The Underground Girls of Kabul Read online

  As always, when I don’t know what else to do, I try to sound matter-of-fact: “It is only a turn of phrase for you, right? ‘This stupid life’?”

  She says nothing, which usually indicates there’s something she’s not saying—something contrary to the confident image she wants to project. It is hard enough to admit that domestic violence has returned to her family.

  “Have you ever tried to kill yourself?” I ask.

  Her eyes flicker and turn down to the table.

  It was early in her marriage, in Badghis. She had panic attacks that developed into seizures, when she would go catatonic. They usually lasted only minutes, but sometimes longer. The first such episode came right after the wedding. It began with sharp chest pain, followed by shortness of breath. After that, her hands and feet would go cold, and she could not move them. Nor could she speak or move her head. With time, she found the attacks would subside when her feet and hands were rubbed. A doctor also gave her phenobarbital, an antiseizure medicine. She was newly pregnant with the twins, and, following instructions, she took two a day.

  One day, she took twelve.

  It was a watermelon that pushed her over the edge, or more accurately, the fantasy of one. She was locked inside the house, thinking of the watermelons in the field outside in the family’s plot. She could not stand most foods, but she craved that cool, crisp melon. But they were outside the locked door where she could not go. And none were for her, anyway; they were to be sold at the market.

  The twelve tablets put her in a deep sleep for two hours.

  When she woke up again she immediately apologized to everyone for mistakenly taking too much medicine. How stupid of her. She is still not sure why she took them; maybe it was indeed a mistake. But she never wants to revisit that low again. It was the weakest her spirit had ever been. That she was so close to abandoning her daughters before they had even been born is her greatest shame.

  She looks up at me and apologizes for her initial remark—of course she does not want to end her life. She really does not. But it does feel as though there is something wrong with her mind these days. Where she used to be able to think of solutions, she now feels blocked. With the increased insecurity in Kabul, with the foreigners leaving, the parliament still in chaos: She always saw a way before, but it feels harder now. Or maybe she is getting older? The thought of Afghanistan descending into chaos after foreign troops leave is something she cannot even contemplate.

  “I think maybe I should have left,” she suddenly says.

  She has never said that before. Hardly even thought it, in a real way. Divorce was just never an option. Just like Shukria, Azita knows seeking a divorce would not be in her favor—especially not with the accusations of infidelity, which could land her in prison. And she would most likely lose her children.

  But the “leaving” Azita refers to is of a different kind. Unlike for many of her colleagues in politics, the thought of living life abroad after the foreign troop withdrawal has never held much allure for her. The concept was almost unspeakable for an idealist who always swore she would stick by her country and its future.

  “When I was an MP I had lots of friends and contacts. Visas were never a problem. I could have gone anywhere. The children could travel on my passport, even. Now I just have a tourist passport. I was so busy with my work. I feel so guilty for them now. I was so selfish. I was thinking of my country and its future. And my work. I should have only taken care of my family.”

  In wanting to create a better future for her daughters she had always imagined it would be in an Afghanistan she had helped reform. Trying to teach her daughters resilience, strength, and pride for their country, she also wanted them to be proud of her for the effort. To then plan for a comfortable exit abroad like several of her colleagues seemed so … hypocritical.

  Before leaving for campaign training in the United States a few years ago, she had joked with the twins about seeking asylum there. It was already a popular topic among her colleagues, back then. Several of the other MPs had sent their children to study, or to apply for asylum in Europe, so they could eventually travel back and forth and get better educations. But Azita assured her daughters that she would, of course, always return to them, to Kabul and to their family. Besides, she had no dreams of America. Her dreams included only Afghanistan. She had felt pleased with herself after giving her daughters that speech, thinking she had taught them a little something about character and national pride.

  But on one recent evening, Benafsha, the quieter of the twins, had suddenly spoken up after another suicide bombing not far from their house. She reminded Azita of the conversation about foreign countries and how she had said they would always stay in Afghanistan. “You made your choice, Mother,” Benafsha said. Now, none of them would ever leave.

  It was in that moment when Azita’s image of herself as a selfless patriot began to shift, replacing it with that of a selfish careerist. A sense of shame came over her. She was someone who would choose her country over her daughters, and they had always known it. She had not seen it herself until it was too late. She had taken a chance on Afghanistan with the new foreigners and had believed that it could get better. She had reached for something impossible, and she had been a fool to do it. Maybe it had always been unrealistic that Afghanistan would change much in her lifetime, and she had gambled away the lives of her daughters on it.

  “Are you still thinking of leaving?”

  “No. Never. I could never leave them,” Azita says. “But maybe I was very stupid before.”

  She must carry on for the sake of her parents, too. Her father’s decision to marry her off will stand in war or peace, whether she is in parliament or not, and regardless of her relationship with her husband.

  “I would like to meet him,” I say. “The man who holds all this power, always and from the beginning. Do you think he would speak to me?”

  “Probably no.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  THE FATHER

  Azita

  NO REGULAR AIRLINE flies to Azita’s home province, and the roads snaking up to the northwestern corner of Afghanistan are known to be riddled with homemade explosives and criminal gangs.

