The Underground Girls of Kabul Read online

  Just a week earlier, the first wife lectured Mehran about how she should never think she is any closer to her father than the other children, nor that there was a special bond between them. Mehran responded by throwing another fit and yelling at her stepmother. When Azita came in, intending to plead with her husband’s first wife to stop, she instead lost her patience with Mehran, who furiously screamed back. Azita slapped her across the face to make her stop.

  It was the first time she had hit her daughter.

  “You must never speak to your other mother like that again!” she yelled at her daughter. Mehran went silent immediately. Azita froze as she watched the surprised look on her daughter’s face and the tears that ensued. The red marks on Mehran’s cheek faded, but she did not speak much until the next day.

  Azita pleaded with her husband’s first wife to recognize that the bacha posh arrangement is to their joint advantage. It helps control the pressure to bring another child into the family. Or a third wife. But that argument gains no traction with the first wife, who has firmly argued that Mehran must look, behave, and be treated like the girl she is. Until Azita understands this, it is necessary to remind Mehran that she is indeed a girl—and an ugly one at that—if she misbehaves.

  Underneath these forced but polite conversations between the two wives, they both know exactly what is at stake: If Mehran is stripped of her role as a son, it will also remove Azita’s fragile status as a somewhat more important wife. There is a traditional ranking order between multiple wives married to one husband, where the first-married holds a higher status and more clout in the family. But that is, in turn, calibrated by who produces the most sons. Mehran is all that stands between Azita as she lives now and potentially reverting to the traditionally lower status of second wife. Making an already complicated childhood even more difficult, Mehran thus holds some of the power balance between her mother and her stepmother.

  The first wife has also taken to reminding her husband that his youngest daughter needs to be cultivated into decent marriage material. If nothing else, her current loud and talkative manner will grow into a problem later on. She is already hard to control. He should not let it escalate, she keeps reminding him. “She’s a girl, and you have to treat her as one.”

  Azita’s husband has not taken kindly to the brewing conflict centered around his oldest wife and his youngest child, demanding of both wives that they get along and make the children behave. He has even snapped at Mehran a few times himself—something he did not use to do. It should be a happy time for all of them, he insists, now that they are all together again.

  After the meal is finished at Afghan Fried Chicken, Azita pays the bill. She wants to leave in order to catch her Turkish television series: In the previous episode, a young woman was being threatened with an arranged marriage, and Azita is curious to see how the drama will evolve. She hurries her husband and the children out through a side door where the four-wheel drive is parked. They had to get a new car to fit the family of eight.

  Tonight, Mehran still rides in the front seat.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THE CASTOFF

  Shukria

  ALL SHE HAD done to become a woman was rendered meaningless in less than thirty seconds. Her sister had been blunt on the phone, repeating what she had just been told by Shukria’s husband: “I have another wife, and a baby.” Reluctant to break the news directly, he then asked Shukria’s sister to pass the message along.

  Shukria, who had just come home from a shift at the hospital, was exhausted, and at first thought that she wasn’t thinking clearly when she got her sister on the line. But after they hung up, Shukria asked herself how long she had really known. A feeling that something was off had certainly been there for a while. And now she looked the fool, for not admitting it to herself and for denying it to others.

  She stares into the air at the expensive Lebanese restaurant I have chosen. Or so it looks. Her small, gray-tinted eyeglasses effectively hide her eyes.

  Almost two years have passed since we first met at the hospital. She has arrived an hour late today, giving Setareh and me plenty of time to order half the menu, trying to envision what may appeal to Shukria. We had imagined it would be a small celebration—mostly just for being somewhere other than at our usual dark and suffocating meeting place. Now we sit with an ill-suited buffet of grilled chicken, hummus, chopped salads, and melting ice cream on the table between us. Shukria will not eat, and Setareh politely does not touch the food, either.

  Of all the intimate details Shukria has shared in the time we have known each other, she has avoided speaking much about her husband. Almost always in passing, she has only mentioned him in a neutral, respectful tone, unwilling to offer up much about their marriage.

  Until now.

  The first visit her husband took to Tajikistan a few years ago had been a short trip. He had asked Shukria for her saved money to invest in a new business there. There were no opportunities for him in Kabul anymore. The investment optimism of the war’s early years had vanished. The construction business was no good anymore; one new development after the other was scrapped or abandoned only half-finished. It seemed foreigners with money wanted out, and most Afghans with money preferred to invest abroad. But Tajikistan next door was ripe for investment, he had heard. It could make them rich, he told Shukria.

  She was not convinced but did not want to seem too negative. So she gave him the money. For his second trip, he asked for more, and that time, he was gone longer.

  In the next six months, he came home only twice. He had developed a fruit-and-vegetable business in Tajikistan and said that it needed his constant attention. He had a car with a “road pass” allowing him to cross the border, buying his produce on the Afghan side and then selling it in a Tajik border town. He seemed cheerful; things were going well. Shukria need not worry, he assured her. He had taken some other loans, too, in Kabul. It would be up to Shukria to pay the debtors when they came knocking. But surely she understood that they were in this together, and that she needed to contribute her share for his hard work abroad? Shukria swallowed any protest, wanting his good mood to remain. How she would find the money to pay off his debts was a problem for later.

