The Underground Girls of Kabul Page 29

  THE GOVERNOR’S GUESTHOUSE is pink, and with its peach-colored curtains and soft carpets, it’s the most luxurious accommodation in town. Spotty electricity arrives for a few hours every day, and there are indoor bathrooms, albeit without running water. We are given a small room, littered with the belongings of two male guests who, by gender discrimination in our favor, are told to get out and sleep on the roof instead. On top of the makeshift beds are mattresses with the manufacturer’s plastic wrapping still intact. Setareh fishes out her shiny blue burka and spreads it out over the bed before she lies down, bouncing right back up again after inhaling the odor left by previous guests who have slept in the 100-degree summer.

  We will spend days waiting in this little room with pink walls and a peach glow through the curtains.

  Everybody seems to know of Azita’s father, as he is still one of the very few residents of this province with a university degree. But we are informed that he is old and tired, and has no interest in discussing times past.

  In the meantime, our efforts to lie low and dress appropriately—Setareh in her sheet and I in my black cloak, hair completely covered and my eyes darkened with kohl that no amount of baby wipes will remove at night—render some unexpected praise from our housemates. After a few days, Setareh overhears the men staying in the room next to us. Forgoing all courtesy phrases and looking down as we pass them, at all times entirely mute and with most of our faces covered, we seem to have met their approval. “The Iranian and the Hazara,” they conclude, “are very good girls. Very covered, and very shy.”

  Our modesty has appealed so much to one man that he decides he likes us both “very much.” For a moment, he ponders whether to ask each of us to pose for a cell phone picture with him. But it would probably be too forward, he tells his friend, and not something the good and proper girls would ever agree to.

  After translating the mumblings next door, Setareh and I declare success for my efforts to become a woman. After removing my body, my voice, and most of my face, I have finally arrived.

  THE VILLAGE WHERE Azita’s mother-in-law still lives is about ten minutes by car from the city center, on a small road where a group of Kuchi nomads—a mostly Pashtun minority—have settled, their red and green fabric tents shaking in the wind, and small children herding bony goats. A narrow bridge sprouts from a hillside, which Azita is credited with convincing the Spanish military to help reinforce. The village is said to have a thousand houses, but we do not count more than a few dozen on the small hill. There are a few small fields of green where farmer families live in tents or under tarps with UNICEF logos and where, when we pass, the women turn away and hide their faces with their large chadori sheets. Those tarps are for sale at the market, just like the seeds handed out to women by another NGO. Eggplants are budding in one field, where Afghan pop music unexpectedly streams out from a transistor radio. Two boys play naked in a small water stream.

  Our driver, who has on enough cologne to kill the entire population of the backseat, takes us to a metal gate. The scent wafting from the car competes with the stench from an open sewer that hits as soon as we enter the small compound.

  This is what poverty looks like.

  Small barefoot girls in synthetic dresses flock around us. Two teenage girls are holding babies whose faces are spotted with lazy flies. They are the grown-ups. One girl looks at me from under a mass of tousled dirty hair and remains silent. She may be around six, but she acts like an older sister to the others. For the next two hours, she will just keep looking at us, the whites of her eyes contrasting with her darkly tanned skin.

  The mother-in-law’s one-story house is the color of dried mud without a single tree to protect it from the blinding sunlight. Mud and straw, the least expensive building materials, provide natural insulation through all seasons; they are organic and practical compared to the cinder block houses that the military is fond of putting up as aid projects. Afghans often reject those; they feel like freezers in the winter and bake ovens in summer.

  An exhausted-looking goat is tied to a pin in the stone wall inside a fenced area just outside. Another small patch of land is dedicated to the cultivation of kitchen vegetables. It is surrounded by barbed wire to prevent animals and children from raiding the tomatoes, potatoes, and onions. From above, it all looks dead. Food is cooked outside, over an open fire. A small naan oven is built into a corner. There is no electric heat. In the winter, firewood is used to heat the house. The wood is collected in the summer from the bottom of the hill, about a twenty-minute walk away.

  A small, hunched-over woman steps out. The girls instantly part to let her through. She is dressed all in white, with a thin, white head scarf wrapped like a turban around her head to protect her from the sun. Her face looks much like how the desert appeared from our helicopter—a burnt shade of brown, cut by the ancient marks of riverbeds.

  She embraces me and kisses me on both cheeks with a stream of respectful greetings. Setareh and I greet her in return. On her left shoulder, a set of tiny keys is attached with a safety pin. They make a small rattling sound as she moves. “I found them on the road. I like to wear them for decoration. Like jewelry,” she explains when I ask what they are for.

  Her other son, Azita’s brother-in-law, has two wives. His first, who lacks most of her teeth, is the mother of seven daughters. His second wife is fourteen and has just given birth to a son, the mother-in-law’s first grandson.

  This recent marriage happened according to the tribal exchange tradition, so the family did not have to pay for her. In order to secure a new wife who might bear a son, the family made a trade with the neighbor, where a thirteen-year-old daughter was offered to the neighbor’s family. She is now married and pregnant by the neighbor’s fifteen-year-old son, who is proudly referred to as a Koran student. Like other Koran students here, he is instructed by an illiterate mullah on what the religious texts say, since he himself is not able to read or write.

