The Dressmaker of Khair Khana (3 page)

Once her sister-in-law had arrived from the apartment upstairs to look after her older boy, Malika gathered Hossein in her arms and tucked him inside her baggy black overcoat. Holding him close to her swelling belly, she hurried out the door for the ten-minute walk to the doctor's office.

The silence in the street frightened Malika. At this early afternoon hour her neighborhood was usually crowded with a jumble of taxis, bicycles, donkeys, and trucks, but today the streets were empty. The rumors of the approaching army had sent her neighbors deep into their homes, behind their gates and window coverings. It was now a waiting game, and no one knew what the next few days would bring.

Malika winced at the sound of her own heels clacking on the sidewalk. She focused her eyes on the ground as she struggled to hold the wide folds of her scarf in place, but the heavy fabric kept slipping off her head, forcing her to juggle and shift the small boy in her arms as she performed the awkward dance of replacing the shawl, keeping the child covered, and walking as quickly as she could. An afternoon shadow began to fall on Karteh Parwan's uneven rows of homes and shops.

Finally Malika made a right turn off the main road and reached an office that occupied the ground floor of a shabby strip of storefronts, all of which shared the same cement floors and low ceilings. Several rows of brown stone separated the shops from the balconied apartments above. Relieved to be inside and to rest for a moment, Malika checked in with the doctor, who had come out of his examining room when he heard the front door.

“My son has a fever; I think he may be very sick,” she said. “I brought him here as soon as I could.”

The doctor, an older gentleman whom her husband's family had visited for years, offered her a kind smile.

“No problem, just take a seat. It won't be long.”

Malika settled Hossein into a wooden chair in the dark and empty waiting room. She walked the floor, trying to calm herself, then rubbed her belly for a moment and inhaled deeply. Little Hossein was pale and his eyes looked glassy and expressionless. She wrapped her arms tightly around him and pulled him closer to her.

Suddenly a noise on the street outside startled her. Malika jumped from her chair toward the window. Gray clouds hovered over the street and it had grown dark outside. The first thing she could make out was a shiny dark truck. It looked new, certainly newer than most cars in Kabul. And then she saw three men standing beside the pickup. They wore turbans wrapped high and thick and carried long rods in their hands that looked like batons. They were striking at something or someone, that much she could tell.

With a start Malika realized that the figure huddled in front of them was a woman. She lay in the middle of the street, crouched in a ball, and was trying to fend off the blows. But the men would not stop. Malika heard the dreadful slapping sound of the wooden batons as they hit the helpless woman--on her back, her legs, over and over again.

“Where is your chadri?” one of the men shouted at his victim as he lifted his arms above his head to strike her. “Why are you not covered? What kind of woman are you to go out like this?”

“Stop,” the woman pleaded. “Please have mercy. I am wearing a scarf. I don't have a chadri. We never had to wear them before!”

She began to sob. Malika's eyes teared as she watched. Her instincts commanded her to run into the street and rescue this poor woman from her attackers. But her rational mind knew it was impossible. If she left the doctor's office she would be beaten as well. These men would have no problem hitting a pregnant woman, she thought. And she had a sick child to protect. So she stood helplessly by the window listening to the woman cry, and wiped her own tears away.

“You think this is the last regime?” one of the young men shouted. His eyes were black with kohl, the night-colored cosmetic that Taliban soldiers wore. “This is not Dr. Najibullah or the Mujahideen,” he said, his club hitting her once more. “We believe in sharia, Islamic law, and this is now the law of the land. Women must be covered. This is your warning.”

Finally the men got back in their truck and left. The woman bent over unsteadily to grab her handbag from the street and slowly limped away.