  Foreigners, on the other hand, can travel anywhere for free on UN flights that run on an ad hoc timetable based on when any of their more prominent officials need to take off. A ticket, or “travel authorization,” for Setareh, who holds an Afghan passport, comes at the price of my attending a half-day lecture at an air-conditioned UN office on the suffering of Afghan women. After that, we will spend the next day hanging around the United Nations’ private terminal at Kabul airport, a hangar filled with aid workers and diplomats where planes randomly take off outside.

  The women waiting to fly somewhere all look foreign-born, and all are in the very distinctive ethnic war-chic resort style rarely seen outside fortified expatriate compounds and never on regular Afghan women. Long, flowing silk tunics in light colors are paired with delicate, embroidered head scarves, slightly slipped back, Benazir Bhutto–style, allowing strands of expertly blow-dried and highlighted hair to escape. Exquisite antique Kuchi-nomad silver jewelry once made by hand for tribal weddings in the provinces clatters on wrists and necks. The standard male diplomat wardrobe is made up of different gradations of khaki. Some are are sockless in loafers and pair the pants with navy, gold-buttoned blazers. Most of the elegant foreigners carry small point-and-shoot cameras to document their work in the field. Their accompanying “body men” are about double the size of any diplomat, and carry German automatic weapons strapped onto their backs.

  A mid-level foreign aid worker can take in a salary of $15,000 per month, tax free. Plus various bonuses for “hardship,” which a posting like Afghanistan is considered to be. But the enthusiastic caravan that has rolled into Afghanistan in the past decade is not all about money, although that has certainly drawn more than a few. Many are young idealists looking for adventure. Others are seasoned bureaucrats who have seen
every war of the past three decades and signed up for yet another tour.

  There is the Balkan gang and those who used to dine together in Baghdad. They demonstrate their status by sharing stories of wars past with the brand-new Afghanistan experts from elite universities on the American East Coast. Just as the European colonialists before them, these current-day explorers live well before they return home with exotic tales of foreign lands.

  Decor inside the embassy compounds, air-conditioned by powerful military-grade generators, aims to showcase the best of each country’s culture and design. A Dane will recline on exquisite Scandinavian midcentury classics that were bubble-wrapped and shipped in secure containers from Copenhagen. The British offer the best-stocked bar in town at the queen’s outpost in Kabul, named “The Inn Fidel.” They are also known for some of the most elaborate costume parties, where in a favorite tradition of both historical and current-day European aristocracy, guests are thrilled to pose as someone else for an evening. American embassy workers can swim in a beautiful lap pool with a barbecue hut close by, where a trusted Afghan in a white chef’s hat will cook anything to country club perfection. Americans there will sometimes proudly proclaim that they haven’t set foot outside the compound since they were picked up at Kabul airport and won’t again until it’s time to return home. No need for that. The U.S. Embassy seems to be constantly expanding, and the grass truly is greener in the green zone, where water is never scarce. The dust inside the perimeter is swept away so diligently that the air feels easier to breathe than in the rest of Kabul, where thousands of children die each year from respiratory ailments caused by garbage bonfires, cars burning cheap gasoline, and the microbes spewing from open sewers.

  The benefits of being a foreigner in Afghanistan are well-known to those who get drunk together on Thursday nights around Kabul. No matter who they were in the outside world, or what social class they belonged to, in Kabul a foreigner instantly becomes a member of an upper, ruling class. Like any war zone, this is a place for personal reinvention, where a new, improved persona can be crafted, the past temporarily erased, as demands and social codes of the outside world are put on hold. Joining the expatriate set in Afghanistan is an effective disguise, and one that brings power and access.

  AFTER A DAY and a half spent waiting at this karavan serai, as an irritated Setareh dubs the hangar scene, I have tried everything from the kiosk of foreign and Afghan delicacies, and she has refused most of it. We conclude that we are not on anyone’s preferred passenger list, and that if we are to ever meet Azita’s father, we must concede defeat and make our own way to Badghis.

  So we fly to Herat on one of Afghanistan’s own local airlines and eventually, with some help by both Azita’s and Setareh’s relatives, we find an Afghan army helicopter crew willing to take us further into the land. As we arrive at the base in a faux-fur-lined taxi, we are met with a breakfast that appeals more to Setareh: sweet tea, chewy flatbread, and mulberry jam. The local commander cautions us that while he can take us into Badghis, we may not get out, since he is not planning on sending anyone back there for a while. But Setareh has already plotted our exit by road: She has gone out and bought two light blue burkas and tucked them into her black wheeled carry-on, smirking at my backpack once again. For our planned stay in Badghis, which is close to Iran, we have also gone shopping for some more black; Setareh is in what we come to translate as “Herati dress,” a very large sheet of dark fabric swept around her head that reaches all the way down to her shoes, making her look like a little friendly ghost with a serious face. I have opted for the full hijab, “Iranian style.” In the black head-to-toe cloak and tightly pinned black head scarf, plus sunglasses, I am all mind and no body. If even that.

  IN THE HELICOPTER we are seated on the floor in the glass bulb next to the pilots, with the earth moving underneath us.