  Inside, all the cupboards in the kitchen have padlocks. A few large storage containers and a glass cabinet with dishes are also locked. We are shown into the main salon, a small room painted in a shiny turquoise color. A photo of Azita hangs on the wall, surrounded by a fuchsia paper garland from when she first celebrated her election to parliament. This is the room Azita’s children would live in with their mother were they to return to their father’s house. We sit on the dirt floor and exchange more greetings. The low, bulky door is pushed almost shut so the family’s women and children cannot enter. We are in what currently serves as a guest receiving room, and only the mother-in-law and her son are allowed here.

  The women remain outside the door, eagerly trying to get a peek at the visitors. The children pile on top of one another to make the most of the thin strip of visibility through the door opening. Every now and then, a small child tries to force the door open, only to be pushed away by her grandmother. Azita’s brother-in-law brings in a special treat: a square box with liquid in it and a large table fan. He places the acid battery in the window and hooks up the fan. Moments later, Setareh and I are ensconced in a thick stream of warm air blowing straight into our eyes, and we must raise our voices to be heard over the noise of the engine.

  Through vivid gestures and rapid speech, showing her few remaining front teeth, Azita’s mother-in-law describes how she runs the house: “It would be impossible for everyone if I were not here. Yes, I can’t leave the house. I need to stay here and take care of my son and my grandson. And my son needs to work on the plantation outside.”

  Being the oldest surviving member of the family, she gets to advise everyone on how to do things. How old exactly?

  “I’m seventy or eighty. I don’t really know.” Her son offers another estimate: “She’s eighty-five or ninety.” In any case, she is by far the longest-living woman in her village, they believe. Since men work with the animals, the women run the household, under her direction. Some of her granddaughters go to school for a few hours each day, but other than that, no
ne of them are allowed to leave the house.

  She loves Azita.

  She says it over and over, with great emphasis. Her oldest son reaffirms it: Azita is the family’s great pride. They are now known in the village as “the husband family” of the powerful politician in Kabul. People treat them with more respect and admiration now. The family is of course sad Azita does not live with them anymore, but they are well aware she has more important things to do. They always knew she was destined for greater things. Hopefully, she will return to them one day, with her daughters. It is a burden to her husband, though, to lead the stressful life of Kabul, but they understand it is a sacrifice he is making. Those same statements come back in response to almost every question we ask, before we are ushered out for a tour of the humble premises by Azita’s brother-in-law, who feels his elderly mother should no longer be bothered: They both agree that Azita’s success is thanks to her husband.

  Later, we make our way on the narrow road back to town, and we pass a little girl who is wandering alone on the road. She is barefoot and seems unable to walk straight, her small frame moving unsteadily back and forth along the roadside. The shoulder straps on her dress are untied, hanging down from her naked torso. The driver circles his finger in the air: She is sick in the head. Nobody cares how she dresses or that she is out walking alone. She will never marry anyone.

  “DID YOU SEE the keys?” Azita’s brother asks when we meet him in the trailer where he works on a USAID-funded project to convert Taliban sympathizers in the province by offering them cash payments.

  He emits a hollow laugh.

  Those keys were the very thing his sister’s life revolved around for many years. She could not even drink a glass of water, no less eat, without access to those keys, which came only with her mother-in-law’s permission. It makes him angry to talk about them. He was the one who went to check on Azita each Friday. The trip took one hour by foot, and forty-five minutes by donkey. And at the age of ten, he was the one who tried to challenge his brother-in-law by refusing to leave so his sister would not be harmed again. When he was twelve, he started spending the night in the village, so he could visit her on two consecutive days.

  “And you think they are poor?”

  He smacks his tongue after hearing my account of the village. “That family has both money and land! But it is how villagers live.”

  When he smiles, showing all his teeth, he looks just like Azita. His eyes glimmer just like hers, and his speech is only an octave or two deeper. And just like his sister’s, his fluent English is self-taught. He is twenty-four and the only son of his parents. But he is not on speaking terms with them; he married a Pashtun woman they did not approve of. He does not want children, either. Why would he want that, in this society, with its impossible rules to live by for both men and women, he asks me.

  As a son, he has not been able to please his parents more than his sisters; quite the opposite. Before his marriage, he had refused his father’s dictated career path of becoming a mullah. During the Taliban period, young boys were obliged to study under religious leaders, and to Azita’s brother, those years felt completely wasted. His father was still disappointed; the path to a future with some recognition would come only through studying religion, he told his son. It would help not just him, but the entire family, he had argued. It was the beginning of a rift between them that only widened in the years after the Taliban left.

  He expected more from an educated man like his father. But maybe the wars got to him in a way that changed him for good. When their father was young, he was an idealist who wanted to take on and change the world, but he was struck down. He was said to be “the most liberal of everyone” back then. Azita’s brother does not hesitate to say out loud what I have suspected for a while now: “Everybody here knows he was a Communist. It’s not a secret. Today, he just says it was something in his youth.”

