The Underground Girls of Kabul Read online

  They were to be beaten out of her.

  THE FIRST BLOW came as a surprise to Azita. She had never seen her father beat her mother, and she had rarely been slapped as a child. Now, her husband would use a wooden stick or a metal wire, when one was available, for regular preemptive beatings without a specific cause, just to make sure there would be no arguing with his mother. Sometimes, he just used his fists.

  “On the body. On the face. I tried to stop him. I asked him to stop. Sometimes I didn’t.”

  “And sexually?”

  Azita goes silent.

  “It is not called rape in Afghanistan if your husband forces himself on you,” she says. “People would think you are a stupid woman if you call it that.”

  A woman’s body is always available to her husband, not only for procreation, but for recreation as well, since male sexuality is seen as a good and necessary thing. If a wife does not submit, the husband could feel frustrated and look elsewhere, the thinking goes, which would then endanger the fundament of a family and with that society as a whole. Predominantly Christian countries did not recognize marital rape as illegal, either, until fairly recently, as one of the original purposes of marriage itself was to legalize sex. In the United States, marital rape was not criminalized in all states until 1993; in the United Kingdom, 1991.

  Early on in her marriage, after the physical beating had begun, to everyone’s relief, Azita became pregnant. With that, she had taken the first step toward fulfilling her purpose. Expecting a son, the family left her alone as she grew bigger. “Look at her—she is so fat and healthy. Surely, she will have a son,” they said.

  Azita was grateful for the semblance of peace. She, too, prayed for a son.

  Delivering the twin girls was not only a disappointment; Azita had almost made a mockery of the family. Azita’s brother-in-law had also only fathered girls; it was as if the family was cursed. The one consolation was that the premature twins might not live long.

  Not even Azita felt any love for her daughters at first. It was a different emotion that made her fight for her tiny newborns: pity. The doctor who had come from town offered no congratulations when she examined the twins after a few days. They still had little chance of making it, she decided. She turned to Azita and said, simply, “I am sorry.”

  Azita accepted the doctor’s prognosis, but being unable to breast-feed, she still begged her mother-in-law for some milk from one of the cows. After Azita offered to pay for the milk, which her mother-in-law argued could have been sold for a profit, she was able to spoonfeed her two daughters. Slowly, their condition improved. After two months, they smiled a little, and that’s when Azita began to love them. They became her reason for living in those first years of marriage.

  When Azita’s younger brother came to check on her on behalf of their parents, she tried to be upbeat and assure him it was not so bad. She hoped he would bring their parents good news, not making them think of her as a quitter. It was only when her father, Mourtaza, came to visit that the veneer cracked. She told him she hated her life. When he showed no reaction, her fury grew in a way that she had never dared to show her father before. As he walked out the door to leave, she followed and screamed at him from the doorstep: “Thank you very much! Because of you, I am suffering every day. You told me to educate myself. I did, and now I am treated worse than a donkey, or a cow. You did this.”

  Mourtaza looked at her in silence. Then he spoke. “Yes. I did this to you. I am so sorry.”

  It was the only time she had seen her father cry.

  IN CURRENT-DAY KABUL, when Mehran returns home from school in the late afternoon, her special snack is already set out on the kitchen counter: two oranges on a plate, with a little knife to peel them. She attacks the oranges in a frenzy, and then, her hands still sticky, she crawls up onto her mother’s lap. The goal is to convince Azita to release her laptop so the sisters can watch a film. While her sisters smile as they gently make a request, Mehran is loud and insistent. Her right ear sports a large Band-Aid, after a failed attempt to pierce herself with a needle inspired by the male Bollywood action hero Salman Khan, who wears just one earring.

  “He is very much a boy right now,” Azita mutters, trying to hush Mehran while she is on the phone. “The other day I came home, and he was trying to take apart my computer, saying he was looking for the games inside.” She laughs. “Mehran is not like the girls. He is my naughty one.”

  Azita caresses her daughter’s arm while switching between two cell phones and three languages. “I will try,” she tells one caller. “I will call the principal and discuss it with him.” A colleague has had a child expelled from school and asks that Azita pull some strings. There are some things she won’t do: suggest young unmarried girls as wives for constituents or their children, for example. She never says “no” outright but will always take time to explain that she may not be entirely suited to help with some tasks.

  Azita’s daughters spend this afternoon like most others—in frustrated boredom between the apartment’s yellow walls, watching Indian television or favorites Hannah Montana and Harry Potter on DVD. They will raise the volume, as well as the level of bickering, as each hour slowly passes. Mehran needs to do her homework, and until it is done, the girls have been told no one goes outside. When the twins find a pirated Tajik CD with pop music under Azita’s desk and begin to dance, Azita becomes worried. The neighbors might hear, and a parliamentarian’s family can’t be suspected of listening to something like that.

  Azita loves to dance, but she does not do it often. Dancing falls into the same category as poetry for a woman—it equals dreaming, which may inspire thoughts about such banned topics as love and desire. Any woman reading, writing, or citing poetry is a woman who may harbor strange ideas about love and romance in her head, and thus is a potential whore. When Azita once posted a poem on her Facebook page, she immediately received comments suggesting she was inappropriate.

