The Underground Girls of Kabul Read online

  She learned this quickly on the job: “A woman politician’s work is very different from a man’s. You are a politician during the day, and then when you reach the door of your house, you have to be a good mother and a housewife as well. I have to take care of my children: Do homework, cook for them, make dinner, and clean. Then I have to receive my guests and be a good host for them.”

  She cheers herself up as she cooks dinner for ten most nights of the week. “I compare myself to other political ladies in the world. We all have to work very hard and ignore those people who say we should not be here.”

  BY MIDNIGHT, SHE is finally alone again, in the same corner of the bedroom where she began her day. Only now she is in jeans, a short ponytail, and a loose tunic. She rubs Pond’s cold cream onto her face to remove the powder now alloyed with dust and oil from the gas burner on the kitchen floor. Without makeup, her face is softer, younger.

  Her dinner guests included eight men from Pakistan and their children, some of whom are now asleep on the floor in the other room. The guests were appropriately honored, both by the generous portions of meat served and by the hospitality extended to them by the men of the house: Mehran, barefoot in a crisp white peran tonban, seated next to her father, who wore an identical outfit. Glowing from the attention and excitedly chatting with the men gathered, Mehran also managed to follow a wrestling match on the corner television. They laughed together while Azita kept the serving plates heaped with rice and stew coming from the kitchen.

  “After five or ten minutes, they used to ask about my son, and the entire discussion was about why I don’t have a son. ‘We are sorry for you. Why you don’t try next time to have a son,’ they would say. And I want to stop this talking inside my home. They think you are weaker without a son. So now I give them this image.”

  “So they are all fooled by this? And nobody else knows?”

  Her family and relatives know. Some neighbors may have a clue, too. But no one has commented on it.

  “What if someone asks you outright whether Mehran is a boy or a girl?” I ask.

  “Then I don’t lie. But it almost never happens.”

  But if it became known to a wider circle? Would it shame her? And what of any danger to Mehran from religious extremists? Or just from some of the many who comment on how people should live their lives in accordance with Islam?

  None of that applies, according to Azita. Perhaps because the absolute need for a son trumps everything else, a disguised girl in Afghanistan, or any other collective secret, exists under the same policy as gays in the United States military used to do: “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

  Afghanistan has many other worries on its mind. A girl who grows up in boys’ clothing is not an affront—in fact, it only confirms the established order, in which men have all the privileges. And as Carol le Duc said: “Shared deceit at some point no longer constitutes deceit.”

  Like Carol le Duc and Dr. Fareiba have done, Azita gently hints at the possibility that I may be more caught up in questions of gender than she, or any Afghan, is. After all, she points out, we are just talking about a child. Why is it important to manifest her female gender, especially when it marks the little girl as a weaker, more constrained, child, of lesser value? Instead, just like Harry Potter when he dons his invisibility cloak, Mehran can move about freely in pants with a cropped haircut. A girl always stands out—she is a target, for which special rules and regulations apply.

  That Western idea of “being yourself” does not apply for adults here, either. In her eighteen-hour workdays, Azita too plays a role, keeping what she thinks of as her own persona under wraps:

  “Most of the time now, I am a politician. Not Azita.”

  “What is the other one like?”

  She rolls her eyes. “The other one is more fun. She is happy and she has more time to live in her own way. Not in the way other people want. People don’t look at her all the time. She is a better mother. In Afghanistan, you have to kill everything inside you and adapt yourself to society. It is the only way to survive.”

  “Do you think Mehran would have been turned into a boy if you had not been a politician?”

  “Honestly? No.”

  “But don’t you worry about Mehran? Don’t you think of what it’s like for her, and what will happen to her?”

  “I think of that every day. Every day I wonder if this is right.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE UNDERGROUND GIRLS

  IT IS SIMPLE MATH—if she is caught, no one eats. And every day she fears discovery.