  At another homecoming, he mentioned a woman during dinner. Relating a string of casual anecdotes about his travels, he told her about a particularly silly woman he had run into in Tajikistan. She had fallen in love with him, and said she wanted to marry him. Shukria had not been entertained: “If you want to marry someone else and forget about your wife and three young children, I think you should go ahead,” she told her husband.

  He laughed at her—she could never take a joke, it seemed. He was not that kind of man. It was just another story. Women so easily got hung up on crazy ideas; that was all. Shukria remembers shooting her husband a weak smile: Yes, how silly women can be, she agreed.

  He did not come to her bed that night. Instead, he abruptly said he needed to go visit some relatives. He would stay with them overnight. When he returned the next day, as she was cleaning up after breakfast, he just said it.

  “Talaq. Talaq. Talaq.”

  Then he said it three times again, and left without another word. Shukria heard him perfectly the first time, but she did not understand exactly what it meant until later, when she looked it up. By uttering talaq—literally meaning the untying of a knot—her husband was divorcing her. Saying it three times made it final.

  Still, she did not understand. It made little sense. Why would he want to divorce her? It was impossible to take in. Instead, Shukria went about her day, first going to the bazaar for the shopping she had already planned. She cooked dinner and helped the children with their homework. She told no one about her husband’s strange behavior earlier in the day. If she stayed silent, it might never have happened.

  Shukria worked her way through the next ten months in that same state of denial. Occasionally, her husband showed up on a visit from Tajikistan, but they did not discuss the di
vorce. And she tried not to think about it. Until her sister called the other night.

  “You must listen now,” she demanded of Shukria during the call, speaking each word in an exaggeratedly slow fashion. “I will not allow you to suffer anymore. You have to think of your life and your children.”

  Besides, the entire family already knew, so she could stop pretending, the sister said. They even knew of the new baby. “You need to live in reality,” the sister said.

  Shukria’s husband had left her, and it was time to accept it. And it struck her for the first time then: She had not only failed as a wife. She had failed at being a woman.

  IF AN AFGHAN woman wants to divorce her husband, she needs his explicit agreement. She may also need to produce witnesses to testify that a divorce from her husband is warranted.

  A man can divorce for any reason, or for no reason at all. Uttering the same word three times undoes a marriage for a man. It is often left at that.

  But in those cases, the woman left behind has hardly been liberated. Unless a marriage is dissolved by a court or a gathering of elders, in the eyes of society a dismissed woman is still married, only with an absent husband. This is the Kafkaesque situation of Shukria: All power over her life still belongs to an absent person, under the law. If she were to attempt to move, travel, or sign anything on behalf of herself or her children, anyone could request the additional and explicit approval of her husband, as he remains the head of her household and her affairs.

  Like most women, Shukria wed her husband at home, surrounded by family, in a ceremony conducted by a local mullah. Their marriage, as most Afghan marriages, was not registered anywhere.

  Shukria has the option of taking her action for divorce into Afghanistan’s official justice system, where civil law, Sharia, and local custom each play a role. It is at best an improvised and unpredictable procedure. She will likely be heard only through a male intermediary. Without her husband present to testify that he has indeed left her, she will need to call her own witnesses, and even so, she risks leaving court without being granted a divorce. Shukria’s husband was very clear to her sister: He would never stand in front of his relatives, no less in a court, and declare that he had divorced his wife. It would be embarrassing to him.

  A woman seeking a formal divorce also risks frustration and humiliation. It sends a damning message, regardless of the outcome: Such a woman must not have been a good one, as she obviously failed to take care of her husband and her family. Otherwise, why would she have been cast aside?

  Shukria would face one or several judges, who may or may not have legal educations but who will each have his own interpretation of the various laws, and who may operate in a confusing maze of rumors and “tradition.” The court is formally required to attempt to contact the absent husband, to secure his approval of the divorce. Failing that, her relatives would be called in to verify that the husband is absent. Only then would Shukria have a chance of dissolving her marriage and being awarded the divorce she never asked for.

  With very little rule of law in place, most people also bypass the official Afghan justice system altogether in favor of an informal justice system to resolve conflicts, where local laws and judgments vary even more, and rarely to a woman’s favor.

  Shukria shivers at the notion of being a working divorcée: “If I were a housewife, it would be okay, but now I work on the outside. Everybody will know I am divorced. I could even run into those same judges at the hospital!”

  She would be looked upon with suspicion and possibly contempt by both men and women as a failed wife and, by extension, a failed woman. But humiliation would be far from the worst thing. Nor would the fact that she may be forced to move into her parents’ house again, where she would formally live under the guardianship of her ailing father. An adult woman cannot live on her own in Afghanistan without a blood relative or a mahram. As a divorced woman who still has children living with her, Shukria could not remarry, either, other than to a relative of her husband’s. The grave inequality of divorce in Afghanistan is often explained here with the idea that women have less brainpower and may haphazardly ask for a divorce for no good or valid reason.