  Though the sun has already begun to set, Azita decides to allow the girls an hour of outside play, on the condition that they stay within her range of vision from the window. The four girls almost fall over one another as they slip on their sandals and tumble down the stairs and into the small yard. The neighborhood crew of two older boys and a cadre of smaller children are already there, all in bright-colored clothing emblazoned with cartoon characters. No other girls of Benafsha and Beheshta’s age are present. Allowing young girls outside is uncommon, even in less conservative neighborhoods, and Azita’s ten-year-old twins may be able to go, at most, three more years without head scarves. Their father has let it be known that he would prefer they cover themselves already now.

  On the grass, a few boys toss a weathered football between them, and when the ice cream man comes cycling by with his cart, its one speaker playing a monotonous little melody, the scene is momentarily peaceful.

  Benafsha and Beheshta do not envy Mehran, they assure me. Why would they want to play football and get dirty like Mehran? Scream and yell and fight with the boys? Mehran may be their much-cuddled younger sister who rules the family with her temper, but they would not want to trade places with her. With Mehran’s boyhood, she has become the most spoiled child of the family. Or perhaps, as the baby of the family, she always was. The twins only know they have a much harder time extracting money from their father, who seems to give Mehran anything she asks for. To the twins, he appears to listen more attentively when Mehran speaks and to laugh a little louder at her jokes.

  In eight-year-old middle child Mehrangis’s view, on the other hand, Mehran absolutely has the better deal. Mehrangis is not included in the twins’ giggly camaraderie, where they always have each other’s backs, and she receives less attention for her appearance. She reveals a proposal she recently made to her parents: “They say I am a little bit fat, so I told my mother that maybe it was best they make me a boy, too, since I am not pretty.”

  But her parents denied her wish to cross over to boyhood. Mehrangis had actually been
her father’s first choice for bacha posh, but since she is older and would have had to become a woman sooner, they decided against it. Mehran would last them longer as a son. Mehrangis shrugs her shoulders when she tells the story; it didn’t happen for her, and that’s just the way it is. She knows she is not considered as charming or as cute as her older sisters. But because Mehran goes as a boy, at least no one talks about her being fat or not pretty enough.

  For Mehran, there is no need to play well behaved, adorable, or pleasing. There is no expectation of grace or adoring smiles. When I take pictures of the girls, or when they take pictures of one another with my camera, Benafsha and Beheshta strike well-rehearsed poses, pouting their lips and batting big flirty eyelashes, sometimes pointing fingers at each other and swirling their arms as they perform a little Bollywood-style dance routine. At times Mehrangis attempts to emulate them, but it mostly earns her mockery. Mehran goes in the exact opposite direction—looking angry, staring into the camera, hands on her hips. When she does smile, it is a big grin, showing off the large gap between her two front teeth. Her clothes barely hold together at times, especially after she has been rolling around outside for a few hours. And she is the biggest eater in the family, after her father.

  Benafsha pulls my sleeve. She wants to say something, but we must move away from the others. We move closer to the wire fence toward the road, and she says it quickly, her voice low and her face down.

  “Two of my friends call her a girl. They know I have a sister and not a brother.” Not only that: “She fights a lot. The boys, the older neighbors’ boys, they say ‘You are a girl.’ She tells them ‘No, I am a boy.’ But they know.”

  The twins try their best to comfort Mehran when it happens, Benafsha says. But sometimes she becomes too upset, and they do not know what to do. Certainly, Mehran annoys the twins at times, but what upsets them more is when other children gossip about her.

  “She was quiet before,” Benafsha says. “Now she’s naughty, and she fights. Now, she cries a lot. When we go to sleep I ask her ‘Why do you cry?’ She says, ‘Because they say I am a girl.’ ”

  Luckily, Benafsha feels, it will all be over soon. In a few years, Mehran will have to change back into being a girl. They all know it—their mother has told them several times. At some point soon, whatever privileges Mehran now enjoys will end.

  Not sure what to say, I look up at the building. Three windows are full of faces wrapped in head scarves, smiling and waving down at us. The girls are too old—too close to puberty—to be allowed outside.

  WHEN A STORM arrived from over the mountains to her small village in Badghis, Azita used to imagine the clouds came from Kabul. As a child, she had been scolded by her mother for running around in rainstorms and getting sick. In those early years as a married woman, she would stand on the doorstep of the village house, her eyes closed, and let the rain pour over her face. In her mind, she would go up to the locked gates at the end of the yard. She would open them, and just keep walking.

  It would be years before she began to dream of a big future again, but with time, she extracted permission to do more things beyond caring for her children. By teaching neighboring women to cook the exotic dishes she had learned to make in Kabul, she gained a reputation as the mashed-potato lady. Based on her preparatory studies for medical school back in Kabul, in Badghis, she also began receiving villagers for small health care needs. Volunteering for the Red Crescent, she administered shots to children and diagnosed the most common illnesses. Villagers paid what they could—often nothing, but sometimes a few onions or tomatoes, even a chicken. Most of the time, Azita used them as trade with her mother-in-law, in return for fresh milk from the family’s cow for her daughters. She also taught basic writing and reading in Dari to any girl in the neighborhood who would come over, under the guise of reading the Koran.

