In My Father's Country: An Afghan Woman Defies Her Fate Page 16

  Sabir had arrived and had brought me a burqa to wear during the trip south to Ghazni Province, where they lived. My female cousins and aunts wore the traditional sea-blue chadri with the lace grill over the eyes. The black burqa was new. The fabric was heavy and serious.

  A few soldiers came to watch as I pulled it over my head. It took me a while to get it right. One very young soldier said, “I’ve never seen one of these up close. We only see them on the street. How does it feel under there?” This was before the burqa had made its appearance at the local shops on FOBs all over the country, where soldiers bought them as Halloween costumes for just $15, more than three times what the locals paid for them outside.

  “Are you going to be able to walk wearing that?” one of the soldiers asked with real concern.

  “I don’t know. This is my first time,” I replied. “I’ll let you know when I get back.” I wondered if the Afghan men out there looking at their women were ever concerned about their ability to walk wearing the burqa. I found this casual kindness of the American soldiers endearing and touching. I had seen it when they were talking to little Afghan kids, or old Afghan men, or even one another. The war brought out the kindness in most people, although I wasn’t naïve about the ugliness it brought out in others.

  Outside the gate Sabir stood waiting for me. He had a dark, clean, short beard. He looked me up and down sternly before turning and nodding toward a taxi he’d hired in Kabul. I had not seen him since I was nine years old, and he didn’t even say hello to me. There were no welcoming words, no indication that he was glad to see me. It was essential that Sabir maintain distance and authority. Later, I would discover that he had a quick smile. Even though the morning was cool, beneath my burqa I was already sweating—dripping beneath my hair and on the bridge of my nose. I felt like I was suffocating on my own breath and sweat.

  Inside the taxi sat two women in their blue chadri and one with a huge black scarf covering her from head to toe and her face showing, stern and wrinkly. These were my cousins and my aunt. I got into the backseat without saying anything, but I squeezed their hands. One of them—I had no idea at the time which one she was—held my hand all the way to Kabul.

  These were my mother’s people. Unlike many Afghan married couples, my parents weren’t cousins; they weren’t even related. My mother was a chatterbox; at home in Portland she talked loudly on the phone all day long to her friends. But as we drove to Kabul my aunt and my cousins were silent. On the way to the taxi Sabir had warned me not to say a word. He suspected that the cabdriver, whom he didn’t know and who kept glancing at me in his rearview mirror, was mixed up with the insurgents. The driver was probably just an Afghan trying to make a living in the war, but it was also likely that he was being paid for any information he might glean from the conversations of his passengers, especially ones he drove to and from the airfield. I was an oddity worth keeping tabs on. I’m pretty sure that in all his years of driving this cabbie had never picked up a Pashtun woman working with the Americans.

  I despise wearing anything on my head. Even before I arrived in America, when I was still living in Peshawar, my relationship to the scarf was hostile. Every minute it was on my head I hated it. That light pressure, the bit of friction it always created, the pure nuisance of worrying whether it was going to slip onto my shoulders or even the floor, as if it was a trick by men to keep us occupied—I had no patience for it. When an Afghan girl of seven or eight is told that soon she is going to be able to wear a scarf, she is usually excited. The adults make a game of it, giving girls pretty scarves when they’ve been good. By the time they’re forced to start wearing them, they’ve already amassed a little collection. Najiba couldn’t wait to start wearing her scarves, but I grumbled and complained. My mother would see me without my scarf and ask me where it was, and I would make excuses, saying that Najiba had stolen it or that I couldn’t remember where I had it last. She could tell I just didn’t like wearing it, and tried not to pester me too much, unless her friends were coming to visit. Then I had to find it and wear it tightly on my head, so none of them could say that my mother was not doing her Pashtun duty by me.

  I SMOOTHED THE fabric of my burqa and tried to relax. Our taxi was clean. Beads hung from the rearview mirror and framed pictures adorned the dashboard. I was touched to realize that Sabir had probably made an extra effort to hire this specific taxi so that he could transport me in style.