  Now, Shukria’s children stand to eventually be taken away from her. According to Afghan civil code, based on Sharia, children belong to the father, since “every child is created by the father.” Sharia is considered to be the word of God, and to question it equals blasphemy. Legal arguments challenging the civil code could be interpreted as insults against God, producing a whole new, more serious crime. To question a Sharia argument in a court can be dangerous, since the justice system in Afghanistan is often staffed with ill-educated but self-described pious lawyers and judges.

  An Afghan woman who wants to leave her husband will be obliged to also leave her children behind. Making divorce nearly impossible for most women is exactly the point—otherwise, the thinking goes, women could just divorce men left and right, taking the children with them. Women are too emotional, rash, and impulsive—particularly when they are menstruating. They cannot be trusted to make rational decisions. So for their own well-being, the logic goes, children should always remain with the father to avoid being carted off to a series of new husbands whom their whorish mothers may decide to marry at a whim.

  Shukria’s husband has not yet claimed his children, but she expects it is only a matter of time: “He has no money right now. He wants me to support them a little longer. He will let me raise them and pay for them, and then he could claim them later.”

  If the father agrees, a son can stay with the mother until he is seven, and a daughter until she is nine. After that, all children become his property. When children reach the age of eighteen they can, in theory, decide with whom they want to live. But in practice, a girl is often married off before then.

  SHUKRIA BEGINS TO pick at a chicken kebab. Then she grabs a plate with sautéed mushrooms. “I’ve never had one of these before. I will try it. I am trying new things.”

  While chewing, she apologizes for not bringing up the state of her marriage before: “I thought maybe you would become emotional. I did not want to upset you.”

  “How are you?” I ask, touching her arm carefully.

  Looking back at me, she smiles wistfully and tilts her head a little. The announcement of a new baby has made the nightmare she held at bay for ten months excruciatingly real. “I have no feeling right now. There is nothing in my heart. I am like a stone inside. My head is still trying to understand it.

  “This is my third destiny,” she continues. “First I was a man and then a woman, and now I will be a divorced woman.”

  The way she sees it, marriage did not quite succeed in fully making her a woman, although childbirth eventually gave her confirmation. But a divorced woman in Afghanistan is something else—without a husband, a woman is lowered to a caste where she is neither man nor woman, nor a respectable citizen. With a divorce often comes the suspicions of a woman being un-Islamic, referencing the prophet Muhammad, who was believed to have expressed that, except for anything that is outright illegal, divorce is what God hates the most. A woman here can be either a daughter or a wife—or a widow—but there is not much in between. When a woman does not belong to her father, with her virginity as capital, or a husband, with her status attached to him, there is no role for her in the patriarchal culture. A divorcée is a fallen woman, who loses all the privileges attached to marriage and her elevated status through her husband. And it is other women who will come down on her the hardest.

  If Shukria’s husband eventually comes to collect the children there is little she will be able to do. When they are taken away from her, she is reduced to a figure she does not yet know how to name or to describe.

  “That will be my fourth destiny. A divorced woman without her children.”

  She thinks out loud: Perhaps this happened because their marriage was never proper to begin with? She was never a real bride, anyway. She was just Shukur; miserable, in that stupid wed
ding dress. The marriage probably failed because she could never quite force that man out from inside of her. As her body was put into a dress, she tried to make her mind follow. Nor did she ever get a mahr—that sum that should but rarely is paid to the bride to secure her.

  “Right now I am nothing. I was nothing and I am nothing. I was never a man and never a woman. I was a wife and now I will not be a wife anymore. When he takes my children away from me, I will not be a mother. To whom do I have value? Can you tell me—to whom?”

  She wags her head from side to side, her voice bristling.

  “To your children, your parents, and to your patients,” I say. “To us. You have value to us.”

  But Shukria still shakes her head.

  “How many lives should I have? How many people must I be?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THE WIFE

  Azita

  THE PRODUCER ASKED for color, so she added the turquoise scarf to break up her all-black. He is happy with the small concession, nodding in approval as Azita walks back onto the television set. Then he turns to the production assistant right behind him. Something is still not quite right: Azita needs more eyes. The assistant springs into action, and Azita patiently allows her eyes to be lined with even thicker strokes of black kohl while the female sound operator attaches a small microphone at the neckline of her black coat. Azita remains still. She knows it will be faster if a professional does it. They are all waiting for her now.

  “Ready?”

  Azita nods to the producer. Ready. And the tape rolls again.

  Heat is rising quickly on the hillside terrace, but little can dampen her energy today, where she is placed on a small stage in front of three cameras and a local production crew. Her delivery is flawless and moving; she tells the story of how she came from a dirt-floor house in the provinces and took the seat for Badghis in parliament. It’s her success narrative and she doesn’t miss a beat when she ties it to the future of Afghanistan: “Our nation is in trouble, but it will never go anywhere by itself,” she exclaims to the future viewers. “The responsibility for your future lies with you. No one will take care of it for you.”