  WHEN THE UNITED States, the United Kingdom, France, and Australia launched the attack in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, it was a direct message to Azita that her world might open up again. As the Taliban leadership crumbled, she began an attack of her own, to convince her husband that the family should leave the village and move to the provincial capital of Badghis. In Qala-e-Naw, she would be able to work now that the Taliban was no longer in power, and the family could make a better life from that income. Her husband had already invested in a small street stall that sold chewing gum and phone cards, but profits were not enough to sustain them. If Azita were allowed to work, he would no longer need to labor in the family’s small plot of land, she argued. She knew there would be ways to make money now that she could go outside.

  Eventually he agreed to leave his mother’s house behind, on the condition that Azita would support the family. They moved into a borrowed house, sharing it with another family. In the beginning, food was scarce. Benafsha and Beheshta still remember the luxury of tasting biscuits from a bakery for the very first time when their grandfather brought them as a gift.

  Azita quickly lined up two jobs: During the day, she would teach in a middle school, and in the evenings, she offered even more classes for those girls who had been left illiterate during the years of war and Taliban rule. By now, Azita had three children of her own who came with her or stayed with neighbors when she worked.

  But the real opportunities, she realized, lay with the foreigners.

  She took it upon herself to learn some English—memorizing twenty words a day—and within a few months, she landed a third job as a translator for a German aid organization. They offered her the most she had ever made—$180 per month. It was enough to turn the family’s life around completely, and almost overnight, they moved several steps up society’s ladder. As one of the few women with an education in her province, Azita was well served by the influx of foreigners and cash that came with a wartime economy. She soon could even dangle the prospect of a house of their own before her husband. She was determined to make their marriage work, too, and once out from under her mother-in-law, they did get along better.

  As a fourth enterprise, Azita expanded her health services in the evenings.

  There was still very little health care available, and even though Azita was rarely able to charge her patients, her reputation slowly built in the province, where people would travel from afar to see her for a shot, or to have their children seen by her. She also held preventive health seminars, where she taught simple things, such as the benefits of washing hands, and washing vegetables before eating them. Slowly, she built on her standing in the community, and for the UN-mandated 2002 emergency loya jirga meeting, where a transitional government after the Taliban would be agreed upon, Azita was elected as one of the representatives from Badghis province.

  The Kabul meeting, where Azita carried her seven-month-old daughter Mehrangis on her hip to negotiations, offered a taste of what she had once imagined her life should have been. More than two thousand delegates from all around Afghanistan gathered for several weeks and Azita was surrounded by those with ambitions similar to hers. The idea of helping to build a new society—one where her daughters would not have their dreams crushed by authoritarian regimes and war—seemed perhaps less of a calling and more of a responsibility she should take on. The childhood dream of becoming a doctor would mean going back to school, and as she now had a family to support, she needed full-time work. As women were to be allowed into Afghan politics, it held the promise of an area where she could revive that old dream of making an impact, of becoming a leader.

  Three years later, after getting her degree from a teaching academy in Badghis while working for a United Nations office as a translator, a friend offered to lend her the two hundred dollars needed to register to run for parliament in the first national elections. At twenty-eight, and now a mother of four, Azita decided it was more money than she could afford to repay if she lost. She simply had to win.

  AMID THE ENDLESS cement, blast-protecting sandbags, and dust of Kabul, the desire for beauty can become overwhelming. To those who make the fiv
e-hour journey past the infamous Bagram air base, where Afghans have been tortured to death by U.S. forces, through several Taliban-controlled areas, and down a dirt road where small homemade bombs frequently disrupt traffic, an untouched fairy-tale world is said to open up.

  On this Friday, Azita has sent her husband and the girls off to that place for a picnic outing. While they are gone, she will rest. As she waves good-bye to her family from the third-floor window, she sees that Mehran has taken the front seat next to her father. The older girls, bubbly with excitement, share the backseat as long lines of cars head out of town early in the morning. Friday is the day for prayer, but it is also a day off that families can spend together. Going on a “picnic” is a much appreciated way for less conservative Afghans to meet, and for some to clandestinely drink, away from neighbors and other gossips in Kabul. Alcohol is banned, but that rule is freely bent, just as many other cultural and religious decrees in Afghanistan often are.

  Our Friday morning convoy also includes a local fire chief, who is an old friend of Azita’s husband. His car is followed by two trucks with young Kalashnikov-carrying firefighter escorts.

  The destination we arrive at is Kapisa province, an old mujahideen stronghold, where large stone formations and hills break up a dwindling green landscape just on the verge of bursting into full summer. Harsh winters have made knotty branches on century-old trees more resistant, and they reign over almost invisible paths through high grass and into fields where children herd sheep. On the other side of a hill are fields of shell peas and cucumbers, where a river feeds the thick, dark soil. Next to it, spread out on the grass, picnicgoers from Kabul sit together in groups. Some women have removed their head scarves and laugh loudly.