In My Father's Country: An Afghan Woman Defies Her Fate Read online

  Once, when I was going to the bazaar with Sabir, we drove by a group of tiny young girls with water jugs on their heads weaving past a group of men and boys who just sat there and stared at them. I asked Sabir if we could stop, without really thinking about what I was about to do. He asked why, and I told him that I wanted to tell the boys to get up and help the little girls. He locked the doors of the car quickly. I’d never seen him move so fast. He stepped on the gas. “You’re crazy if you think you can do stuff like that here. These guys could easily kill you for saying something like that. This is not America, and we have to live here, even after you have gone back.” I was appalled by his response, and even more sickened because I actually saw its crazy Afghan logic.

  THE NEXT DAY I went to the kitchen when I knew that dinner was about ready and sat there with the ladies of the house. They all looked at me expectantly, questioning me without saying anything. I told them I wanted to eat with them in the kitchen because I was not an auntie who is allowed to eat with the men. They didn’t argue much because they said they loved my company and talking to me was like talking to Mamai, their aunt. We were having shurwa, my favorite, since I was the guest. This is one of the oldest, simplest, and—in my opinion—most delicious dishes Afghanistan has ever produced. It is simple in that it requires only meat, onions, tomatoes, potatoes, salt, black pepper, and, if you want to get fancy, turnips and carrots. Boil it all together for a long time, over low heat, and soak some bread in it. Put some yogurt on top, and eat it with fresh chili peppers. I had asked the ladies to cook this dish that night. I’ve made it many times at home in Oregon, but I have never been able to capture the flavor it had that night.

  We sent the men their food through my little cousins, but they soon returned, telling me that Sabir and the other men were asking me to come and eat with them. I told the little ones that I was eating where the women ate, and I would have tea with them. This didn’t work, and the kids returned with one of the older male cousins. He told me that he had come to ask all the women to eat with them, at least while I was there. I was finally going to eat with my whole family! But I could tell that the women were not excited. Who could blame them? They would have to cover their faces while eating. I felt guilty, but I also felt that at least I would break some silly gender taboo about men and women eating together, even if it was only for a couple of days.

  In terms of conversation, we’d already exhausted the one topic we shared—my mother, their sister and aunt—and I struggled to find some common ground with these men. I resented them for the awful way they treated my female cousins while at the same time offering me the care and respect traditionally shown an honored male guest. I couldn’t decide if they believed that my female cousins were not human, and therefore didn’t have any thoughts or feelings, or whether they saw me as having nothing in common—including gender—with the women at the compound. I was becoming increasingly upset that they wanted to talk to me endlessly about their business, a small gas station in Ghazni City. They made jokes about learning English so they could speak with my mom, in case she became so Americanized that she forgot all her Pashtu. I should have been grateful for their attempts to involve me and entertain me, but I hated that I had to choose which gender to spend time with during my short visit. Why couldn’t I be with them all, together?

  The soldiers at Farah were so typically American, with their love of Pizza Hut, video games, and country music. As a Pashtun, a female, and a civilian, I was an outsider three times over. I had imagined that when I arrived at my family’s compound I would feel a mystical sense of finally belonging. I had thought it would feel like home in the way that Portland, Peshawar, and even Kabul never really did. I was a real Pashtun, so why was I feeling as if I were walking on eggshells, all alone, with no one to guide me or give me some hint about how to behave? I didn’t want to insult anyone because I knew that the minute I left to go back to BAF, phones would be ringing in Portland, telling Mamai how I had behaved. I felt pressured to act as she would have because this was her family, but at the same time I felt that it was unfair to treat me so much better than the other females. I sat on the front veranda watching the evening news on TV, listening to everyone talk at once as I sipped my green tea.

  I was angry, sad, and hopeless. I felt lonely and confused, like an alien who’d been brought home by the friendly citizens of a new and strange planet. One of my youngest cousins, Bashir, who was lucky enough to go to school during the day for a couple of hours, asked me the English words for apple, grapes, chicken, children, TV, and all the objects around him, but not for women. While the men were amusing themselves, their wives and sisters silently replenished the tea. The men didn’t even acknowledge them, much less thank them. It was unthinkable that they would ask their wives and sisters to join us. I felt sick, as if I were giving the entire family the impression that it was okay for these women to be treated this way. There and then I decided that I was going to ally myself with the women. If they woke up at four o’clock in the morning to milk the cows and bake the bread, then so would I.

  The next morning I rose in the dark with my cousins. I found Auntie in the courtyard, milking the cows.

  “I want to help with everything. For one day I want to be like your daughters,” I said.