  Azita’s father’s joining the party at that time explains how he came by the university job, and how his daughter attended elite schools. And later, why his library was burned and the family had to flee from Kabul. It is also the reason why Azita does not want to involve her father too much in her politics—he was aligned with other foreigners, who are not appreciated by the new ones she is currently aligned with. Nor by her Afghan constituents.

  It makes their journeys eerily similar, and perhaps typical for many Afghans of these two war generations.

  Azita is the “collaborator,” as her father was in his time. “Communists” were viewed as those who sold their country to the Russians, similar to how Azita has been part of a foreign-backed government. Her father placed his trust and loyalty in those who promised to reform the country; he bet everything on it. When those ideas were shut down and the foreigners left, after his family’s life fell apart, he was filled with regret and distrust.

  “She is just like him,” Azita’s brother says, as if to confirm my train of thought. “She is her father’s daughter. Anything she could do to make him proud she has always done.”

  And just like her father was, she will be disappointed, her brother predicts. When he travels to the capital, he wears jeans and a leather jacket. That would raise too many eyebrows and might even be dangerous in Badghis, where he sticks to the flowing white peran tonban he detests. In his view, Afghanistan has dark days ahead.

  “I used to cry when the Afghan flag was raised. But just look at my sister’s situation—that political game. The internationals have been playing a game with us, too. When they leave, there will be a civil war, after just this short time of peace that we have had now.”

  Azita’s brother predicts she, too, has too much faith in the political process, just as their father once did. Kabul’s elite has always aligned itself with whichever foreigners pull into town, and, eventually, Afghans who stay pay a price when those foreigners leave. Those who can will leave the country, and will again be replaced by those with more conservative values. And there will be consequences for Azita, too—the threat against her will only increase once the foreigners leave. She will likely never try to separate from her husband; her brother is sure of it. She would not do it to her parents, nor to her children.

  But, he says, “Every human has her limits.”

  ONE OF THE most prominent families in town is about to marry off another daughter.

  The price for Azita was $1,000 and some land. The price for her three-years-younger sister was set to $4,000.

  Now, thanks to Azita’s status, the family’s stock has risen, and a daughter of the house fetches one of the highest prices of any bride of Badghis. The asking price for Azita’s third sister, Anita, has been met at $14,000.

  Preparations at Azita’s parents’ house have been going on for months now, with cars shuttling between Herat and Qala-e-Naw. An entire room of the house is dedicated to the bride’s loot: Brand-new pots, pans, and plastic containers are hidden under a large blanket. Decorations have been brought from Herat, and pastel-colored garlands and paper napkins are stored in a large box. In the garden sit five large shipping containers from Pakistan, now emptied of their contents. Few expenses are spared in the wedding preparations, and the future husband is paying for everything. Azita’s father has also contributed several gifts: A double bed. A washing machine. A dishwasher. An electric heater. Cooking gas.

  At twenty-six, Anita is not a young bride, but she has some education and works as a teacher. She lives here with her parents in one of Qala-e-Naw’s best houses on an avenue-like street, where high iron doors with ornaments open onto a garden of well-tended red and white roses. A small, simpler house sits to the right, next to the larger, white-painted main house with stately entrance pillars. High palm trees shade the big house entirely. Its greatest luxury, an indoor bathroom, is said to be the envy of the neighborhood. Not even the governor’s mansion has that. The toilet is still outside, but there is running water in the house, in a white and yellow porcelain washbasin. Thick wall-to-wall carpets in soft pastel colors soak up any
noise, and heavy brocade curtains seem to keep the desert sand out, making the indoor air easier to breathe. Azita has mentioned, not without bitterness, that her parents collect a healthy income from their old apartment in Kabul’s Macroyan neighborhood. Her mother also runs a kindergarten school.

  The lady of the house is Azita’s mother, Siddiqua.

  She strides toward us at the entrance, in a sheer white head scarf and a long brown cotton jacket and skirt. The whole family is busy with the wedding preparations, she tells us. Very busy indeed. But they can see us for a brief moment, since we have traveled far. Azita’s mother is striking, with a sharp nose and high cheekbones. She has a few gray strands blending into her dark hair, the same color as her thick eyebrows. As we sit down for cardamom tea and imported chocolates in shiny wrappers, Siddiqua remarks on how she, of course, finds it an honor, but a bit curious, that someone would travel all this way to speak about her oldest daughter.

  Is there any chance we might see Azita’s father as well? I wonder.

  She shakes her head. He is a man of his own mind, and he is not always in the mood for visitors.

  How long might we be in Badghis? In polite code, Setareh explains that we are in no hurry and will remain for as long as we need to. In even more polite code, Siddiqua in return assures us that she will welcome us every day, without guarantees of a meeting with the patriarch himself.

  Her daughter Anita joins us. She is young and a little shy, but proud to be at the center of her parents’ attention as a bride to be. Her bushy eyebrows, which have grown together in the middle, will soon be plucked to thin strands for her wedding. Anita has been engaged for six months now. So far, there has been no direct conversation with her husband-to-be, nor has she spent any time alone with him.

  “Afghan girls go blind into their marriage,” she jokes.