  All that Niima is ordered to do, she does very quickly. She climbs to fetch store offerings from the top shelf. She dives under stacked crates of imported Pakistani oranges to pull out boxes of tea. She squeezes her small, flexible body between tightly packed bags of flour behind the counter. She tries never to look directly at customers. If they looked into her eyes, she imagines, they would see she is not a real boy.

  With her short hair and gray tunic, ten-year-old Niima plays her part perfectly. But her soft voice gives her away. That’s why she rarely speaks when she is Abdul Mateen, as she is mostly known outside the mud wall of her home in one of Kabul’s poorest neighborhoods, where an open sewer runs alongside cinder block houses. Niima attends school for two hours each morning in a dress and a head scarf. Then she returns to the house, changes into work clothes, and goes to work as a shop assistant in a small grocery store near the family’s house. On an average day, she brings home the equivalent of $1.30. It supports her Pashtun family of eight sisters and their mother.

  Niima poses as a boy purely for the survival of her family. There is nothing voluntary about it and her act hardly contains an element of freedom.

  At Niima’s house, shoes and sandals lying outside are separated from the inside by only a thin, frayed curtain. Niima’s father is an unemployed mason who is often away and spends most money he manages to get hold of on drugs, says Niima’s mother.

  It was the shopkeeper’s idea to turn Niima into a boy—the shopkeeper is a friend of the family—and she is a few years into her part-time boyhood now.

  “He advised us to do it. And he said she can bring bread for our home,” her mother explains.

  Niima could never work in the store as a girl, nor could her mother, even if she wanted to. It would be impossible for a Pashtun woman, according to the family’s rules. “It’s our tradition that women don’t work like this.”

  The relatives would be embarrassed. And her husband would never condone it.

  Niima displays no enthusiasm for being a boy. To her, it is hard work, with little upside. She would rather look like a girl. At home, she likes to borrow her sisters’ clothing. Every day she complains to her mother: “I’m not comfortable around the boys in the store.”

  Her mother consoles her, saying it will only be a few more years before she can change back into being a girl again. The family’s future survival is already mapped out: When Niima gets too old for working in the shop, her younger sister will take her place. And after that, the next sister.

  SHUBNUM’S TOO-EARLY transition to become a girl has already begun. The eight-year-old is still in a peran tonban, but her hair is being allowed to grow out. It was not supposed to happen until she turned thirteen, but her manner, her fits of giggles, and her long fluttery lashes made it impossible for her to pass any longer. When she was found out in the boys’ school she attended together with her older brother, the teachers did not object. But Shubnum had to endure plenty of teasing in class after the others guessed she was a girl.

  When I visit her mother, Nahid, in her two-room apartment close to Kabul University, Jack Bauer of 24 is torturing a suspected Muslim terrorist with the electrical current from a broken lamp on the grainy television. Shubnum and her brother watch intently. Their older sister, in a head scarf with a shy smile, stays in a corner, mostly looking down at her hands.

  Although Nahid has one son, circumstances dictated she needed another one. When her abus
ive husband of seventeen years asked her to cover herself completely and stay at home, Nahid chose to walk away with nothing. Her father struck a very unusual and costly deal with her husband at the time of the separation: Their family money would go to him in exchange for the children. Husbands otherwise have an absolute right to the children, which is why the divorce rate is close to zero in Afghanistan. With support from her family, Nahid moved to another part of the city and began her life anew. She found a job and an apartment. But as a single mother of three—which is almost unheard of in Kabul—she had to balance her family with an extra son, in order for them all to feel safer.

  As a divorcée, she was seen as a loose, available woman, risking threats and violent approaches by men, as well as plenty of direct and indirect condemnation by other women. As a woman with two sons, however, she is considered a slightly more respectable creature.

  It would have worked out well had Shubnum not been so reluctant and not so terminally girly. Each time she was taken to the barber for a haircut, she cried. Afterward, she would tug at her short hair to make it grow out faster, and at home, she would obsessively try on her older sister’s dresses.