  Auntie wiped her hands on her pale gray dress and peered at me kindly, over the black cotton scarf she’d wrapped around her head and mouth. I think she sensed that I was struggling to try to fit in with the other women in the compound. She took me to the corner of the barn where the cows were stalled beneath an overhang made of dried branches. Shafika was already at work, squatting on her haunches in her lilac-colored purdugh, milking a skinny brown cow. She looked up and gave me a brilliant smile. I thought she was amazing, to be able to smile like that at 4:00 A.M. Najiba wouldn’t smile like that even at 10:00 A.M., claiming she isn’t a morning person.

  Auntie told Shafika to let me have a turn. She demonstrated how to pull on the udders, then stepped aside. I squatted down just as she’d done, grabbed the udders, and started tugging. I’d made the mistake of wearing my platform flip-flops, and every time I got some momentum going I couldn’t help rocking back on my heels. Not much milk was coming out. The cow exhaled, as if it had lost all patience with my ineptitude, and stamped its foot. It seemed as if the more I tugged and squeezed, the less milk came out. After almost fifteen minutes of struggle, there were a few inches of thin milk at the bottom of the pail. I tried to remember how much milk they used in a day, and thought that if you added up the production of all the other cows, this was at least respectable. Like my cousins I wore a shalwar kameez, and as I stood up I stepped on the hem of my kameez, lost my balance, and kicked the bucket over. The milk made a little puddle for a moment before vanishing into the parched earth.

  I grabbed the bucket and righted it quickly, but it was too late. Auntie saw my distress and began to laugh. She rushed over to help me up and told me that it happened to her all the time. I knew she was only saying that to make me feel better, and that the last time she had wasted milk like that she was probably a very young girl. I felt bad, but since I knew that it was no good to cry over spilled milk, I decided to do something very American: I would replace the milk with store-bought. I sent one of my little male cousins to the local shop with 100 Afghanis and told him to get a half gallon of milk.

  When it was time for milk tea, and the store-bought milk was used to make it, Sabir refused to drink it, complaining that it tasted awful. After Auntie told him what had happened, he tried to choke it down in an effort to make me feel better. I told him he didn’t have to drink it on my account, and he put his cup down gratefully.

  The next morning when my cousins woke up in the dark I pretended to be asleep. After my failure at milking the cow I realized it was best to stick to my role of honored guest. Once the men went off for the day, I escaped up to the roof to get some alone time, an American habit that becomes a luxury in an Afghan house.

  IN PORTLAND,
I had made a list of items that I promised myself I would one day buy in the Ghazni bazaar, since it was the only place the items were sold. These were silk fabrics that have been the coveted choice for Afghan bridal outfits for centuries—the traditional Pashtun brides still wear these same colors that were worn by their grandmothers and their grandmothers’ grandmothers. There were some types of beads and mirrors that were then woven into scarves and dresses. There were silk threads, all the things I had seen when Mamai showed me her wedding outfit. I was very young, but I remember her informing me that one day soon, I would get my own bridal dress ready so I could get married. I had told her, “Mamai, why can’t I just get the dress now? I don’t want to get married!” and she had laughed. “Everyone has to get married to get the dress. What would people say if you wore it on any other occasion?” she asked me with so much patience, a mother explaining her culture to her daughter. She didn’t believe me, and I hardly believed myself then, when I said, “I am going to get the dress, and I am not going to have to marry some man to get it!”

  Now I was so close to the shops where these items were sold, and I was getting married, although not to a man who would even know the significance of the dress. Still, I wanted to get it because it meant a lot to me to be married in the same fashion as my grandmother and her grandmother before her, even though I was breaking all the rules by marrying a self-chosen, non-Pashtun, non-Muslim man. I am capable of seeing double standards, hypocrisy, even in myself—maybe more so in myself.

  I asked Sabir, the oldest son and thus the man of the compound, if I could please go to the bazaar to get some shopping done. He looked anxiously at his mother for guidance. Luckily for me, and not so luckily for Sabir, my aunt agreed to the trip but said that I would have to go with another female or I would draw too much attention. I thanked her and waited for her to tell me which one of my cousins should come with me.

  When my female cousins, who were now back in the kitchen cleaning up after breakfast and preparing to begin cooking lunch, heard about the excursion they were excited. It wasn’t every day that there was talk of a trip to the bazaar. They all wanted to go.

  Negotiating this was no easier than figuring out who would get to sit down to breakfast together. Like all Pashtun women, my female cousins rarely left the compound. Shafika was eager to buy some beads for something she was sewing. Like her older brother Sabir, Shafika had a quick smile and a beautiful set of white teeth. I could hear her every morning at dawn, singing in the courtyard as she swept the ground and fed the chickens. She had never gone to school, but once I saw her pick up one of Bashir’s books when she didn’t think her brother was around. She flipped through it, glancing at the pages. It was in Pashtu. I asked her if she could read it. She smiled and said, “Why would I need to read? It is not like I am going to need to read a sign to find the cow to milk!” She laughed, but I didn’t have to be a psychologist to know that she was hurting inside and resented her brother for what she could never have. Did she resent me, too? I would never know because one of the strongest pillars of Pashtunwali is never letting any insult reach your guest, whether from your own behavior or that of another. During the few hours of the day when Shafika had no chores, she pulled out a battered black-and-gold treadle sewing machine and sat on the floor of the main room. She was making something out of a pretty silken fabric of wide hot-pink, royal-blue, and emerald-green stripes. I thought that it was her own bridal outfit, and felt so sad for her, thinking that she had to make the dress for the day when she would become another man’s property. On the day I was leaving, she told me she had made me a present, and it was the traditional silk outfit she had been working on since my arrival.