  In Kabul we switched taxis and drove to a small restaurant, where we ate lunch, also in silence, and then switched cabs. Sabir had a habit of clenching and unclenching his jaw. I could tell he was on edge; traveling with four female relatives was a huge responsibility. At any moment a man could shame him by allowing his gaze to rest on one of us. He would then have an obligation to take some kind of protective and territorial actions. He’d be required to beat up the offender or even kill him, depending on the level of offense. Often Afghans are portrayed as bloodthirsty thugs eager to commit murder, but I could see that for gentle, distracted men such as Sabir, upholding this tradition was a big cultural burden. So he was careful to take precautions. Later, when I e-mailed Najiba back home in Portland, I told her I had felt like James Bond, changing taxis several times, walking quickly through the alleys of Kabul, trying to lose some unseen Taliban spy collecting information for the insurgents, who would use that intelligence to make an example out of me and my family.

  I joked with my sister to hide my fear. The fear I felt on my short trip from Bagram to my mother’s village was like nothing I had ever experienced. When I was with the army on missions, I knew there was danger, but I had taken calculated risks to be there, because I knew the area and, more important, I knew that I could depend on the arms, weapons, and protection of the American soldiers. Here, in the middle of nowhere, so close to Karzai’s palace, I knew that if an insurgent were to attempt to kill me and my family, there would be no one I could count on to protect me. Even praying to God would be useless, I thought, since I was sure God had nothing to do with what was happening in Afghanistan. Afghans always rely on humor to get themselves through uncertainty and danger. This is one of several habits that U.S. soldiers and Pashtuns have in common. I have seen soldiers do the same after dangerous battles.

  Ghazni was a green province in 2005, but just a couple of years later, several night letters would be posted by the Taliban in the cover of darkness, messages warning the local people to refrain from supporting the Afghan government—and support meant not only working in the government but also use of any governmental facilities and resources. One of the letters had made it clear that because clinics, hospitals, and schools were all operated by the government, they could be considered targets. A second letter had been found affixed to the forehead of a recently buried soldier of the Afghan National Army. The insurgents dug him up, posted their note on his head, and left him propped against a wall in the bazaar. This clear violation of the Islamic law about respecting the buried was not pointed out by any of the local imams—it was obvious that the message was intended to intimidate, and everyone was clearly intimidated.

  If we had been ambushed and I was discovered with my military ID, I would have been kidnapped and probably ransomed, if I was lucky, or killed as an example. The going rate for the head of a U.S. soldier was $50,000; for an Afghan American working with the U.S. Army, it was over $250,000, and I knew that if that U.S. civilian was a female Pashtun, the kidnapper could—and likely would—demand more than that, easily. Dead or alive, I was a hot commodity, one most Afghans would have loved to barter to the highest bidder. No one could be trusted to resist the temptation of so much money. I had asked my family not to tell anyone I was coming to visit. I would only meet the people in my immediate family, and no one else could know I was in the compound. However, these relatives were reliable; the fact that they had come to BAF to pick me up meant that if we were caught, they would also be captured and killed.

  As we descended from the highlands onto a low river plain, th
e heat and humidity increased. I could smell my own deodorant and the dry mineral odor of dust. I stared out the window at the crumpled hills, rust-colored in the setting sun, and the mountains in the distance.

  One of the things I love about Afghanistan is the mountains. The mountains surrounding them makes Pashtuns feel safe and protected in their remote villages. But these are the same mountains that serve to isolate them from the development and prosperity in the rest of the country. Later I would learn of the tribal disputes that arose over who owned the rights to these mountains, disputes that would claim the lives of hundreds of Afghans and many U.S. soldiers, and continue to do so to this day.

  Although this branch of the family had a shop in the city and also a private car, Sabir was concerned that the car might be tracked back to our family. At one of the several adda (taxi stations) that day, we transferred into yet another taxi. The sun disappeared over a tumble of distant mountains, and we continued south to our village.

  My family’s mud-walled compound was secured with huge iron gates that took at least two men to open. Once the taxi deposited us and sped away and the iron gates closed, the courtyard filled with children. They poured from every door and even a window or two. Four brothers lived here with their mother, their wives, and all these kids. My aunt, the mother of the brothers and the matriarch of the compound, confided in me that they sometimes lost track of which kid belonged to which brother, a happy predicament because it resulted in all the children being treated exactly the same. The kids stared at me with their long-lashed, almond-shaped eyes, full of curiosity.

