly confined to the house. But Nader would tool around town on a bike avoiding the checkpoints. Her father often laughed at the stories she brought home—of how she had fooled everyone as she went to the bazaar or even to pray with other boys. Like most everyone else in Kabul, her father had only disgust for the Taliban, and Nader’s cat-and-mouse game was their private little resistance movement. Sometimes she exaggerated the drama of how close she had come to getting caught, just to entertain him.

  The entire family was ecstatic when the Taliban left. But as the Americans moved in, Nader’s aging father fell ill. With his passing, power over the family and Nader’s future was passed to her brothers. They did not marry her off, but she had a few close calls: Several proposals for marriage from relatives aimed at setting her straight were turned down.

  After a few heated family arguments, Nader found her salvation: The family does not lack money, and her mother has not wanted to remarry. Since her brothers have adjacent houses of their own, Nader made a case for herself as the useful male companion to their elderly mother. Now the brothers will not have to worry about their mother, since Nader is there to protect her honor and that of the two youngest sisters. She does all the work around the house and runs errands for her other sisters’ families, too.

  So far, that role has allowed her to stay in pants, a T-shirt, and the bulky pinstripe sports coat she prefers on most days. She has perfected a slightly bow-legged walk, and speaks in a low voice. When she leaves the family’s big, carpeted house in one of the better parts of Kabul where houses are surrounded by thick walls, she keeps her head down for fear the neighbors might see her. Gossip is everywhere, and she does not want to unnecessarily provoke anyone. Many know her just as a man who lives with his mother and sisters.

  NOW, AS SHE approaches thirty-five, she is hoping to be out of the marriage market for good as she is simply too old for anyone to want her. And, she hopes, infertile. Watching how her brothers treat their wives and her younger sisters, she cannot imagine being ruled by a man. She went through university as a young man and holds a part-time office job at a software firm in Kabul, making some money of her own.

  The power of prayer has worked well for her, too. As her four sisters developed breasts and hips, Nader’s early teenage pleadings with God revolved around staying flat-chested, bony-hipped, and premenstrual. She vowed to give anything in return for those things. God listened, and although she did bleed at fifteen, it was two full years after her younger sisters had their first menstruations. She has never let anyone touch her thick eyebrows, and she has taken every chance to let the sun burn her skin to make it a little darker and rougher. She prayed for a full beard, too, but got only a smidge of black hair above her upper lip. A sports bra one size too small keeps her chest safely minimized. Just to make sure, she slumps a little, her shoulders turned inward. There is no better compliment than when her brothers tell her she looks too much like a man. She has heard them speak among themselves, too, about how Nader may have turned into a man for good. It’s the way it should be, she reasons: “I am free now. I don’t want to go to prison.”

  There is an expression sometimes used for bacha posh who have aged themselves out of the marriage market. She is mardan kheslat: “like a man.” It can be either a condemnation or a compliment, an expression of admiration and respect for a woman who has the mind and the strength of a man.

  For a woman to live as a man is especially controversial as she comes of childbearing age and lives through her fertile years, the way Zahra is experiencing. But when she becomes too old to have children, she is no longer a sexual threat to society, and she may earn a grudging acknowledgment or at least tolerance from a wider circle as an honorary man, just as Carol le Duc described the woman called “Uncle” she once met. By then, she is of no use as a woman anyway. Only then—when her body is no longer fit to be appropriated by others for childbirth, does it become more her own. An infertile Afghan woman is considered less of a woman, and that is exactly the point: She is a woman who has renounced the feminine.

  Nader is not the only bacha posh who has refused womanhood and now lives as a man in Afghanistan. Forty-five-year-old Amir Bibi in Khost, the violent province bordering on Waziristan, carries a gun and sits on the local shura, where she is seen as a village elder and her opinions have bearing. Meeting Swedish correspondent Terese Cristiansson in 2010, she explained that she had been given permission not to marry by her father, who brought her up as his son among seven brothers.

  Another woman who holds the role of an honorary man in her community is fifty-year-old Hukmina. She, too, lives in Khost, in the small village of Sharaf Kali, with both the Pakistani Taliban and unmanned drones above as everyday threats. There, she is a member of the local provincial council, rides horses, and carries a gun with her at all times. She fought the Russians during the war, and she certainly does not fear the Taliban. Having been brought up as a companion to her brother, she tells us she “never had the thoughts of a woman. If I felt like a woman I would not be able to do these things.”

  She says she is supported by a whole group of women in her province who live like men. There used to be ten, but two died.

  BOTH WESTERN AND Eastern history is filled with Hukminas and Amir Bibis and Naders. In almost every era, there have been women who took on the role of men when being a woman was made impossible. Many of those whose existences are remembered are preserved were warriors, since wars are a manly business deemed worthy of recording.

  In the first century, Triaria of Rome joined her emperor husband in war, wearing men’s armor. Zenobia was a third-century queen in Syria who grew up as a boy and went on to fight the Roman Empire on horseback. Around the same time in China, Hua Mulan took her father’s place in battle, wearing his clothes. Joan of Arc was famously said to have seen an archangel in 1424, causing her to adopt the look of a male soldier and help fight France’s war against England.

  The Catholic Church seemed to not only accept women dressing as men but also to admire and reward those who showed bravery and displayed other male traits. In a study of medieval Europe, professor Valerie Hotchkiss of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign described the phenomenon of cross-dressing women as revolving around avoiding marriage, renouncing sexuality, and forever remaining virgins. Both Scivias, a twelfth-century collection of religious texts by Hildegard von Bingen, and Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas mention how women dressing in male clothing may be permitted in circumstances of necessity. In other words: war.

  Dutch historians Lotte C. van de Pol and Rudolf M. Dekker also documented mor
e than a hundred women who lived as men between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Many were discovered to be women only when their bodies were carried off the battlefield. These women “existed throughout Europe,” mostly as sailors and soldiers, and likely there were many more who will never be known.

  They took on a male identity for reasons similar to the bacha posh in Afghanistan today: Some needed to support themselves and their families. Others needed to disguise themselves to travel or to escape a forced marriage. Some managed to disguise themselves to study, since higher education was closed to women. A few who were found out faced prosecution, but there is evidence indicating some leniency was given to those who had fought for their countries.

  In the 1600s, orphan Ulrika Eleonora Stålhammar supported herself and five sisters in Sweden by enlisting in the army, eventually attaining the rank of corporal and fighting the Russians. She was only one of several Swedish women known to have fought alongside men in male dress to escape a forced marriage. Briton Hannah Snell famously served with the marines in India in the mid-1700s as James Gray, and several dozen Englishwomen have been recorded as having served as men in the British Royal Navy, initially unbeknownst to their commanding officers. German women were also found on the battlefield in the guise of men, as was Geneviève Prémoy of France, who was eventually knighted by King Louis XIV. Women living as men were among the conquistadors in South America, and in North America women clandestinely took part in the Civil War.

  By the nineteenth century in Europe, the frequency of women who dressed as men seemed to diminish. Historians attribute it to an increasingly organized society where various forms of civil registration such as border controls and mandatory medical examinations for soldiers made it more difficult for women to pass as men. A more dysfunctional, primitive society works in favor of those who want to disguise themselves; the less papers or checks of any kind, the better–circumstances still true for much of Afghanistan today.