Malika turned back to Hossein, who was folded up in his chair and moaning softly. Her hands shook as she held his small fingers. Like the woman outside, she was from a generation of Kabul women who had never known life under the chadri. They had grown up in the capital long after Prime Minister Mohammad Daoud Khan had embraced the voluntary unveiling of his countrywomen in the 1950s. King Amanullah Khan had attempted this reform unsuccessfully thirty years earlier, but it wasn't until 1959, when the prime minister's own wife appeared at a national independence day celebration wearing a headscarf rather than the full chadri, that the change finally took hold. That one gesture stunned the crowd and marked a cultural turning point in the capital. Kabul's next generation of women had gone on to become teachers, factory workers, doctors, and civil servants; they went to work with their heads loosely covered and their faces exposed. Before today many had never had reason to wear or even own the full veils of their grandmothers' generation.

Suddenly the tide had turned again. Women would now be forced to dress in a style--and assume a way of life--they had never known, by rulers who had known nothing else. Was this what was in store for her, too, once she left the doctor's office? Malika felt her heart pounding in her chest as she wondered how she was going to get Hossein and herself safely home. Like the woman's outside, Malika's scarf was large, but it was hardly big enough to cover her whole face and convince the soldiers of her piety. She held Hossein tightly, trying to comfort herself as much as her son.

Just then the doctor returned.

After a quick but thorough examination he assured Malika that it was nothing serious. He prescribed plenty of fluids and gave her a prescription to fill, then walked Malika and Hossein back to the waiting room. When they reached the front door Malika stopped.

“Doctor, I wonder if we could stay here for a few more minutes?” She pointed her chin down in the direction of the little boy in her arms. “I need to rest for just a moment before carrying him home again.”

Malika didn't want to talk about what she had just seen, but it weighed heavily on her mind. She needed to a make a plan to get them safely out of this situation.

“Of course,” the doctor replied. “Stay as long as you wish.”

Malika paced the waiting room floor and prayed for help. She could not go back out onto the street without a chadri, that much was certain. But she had no idea how she would get hold of one.

Suddenly her heart leapt. Through the window she saw Soraya, her older son's elementary school teacher, walking down the street toward the doctor's office. Malika recognized the purposeful gait from a distance and then glimpsed the teacher's face peeking out from beneath her dark scarf. A small grocery sack dangled from each arm. Malika ran toward the door. After she had scanned the sidewalk to make certain the Taliban were no longer in sight, she took a furtive step out of the doctor's office.

“Soraya Jan,” she called from the doorway. “It is Malika, Saeed's mother.”

The startled teacher hurried over and Malika related what she had seen in the street.

Soraya shook her head in amazement. She had spent the past hour buying what vegetables she could for her family's evening meal of pilau, Afghan aromatic rice, and naan bread, but food had become hard to find these days. A Taliban blockade now strangled the city, preventing trucks carrying food from reaching the capital's 1.2 million residents. Today Soraya had barely managed to get hold of a few potatoes and some onions. The market had been abuzz with rumors of the Taliban's arrival, but Malika was the first person she knew who had actually seen the capital's new soldiers up close.

“My house is just around the corner,” Soraya told Malika, taking her hand. “You and Hossein will come with me, and we'll figure out how to get you a chadri to wear home. Don't worry; we'll find a way.”

Malika smiled for the first time all day.

“Thank you, Soraya Jan,” she said. “I am so grateful.”

The women quickly walked the one block to Soraya's house, which stood behind a bright yellow gate. They didn't speak a word during the short trip, and Malika wondered if Soraya was praying as hard as she was that they wouldn't be stopped. She couldn't get the image of the woman in the street off her mind.

A few minutes later they sat together in Soraya's small kitchen. Malika tightly gripped a glass of hot green tea and relaxed for the first time in hours. She was deeply thankful for the warmth of her friend's home and the fact that Hossein, who had taken a pill at the doctor's office, was already feeling a bit better.

“I have a plan, Malika,” Soraya announced. She called for her son, Muhammad, who was in the other room. Once the little boy appeared, Soraya gave him his mission. “I need you to go to your aunt Orzala's house. Tell her we need to borrow one of her chadri for Auntie Malika; tell her we will return it to her in just a few days. This is very important. Okay?”