  The cousins who had been in the taxi with me shed their chadri and hung them on walls and hooks placed all around the compound for that purpose. Now I saw that they were two of my cousins I had never met before. Here, inside the compound, behind the heavy iron gate, the women chattered loudly in Pashtu, gesturing and patting my arm, excitedly telling the others about the sights and scenes on our journey. All of them were talking at once and smiling, and I could finally see the resemblance to Mamai. The kids scampered around my feet. My heart swelled at the sight of such beautiful children. I gathered up as many as I could in my arms.

  Even though it was late, they insisted that I have some tea. They wanted to know about my mother. They laughed, remembering her as being so old-fashioned. How was America treating her? Did she like it there? Did she still dress the same? Was she learning English? Did she have any friends? Were there any other Afghans where she was?

  I said I hadn’t been able to spend much time with her, but that she seemed to be adjusting fine. She was making some Pashtun friends in the area and talked on the phone for long hours to her friends and family around the world. I didn’t try to explain how we’d introduced her to Costco, and how her daily walks took her past several Starbucks—she’d noticed that there was one on every corner—where unemployed hipsters blogged and sipped nonfat vanilla lattes. That although she claimed that she didn’t like coffee, she would drink all of my double-shot white-chocolate mocha, insisting that it was not coffee. Even though she was in her fifties and had left her father’s house decades earlier, Mamai wouldn’t have wanted me to share all that with her family. These were still behaviors her family wouldn’t have approved of in her. Instead, I told them that America was probably less of a shock than having a daughter like me who forced her to change her ways faster than she could adjust to. I told them that I believed if she wasn’t given a lot of time to dwell on the changes, she wouldn’t have a chance to resist them, and in a few short years she would become the modernized mother that I needed, in order for her to come to accept what I had become. Both the men and the women arranged their faces to hide their looks of dismay. But since I was their guest, it would be an insult for them to tell me I’d lost my mind.

  SOMETIME IN THE middle of my first night there I awoke with a start. My female cousins, with whom I shared a room, were bustling around in the pitch dark. Only a small square window was embedded in the baked-mud wall; it was so dark I could barely see. I pushed myself up from my mattress, half-asleep. As if by habit I listened for the whistle of incoming rockets, mortars, the pock-pock-pock of gunfire—anything that would give me a clue about all the commotion at this ungodly hour.

  I gave up trying to figure it out and whispered, “What’s going on?”

  “Go back to sleep,” one of them said.

  “Are we getting up to pray?”

  “No, no. Don’t worry. We need to get up and make breakfast.”

  “But it’s the middle of the night.”

  “It’s four o’clock.”

  So exhausted was I from the strain of all the travel and my anxiety over possibly getting my relatives killed, I fell back onto my mattress and slept as if sedated for another five hours. When I awoke a second time, I was alone and the sun had been up for a while. I got up and walked through the rooms until I found the big bare kitchen, in the center of the compound, shared by all the families. Two of the cousins in their bright scarves stood patting hunks of pale dough into bread and chatting. How could they still be making breakfast? They’d been up for hours. They explained patiently that they also had to take care of the animals, feed the chickens, milk and feed the cows. They collected the eggs, made the bread and the butter, because I was the guest and was to be given fresh butter only. A bowl of honey was sitting on a tray with the fresh cream, of course. I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that they had made the honey, too. They had also picked some grapes for the meal, from the vines in the courtyard right outside the kitchen.

  My female cousins were beautiful, like my mother, with their heart-shaped faces, almond-shaped eyes, and straight black brows. To me, Afghan men look closed off and wary, although my male cousins looked kind around the eyes. I was looking forward to sitting around enjoying a meal with them all. But even though we were one family, the men ate alone with their mother, my aunt.

  “We always eat separately,” Bashir, Sabir’s fourteen-year-old brother, explained.