  First pilot Azizi trained under the Russians. The Cyrillic letters inside the cockpit are an issue for the constant rotations of young Americans who arrive on the base to advance Azizi’s skills. After too many jumbled conversations over the radio, the Americans now allow him to be mostly silent on the radio once he is up in the air. They have provided him with a brand-new portable GPS to navigate; he proudly wears it strapped to his leg. As we hover over burned-yellow wheat fields and clusters of pistachio forests, he makes a point of not looking at it. He knows where he is going.

  Like Zahra’s pilot father, he is also a fan of the Americans. They are decent people. Their names are simple to pronounce, too: Bill. Joe. Hank. They trade stories about their kids and their families. Most are younger than Azizi, but he has made a few new friends. He is useful to them: He translates the Cyrillic letters on the dashboards inside the sturdy and reasonably reliable helicopters his division flies. He has tried to teach them the Russian technical terms he knows. They, in turn, try to teach him some in English. But many times, they have found that sounds and letters have no equivalent in the other language, so Afghan-American military partnership gets by using mostly “Ringlish” (Russian via Persian English) and “Pinglish” (the closest possible English versions of Persian words in Azizi’s Dari dialect).

  Americans have a different way of expressing themselves beyond words, too, Azizi has found. They are direct, detailed, and insistent with their ideas. Afghans prefer to be indirect. Bad news or an opinion that differs is seldom presented without some tiptoeing first—or is just left unspoken for each person to figure out on their own. By now, Azizi has learned how to behave when the Americans ask for something impossible. He does not want to seem uncollaborative, and he gathers Americans eventually find out what is possible or not anyway. So he always says yes. And “no problem.”

  As long as they let him get up in the air, he doesn’t really care who they are. He got along fine with the Russians; it just annoyed him slightly that they were always trying to push their political beliefs on him. You needed to be a party member to get ahead. Like most Afghans I have asked, he declines to say whether he actually joined the Communist party back then; it was a long time ago. He thinks he likes the Americans better though; they don’t try to talk politics with him. “They are just soldiers, like me.”

  When the Americans leave, he will fly for whoever comes next. The electrical sockets were changed in the hangar from two-pronged to three-pronged when the Americans came. If they are changed again, it doesn’t matter much to him. He can adapt.

  If not for the landscape moving below, he would seem to be making conversation at afternoon tea. As we slowly make our weightless way across the dried-out land that resembles the cracked heel of a foot, he steers straight toward every steep mountainside that rises up before us until the rotor blades are almost close enough to touch it. Only then, with just a minimal flick of the wrist, will he force his machine to rise up horizontally along the mountainside. Each time, he rewards himself with a wide grin as we reach an open sky.

  BIENVENIDO A QALA-E-NAW. The greeting is spray-painted across the sandbags, where we slowly descend into a swirl of dust. This is northwest Afghanistan, bordering on Iran, with its own elected Afghan governor. But it was the Spanish military who fixed up the modest airfield when they were assigned the Badghis province. They installed their “reconstruction team” in the small capital and unfurled the dark blue NATO flags alongside Spain’s yellow and red. No pole was left for the black, red, and green flag of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

  The helicopter finally lands about as elegantly as an overweight water bug. Our fellow passengers, all Afghan military officers in desert camouflage, with well-tended black mustaches, climb out. This is the desert land, complete with sand dunes and a few pine trees surrounding the mud houses leading into the city, with a cupcake-like turquoise mosque at its center.

  Before 2001, this could not even be called a city, says the governor’s aide who greets us carrying under his arm a pink notebook with pigtail cartoon characters. You take what you can get in terms of office supplies here.

  There ar
e no hotels, but he has agreed to host us in the governor’s guesthouse on the condition that we do not move around too much or let anyone know that women are staying there. As we drive into Qala-e-Naw, it still looks like more of a village, with scattered mud houses surrounded by low walls. Everything is small and brown, tone on tone with the desert itself. The main street counts six shops on each side, in one- or two-story buildings. There is a women’s market, where fully veiled or burka-clad women can shop in the company of other women only, while the men wait on the other side.

  On the men’s side, such items as spare car parts, used cell phones, and carpets are for sale. The women’s area mostly consists of vendors selling dry goods, children’s clothing, and wedding supplies. Brightly hued garlands of paper and nylon fabric hang outside in the sweeping dust-wind. Even though Iran is closer, almost everything is imported from Pakistan. The foreign American-led troops are stingy about letting Iranian imports through wherever they control the border. Here, the language I have come to know as Dari is called “Kabuli,” and a different, more Iranian-sounding Persian dialect, closer to Farsi, is spoken.

  Several UN agencies and the U.S. Agency for International Development have helped build what the governor calls a “very modern” place compared to how it looked ten years ago. Most people still get their drinking water from wells, but at least the wells are no longer contaminated. And most women still give birth at home, but at least the city has one midwife-in-training available for those who would welcome her. Tuberculosis, malaria, and diphtheria are still rampant in the province despite major improvements by the Spanish on garbage disposal and sanitation. Now, there are some small schools, a few clinics, and even a sewage system created by the Spanish equivalent of the army corps of engineers, who dug canals underground.