The eight-year-old nodded.

Just half an hour later young Muhammad bounded into the living room and solemnly handed Malika a white plastic shopping bag; the handles had been carefully tied together and inside was a blue chadri. “My aunt says you can borrow the chadri as long as you need it,” Muhammad said, beaming.

Malika unfolded the fabric, which was really several panels of material that had been sewn together by hand. The front section, about a yard in length, was made of a light polyester with a finely embroidered border at the bottom and a cap at the top. The chadri's longer side and back panels formed an uninterrupted wave of intricate and meticulously pressed accordion pleats that hung close to the floor. Wearing the garment required getting underneath the billowy folds and making certain the cap was in just the right spot for maximum visibility through the webbed eye slit, which turned the world slightly blue.

The family invited Malika to stay for dinner, and after sharing a plate of rice and potatoes by candlelight on the living room floor, she stood up and put on the chadri. The hem of her fashionable brown suit pants stuck out from beneath the veil. Malika had worn the covering only a few times before when visiting family in the provinces, and she now found it tricky to maneuver among the slippery pleats and panels. She struggled to see out through the small eye vent, which was just two inches long and three and a half inches wide. She tripped over the fabric while saying her last good-byes to Soraya's family.

“One of my sons will bring the chadri back to you soon,” Malika said, embracing her friend and rescuer.

She took Hossein by the hand and began to walk home under the starry evening sky, stepping slowly and carefully to make certain she didn't trip again. She prayed the rockets would wait for her to make it back safely.

Days would pass before she would see her family in Khair Khana and share her harrowing story. Malika, it turned out, was among the first to experience what lay ahead for them all. It would be just as the young woman at Sayed Jamaluddin had predicted.

A Time of Good-byes

The radio hummed static from its perch on the living room shelf. Kamila's father, Woja Abdul Sidiqi, placed his ears against the old Chinese machine's black speakers and tried to decipher the BBC reporter's words. An imposing man with a shock of white hair and an angular, nearly regal visage, Mr. Sidiqi revealed his army roots in his military posture and serious demeanor. The children looked on silently; no one ever dared interrupt this somber evening ritual. He gingerly adjusted the aging machine's dials and soon the living room was filled with the sound of the BBC's Persian news service broadcast live from London. The evening program, always a staple of Mr. Sidiqi's dinnertime routine, had now become the family's main link to the outside world.

Dramatic bulletins had arrived over the radio in the month since the bearded, turbaned young Taliban troops rolled into Kabul in heavy tanks and shiny Japanese pickup trucks, euphoric in what they claimed was their divine triumph. On the first morning they hanged the communist former president, Dr. Najibullah, from a red and white striped traffic post in Ariana Square, right in the center of downtown Kabul. Since he was loathed for his close ties to the godless Soviets and his crackdown on Islamist figures during the 1980s, the Taliban put his assassination on grisly display for all the world to see. They dangled cigarettes from the former president's lifeless mouth and stuffed his pants pockets with money to symbolize his moral bankruptcy. His battered and swollen corpse languished for two days at the end of a rope.

Mr. Sidiqi had been recruited to the army as a teenager in the 1960s by a government official who had come to visit his home province of Parwan. He saw a great deal of political turmoil in his military career as an artilleryman, topographer, and senior adviser, including the 1973 overthrow of the sitting king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, by his former prime minister Mohammad Daoud Khan. Daoud dissolved the monarchy and declared the country a republic, but five years later he was murdered by an educated group of communist hard-liners who routinely imprisoned, tortured, and killed their opponents. The Soviet Union became convinced that the revolutionaries they once supported could no longer be trusted, and in 1979 the Red Army invaded. Afghanistan had been at war ever since.

Each of the governments Mr. Sidiqi served had faced a near-constant threat of overthrow from rivals both within and without, and all relied on the army to maintain stability. But today a vastly different military force was in control, and their tactics were very new and very public. Crowds of boys and men piled into the busy intersection at Ariana Square to see for themselves the murder of Dr. Najibullah, and they reported home to their wives, sisters, and mothers the extraordinary scene they had witnessed. The message could not be mistaken: a new regime was in charge.