  “If that’s the case,” I said, “I’m going to go eat with the women. I’m a woman and am not nearly old enough to be an auntie and eat with the men.” I started to stand up to head to the kitchen, where all the women ate.

  “No, no, please sit,” said Sabir. “We want you to sit with us.”

  “I don’t feel right. It isn’t fair. We are sitting here on comfortable cushions, and they are all sitting on the floor in the kitchen.”

  “They don’t really want to eat with us,” said Auntie. “It’s hard to eat when they have to cover their faces from the men.”

  I’d forgotten about this. The last time I was in an Afghan village I was one of the long-lashed kids running wild. But I did remember that even though these women didn’t have any choice but to live with their in-laws, they were also traditionally obligated to hide their faces from all the males who were at least ten years or older, except their husbands. So yes, they could eat together, as long as they took care to slip their food beneath their scarves and into their mouths, and as long as they ate in total silence. It was all coming back to me: Back in the village my mother ate in complete silence, while my sister and I chattered nonstop to Baba.

  The smell of the fresh bread was making my mouth water. I wanted everyone to eat together. I felt annoyed, the same way I did when I argued with Mamai back in Portland over her rabid insistence on continuing to cover her face. She felt she was upholding Pashtun tradition.

  When my mother and I argued about this, it was never far from my mind that had I stayed in the village, I would be the one expected to live my life behind the veil, invisible to those around me, until I made the smallest gesture that could be taken as against the customs, and then I would be made into an example for everyone. In the home of a husband I would be expected to say no more than a couple of words a day, and if I were permitted to leave the compound, I could leave only in the company of a male, even if that male was a teenager and I was his mother. I couldn’t leave the compound witho
ut him escorting me because it would shame my family. I would be waiting for my son to get a little older, so I could find him a young bride and, according to Pashtun tradition, pass the duty of covering up on to her, so I could finally be free to breathe and speak my mind, still within the gender boundaries set by society.

  There are moments when my divided self is more fractured than a Cubist painting: Half of me believes that a young woman’s desire to cover her face, to uphold a proud, centuries-old tradition, is touching and sweet—while the other half wants to pitch a world-class Pashtun fit over such nonsensical, gender-based limitation on movement and speech.

  I sat back down to eat with my aunt and her sons, while the rest of the women ate in the kitchen. The food was fresh and I’m sure delicious, but I couldn’t enjoy it because I felt like I was being completely disloyal to Afghan women everywhere, beginning with my female cousins just down the hallway. I felt like I was conspiring against all women and was deeply ashamed about it. I vowed I would not eat another meal without the women, even if I had to hide in the kitchen until the men ate.

  Those of us who want to free the Afghan woman are fixated on the veil, and how if we could only lift up the veils, the Afghan woman could do anything she wanted to do. When I was young and naïve, I had thought that if only I were allowed to go outside without covering up, I would be truly free. Just as, years later, in my uncles’ house in Portland, I had thought that if only I could stay out past 9:00 P.M., I would be truly happy. Both times I was wrong; the reality is not that simple. What hobbles Afghan women is the endless housework they shoulder, the predawn mornings and late nights—days that end only after everyone is comfortably in bed and all the work is done. They live an entire lifetime of sleep deprivation and monotony. There’s so much talk about the importance of sending girls to school, and I agree, it is important, but given the demands of their daily lives, when are these girls expected to study? By the time they are of grammar school age they are already expected to help their mothers with many responsibilities that in the United States even young adults wouldn’t be expected to do. In Afghanistan, five-year-olds raise three-year-old siblings. It breaks my heart to see little girls, younger than eight or ten, carrying a three-year-old brother or sister on their hips, feeding them, watching them, being responsible for them in every way. In Afghan villages all over you see young girls, tiny, thin things, lugging heavy jugs of water past groups of boys and unemployed men who are squatting in that impossible-to-copy Afghan way, doing nothing more than wasting time. These girls’ childhoods are over before they even start. On top of all that, they are not fed properly, or taken care of by their parents, so they tend to be sickly and look even younger than their age, until they start having children, and then they age years in days. They don’t even have time to realize that they should be out there playing, enjoying being children themselves.