  Eventually, Nahid gave up. She blames herself—perhaps she did not make being a boy alluring enough for Shubnum.

  When asked which gender she prefers, Shubnum is unhesitant. “A girl,” she responds, with a big smile and cocked head. She glances over at the television, now showing an intense performance of Indian bhangra dance. “So I can wear jewelry and dance.”

  Her wish will be granted. At her future wedding, if not before.

  SLOWLY, I HAVE BEGUN to drill through the layered secrets of Kabul in search of more girls of Mehran’s kind. Shubnum and Niima are two of the first I find. I locate them through Kabul’s plentiful maze of gossip, where firsthand information is rarely offered up at once, and only in face-to-face meetings.

  Officially, they do not exist, but one degree beyond the foreign-educated Kabul elite, many Afghans can indeed recall a former neighbor, a relative, a colleague, or someone in their extended family with a daughter growing up as a boy. At first, there are rarely names, and never much by way of an address. But the wealth of human knowledge embedded in a system of tight social control stands in place of a phone book, a database, and a map.

  With the help of Omar and Setareh, two young Afghan translators with few fears but an abundance of street smarts between them, I slowly craft chains of referrals, confidences, and introductions that over time begin to prove that more girls actually live as boys in and around Kabul. Many more.

  One lives “next to the third house where the tree was cut down.” Another is thought to be “on the first floor in the house without windows next to the bazaar.” Or “on the other side of the refugee camp, just up the road, inside the blue gate with barbed wire.” There is one in a certain middle school; another is thought to be in a particular neighborhood. Someone’s daughter has been known to play football on a field, and to help out in her father’s tailoring shop.

  In our search, we are often confused and at times completely lost, circling alleys and neighborhoods that always lack street signs for hours. But once we finally come upon the right family and discreetly inquire whether their son may possibly be a girl, an invitation for tea is usually extended by the ever-polite and hospitable Afghans, regardless of whether they live in elegant villas or in houses made from tarps and mud. After lengthy introductions, always with some fine diplomacy by Omar or Setareh, often with questions about Sweden and my own family—particularly about my father—and many refills of tea, we are permitted to meet and speak to the family’s made-up son.

  Setareh and I soon begin to challenge each other on spotting the common traits of the girls in disguise. Some are given away by softer features. Or the occasional giggle. Others are show-offs, trying a little too hard with the boyish attitude and displays of aggression. But most often, we recognize the steady, challenging gaze, as though we had a secret in common. It happens that a little boy will give either of us a sly smile, out on the street or in school, only to later, in private or with her parents, confirm that she is indeed a little different from the crowd she moves with.

  Although none of the girls chose their boyhood voluntarily, most say they enjoy their borrowed status. It all depends on what they get to do with it. For each child, it boils down to perks versus burdens. Those who, like Mehran, are part of upper- or middle-class families, are often their families’ token of prestige and honor, thriving on speaking up at school and playing violent outdoor games in the neighborhood.

  Others, in poor families, are broken down by forced child labor, just as the actual boys in the same position often are. “This can be an awful place to be a woman. But it’s not particularly good for a man, either,” Carol le Duc is fond of observing. Among street children in the merchant business, selling chewing gum, polishing shoes, or offering to wash car windows on the streets, some are actual boys, and others are girls in disguise. They are all part of Kabul’s underbelly and, to those who pass them by, mostly just invisible.

  I even find that there is a name for those children who are not actually here. The colloquialism for the child who is not a son or a daughter is bacha posh. Together with a translator, I settle on that spelling in the Roman alphabet, as there are no existing written references. It literally translates as “dressed like a boy” in Dari. In Pashto, this third kind of child can also be referred to as alakaana. That the term exists and is well-known indicates that these children are not unusual. Nor is it a new phenomenon.

  At times in our search for the bacha posh we get it entirely wrong, approaching the wrong family or arriving at the wrong house in the wrong neighborhood. And at times, we find something quite different from what we were looking for.