  It was decided that Shafika would go with me to the bazaar. My aunt and cousins didn’t leave it at that. They gave me a long lecture on how to behave there. Bashir kept teasing me by saying, “This is not American bazaar” every few minutes, like I could forget that fact once I was surrounded by all the women in their chadri. I promised to wait for my cousin to talk to the shopkeeper instead of addressing him myself. I would keep the expected distance behind my cousin. Under no circumstances was I to talk to another man, or look at anyone; I would just look down at my feet. And, of course, I could never expose my face since anyone could tell I was not from there. I wanted to get to the bazaar quickly—otherwise I might have asked what that last comment meant. I know I looked very Pashtun when I saw myself in the mirror, but I’m not sure what they were seeing when they looked at my face.

  I found Shafika on the roof, stooped over a cloth on which she was carefully placing bunches of red grapes to dry in the sun. When I told her she could come to the bazaar, she gasped. This would be the first time in three years she had been allowed to go. Although the other women were disappointed that they were not selected, they were genuinely happy for Shafika and gave her their shopping lists. One needed red beads, another a special sort of silver trim. As Shafika put on her blue chadri she whispered to me about why the women were excited for us to go: “The men take our lists, but they never get the right things.”

  Once again my cousin took precautions. We left our car in the compound and walked in the midday sun to the next village to find a taxi. Already, my scalp was sweating. There was no sense in making conversation because everything I said was muffled by my burqa. Shafika and I trudged along behind the men, Sabir, Bashir, and my cousin Daoud. Once we got to the bazaar, the other cousins took off on their own errands, leaving Sabir to take us women to the shops that had what we wanted.

  The Ghazni bazaar sits in the shadow of the Citadel, a mud-walled fortress built in the thirteenth century, high on a hill overlooking the city. The narrow shops are part of a larger mud structure. Villages and smaller towns such as Ghazni are bathed in earthen tones. Most of the shops were run by Hazaras, some by Pashtuns, and others by Sikhs, who shockingly, or at least to me, spoke fluent Pashtu. There was one gas station, which barely looked any different from the rest of the shops, nothing like American gas stations with their huge logos. It would be a few years before they would get the American Shell look-alike gas stations. In between the shops wove mud streets that, on a hot day like this one, were full of dust. Every so often one of the shopkeepers would come out with a water bucket and splash some water on the dust so that people could breathe. It was amazing that I noticed all this behind my veil because I was trying so hard not to lose sight of the backs of my cousins in the middle of all those other backs in the tiny view I had from my chadri.

  Shafika and I needed to go to the fabric shop, but Sabir was in no hurry. He strolled along with the other men, as if they were in a race with an unseen competitor to see how slowly they could work their way through the bazaar. Beneath my chadri the sweat was running down the side of my face. Shafika was silent. We shuffled along. Sabir stopped and talked to some friends. My chadri fit in such a way that I had no real peripheral vision. The day had become hot. I smelled raw sewage but couldn’t see where it was flowing. Men on bicycles wheeled past wearing shalwar kameez and white turbans limp with dirt and dust. I felt stifled. I couldn’t breathe. Back home, I loved shopping; I could shop for hours. Here I thought I would die if I didn’t inhale soon.

  We passed a shop with a stack of folded pieces of brightly colored silk standing sentry just inside the doorway. The shopkeeper leaned against the pile with his arms folded. He looked past Shafika and me, careful to make sure we knew that we were invisible to him. I wanted to ask him about his silk, but Sabir strode on ahead.

  I stopped in front of the shopkeeper. He continued to ignore me. Shafika stood behind me. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. I thought I could feel her nervousness. We needed Sabir to speak to the shopkeeper on our behalf, since it was forbidden for us to talk to him directly and I had promised I wouldn’t talk to the shopkeeper. I opened my mouth to yell for Sabir before he disappeared into the crowd, but that was forbidden as well. No Pashtun woman’s voice should be heard in public. I suddenly realized I didn
’t have to behave this way. I had an option, unlike the poor women in chadri, miserable all around me. I pulled the scarf off my head and gulped a fresh draft of dusty air, laced with the sweet-rotten smell of garbage. I breathed, in and out. The feeling of suffocation was instantly gone.