Kamila's father worried about what would happen to his own family now that he could see how the Taliban would deal with its enemies. He had, after all, served under Dr. Najibullah and worked with Massoud, the Panjshiri fighter who had become the Taliban's biggest foe and still commanded enough forces to stop them from controlling the entire country. But Mr. Sidiqi urged his daughters not to be concerned. “I'm just an old retiree; I've got nothing at all to do with politics,” he reassured them. As the days passed, however, Kamila grew more uneasy. The Taliban began harassing young Tajik men, rounding them up from mosques and bazaars on suspicion of providing arms and information to Massoud's forces, which were now making a stand north of Kabul. Taliban soldiers with Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders patrolled the city in their tanks and trucks, looking to stamp out trouble and crush any opposition.

Mr. Sidiqi, an educated man who had traveled the country during his army days and believed that ethnic differences should not matter to Afghans, struggled to explain to his daughters why these men had ample reason to fear the world beyond their refugee camps. Many of them were orphans whose parents had been killed when Soviet bombs laid waste to their southern villages. The Russian invasion, he said, had taken these soldiers' families and their homes. They had never gotten to know their country, or its capital. “I think this is the first a lot of these boys have seen of Kabul,” he told the girls, “and probably the first time they've seen so many people from so many different backgrounds.” Most had grown up in refugee camps in the southern and eastern regions of Pakistan. What little grounding they had in their own history had come through the filter of barely educated, deeply religious madrassa teachers who schooled them in a singular, unforgiving interpretation of Islam very different from the Afghan tradition. In the camps in which they had grown up, many refugee families kept their wives and daughters indoors nearly all the time to ensure their safety and honor. “These young men who serve under the Taliban's white flag have had almost no contact with women during their entire lives,” Mr. Sidiqi told his daughters. Indeed, their training had taught them to avoid exposure to the amoral temptation of the other sex, whose rightful place was at home behind closed doors. This made the life and culture of the urban capital appear even more foreign and bewildering to the young soldiers who were now in charge of its streets. Through their eyes, Kabul looked like a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah where women roamed freely and alone, wearing seductive makeup and Western-style clothing; where storekeepers did not faithfully heed the call to prayer; where excesses thrived and alcohol was plentiful. Kabul to these zealous young men was a sinful city full of crime and debauchery and desperately in need of spiritual cleansing.

Kabulis watched helplessly as the Taliban began reshaping the cosmopolitan capital according to their utopian vision of seventh-century Islam. Almost immediately they instituted a brutal--and effective--system of law and order. Accused thieves had one hand and one foot cut off, and their severed limbs were hung from posts on street corners as a warning to others. Overnight, crime in the monumentally lawless city dropped to almost zero. Then they banned everything they regarded as a distraction from the duty of worship: music, long a part of Afghan culture, and movies, television, card playing, the game of chess, and even kite flying, the popular Friday afternoon pastime. And they didn't stop at actions alone: creating a representation of the human figure was soon forbidden, as was wearing European clothing or haircuts. After a short grace period to grow them, the length of men's beards could be no shorter than the distance made by a clenched fist. Shaving was prohibited. Modernity, and anything associated with it, had been sentenced to banishment.

But of all the changes the Taliban brought, the most painful and demoralizing were the ones that would fundamentally transform the lives of Kamila, her sisters, and all the women in their city. The newly issued edicts commanded:

Women will stay at homeWomen are not permitted to workWomen must wear the chadri in public

Women had been officially banned from schools and offices, though many teachers, including Kamila's older sister Malika, went to work each week to pick up paychecks for jobs they could no longer do. Girls' schools were quickly shuttered; in twenty-four hours the student body of Sayed Jamaluddin leapt from 20 percent to 100 percent male. And the chadri became mandatory, no exceptions allowed. For many women, however, including Kamila and her four sisters, the clothing restrictions were the least of their problems. The worst was that they had no place left to go; they had been banished to their living rooms. Overnight, women vanished from the streets of a city where only days before they had accounted for nearly 40 percent of civil servants and more than half of all teachers. The impact was immediate and devastating, particularly for the thirty thousand Kabul families that were said to be headed by widows. Many of these women had lost their husbands during the endless years of war, first with the Soviets and then with their own countrymen. Now they couldn't even work to support their children.