  THERE IS NO electricity in the house at the compound built for handicapped war veterans near Kabul airport. The sun set several hours ago, and in one of the family’s small, dark rooms, twelve-year-old Esmaeel has been introduced as “the only son” among ten siblings. Esmaeel has dark hair, bushy eyebrows, and even a hint of black hair on his upper lip. There is nothing feminine about him, and I feel both impatient and confused. We may simply have been misinformed about this family.

  But it would be rude to leave now that we have been invited in, so we sit for tea while Esmaeel’s mother tells her story. She moves slowly, supporting herself on a homemade crutch wrapped in pieces of cloth. She has only one leg. The other was lost in a bomb explosion in 1985. Her ten children, ranging in age from one to twenty, gather around her on the thin carpet covering the cement floor. The eldest grew up under the Taliban, and like many girls that age she is illiterate. She is far less confident than her younger sisters, who have attended school since 2002 and excitedly speak of becoming doctors or lawyers when they grow up.

  But their mother hushes them. All she wants to talk about is Esmaeel. He is the most intelligent of them all, and whatever money the family can spare will go toward his higher education. The girls will have to wait their turn, if there’s anything left. Esmaeel is her “light,” his mother says. “I don’t want to make any difference between my children, but I know that Esmaeel will reach a high position in society.”

  Esmaeel came to the family through divine intervention, she explains. When her sixth daughter was born, this desperate mother decided that the child should be presented to the world as a son. She told everyone her new little girl was, in fact, her firstborn son. The made-up baby boy held no practical purpose for the family as an infant. But she held a magical one. Her mother had been told by friends and neighbors that if she were to turn her girl into a boy, it would bring her good luck. Good luck, in this case, was a real son. The maneuver had helped many families before her: Through visual manifestation, when a woman looks at the image of a male child every day, her body will eventually conceive a son.

  With that, the coin finally drops: Esmaeel is not a girl disguised as a boy—he is the family’s only son. Telling her st
ory of giving birth to a son after dressing a daughter as a boy for two years, the mother looks immensely pleased. Her sixth daughter, who had been a bacha posh, died shortly after her third birthday, but she had fulfilled a greater purpose.

  Trying to grasp this new and additional motif for turning a girl into a boy, I shift my position on the floor. The room goes silent, indicating that we have once again entered the realm where my kind of logic or science is no longer valid.

  “Okay. But how can you know this works—”

  Esmaeel’s mother cuts me off with a quick gesture toward her son.

  “Look at him. You can see it for yourself.”

  “OF COURSE.” IT is one of the most common ways to produce a son, Dr. Fareiba confirms when when I locate her in Kabul later that week. Certainly not as foolproof as her tips and tricks, but an oft-employed method in the villages throughout Afghanistan, where there is no access to Dr. Fareiba’s level of expertise.

  She is in fine form on this day, leading a workshop at a run-down guesthouse in the Shar-e-Naw neighborhood for dozens of Afghan medical workers from the country’s far-flung provinces.

  High on the agenda is the issue of breast-feeding: A problem has arisen in the provinces where aid organizations have been distributing milk powder. The original recipients of the milk powder, the poorest women, resell it at markets, enabling those of slightly better means to buy it, considering it a sign of wealth not to breast-feed. In an attempt to fix an aid initiative gone wrong, Dr. Fareiba and her colleagues are trying to reverse the trend and talk women into at least trying to breast-feed their newborns for a few months.

  Kabul is having an early spring, and the female participants have retired to a room at the back with two chubby sofas and a plastic fan on the floor pushing the air around. The male health workers eat elsewhere. Dr. Fareiba invites us to join the lunch, where eight female Afghan doctors and midwives from eight different provinces are passing around watermelon slices on glass plates. As I sit down with Setareh, they all want to offer us the best bites. Predictably, the oldest woman gets to serve us, and offers an entire pile. But there is something I want more than watermelon: I wonder if the bacha posh are all around Afghanistan, in their provinces too?