For Mr. Sidiqi, the longtime patriot and loyal public servant, the situation was especially distressing. As a young man, he had worked in a state-of-the-art $25 million Swiss textile mill in his hometown of Gulbahar. He had watched the European women working alongside their husbands and Afghan colleagues. All that separated these women who had jobs and an income from those in his own family was education, a reality he would never forget. Through all the war and upheaval he witnessed during his long army career, Mr. Sidiqi was determined that all of his children--the nine girls as well as the two boys--enjoy the privilege of school. He would not distinguish between his sons and daughters when it came to the duties of the classroom. As he often told the eleven of them, “I look on all of you with one eye.” To him it was his highest obligation and a duty of his faith to educate his children so that they could share their knowledge and serve their communities. Now he watched with a sinking heart as the Taliban closed girls' schools and forced women inside.

Gathered around the radio, the Sidiqi family sat together listening to the Taliban's statements on Radio Afghanistan--recently renamed Radio Sharia by the city's new governors--and grew ever more despondent. Each night new rules came through the machine. We don't have much of anything left to take away, Kamila thought to herself one night before abandoning all her worries to the comfort of sleep. How many more rules can there be?

None of the girls had left the house since the Taliban took Kabul, and they were convinced they couldn't bear much more confinement. For seven days straight the young women had roamed from room to room reading their favorite, and then their less-favorite, books, tuning in to the news quietly, so no one outside could hear, telling stories to one another and listening to their parents discuss the family's next move. Never before had any of the girls lived for this long within the confines of their courtyard. They knew that many conservative families in the country's rural regions, particularly its south, practiced purdah, the isolation of women from all men except their nearest relatives, but such rules were totally foreign to them. Mr. Sidiqi and his wife had encouraged each of their nine daughters to become a professional, and so far the three oldest had become teachers. The younger girls, who ranged in age from six to seventeen, were still studying and preparing for university. “The pen is stronger than the sword,” Mr. Sidiqi would remind his children while they pored over their books in the evenings. “Keep studying!”

And now, day after dreary day, these energetic, educated girls sat around in their bare feet on pillows in the living room listening to events unfold over the BBC, wondering how long life could continue like this. All of their plans for the future had simply disappeared in what felt like a heartbeat.

Kamila tried to be optimistic. “I'm sure it won't be more than a few months,” she'd say to her sisters when they grew restless and began to snap at each other. But privately she was sick at heart. She ached for her old life, which had been filled with school and friends. And she found it painful to imagine the world outside going on uninterrupted without her or any of Kabul's women. Surely this could not last forever. Yes, she would wear the chadri, but she could not stay indoors with nothing but empty time for much longer; there had to be a way to study or to work, even if the university remained off-limits. There were five girls at home in Khair Khana, and Kamila knew that her father and brother couldn't support them all forever. If this went on much longer, she would have to find a way to help.

But the reports of life on Kabul's streets remained grim. Kamila's brother Najeeb described to his sisters in detail a city that had been transformed. It was true, most stores had reopened, and more food could be found in the markets now that the Taliban blockade had at last been lifted. Prices had even fallen a little since the roads into Kabul had reopened. You could sense the relief in the air now that the fighting had finally subsided and rockets no longer fell on the city each day. Security had instantly improved. But the capital was eerily quiet. Traffic no longer jammed the city's roads. And almost no women could be found on the streets. The two that Najeeb did see one afternoon walked quickly beneath full chadri and kept their heads down.

And something else was new on Kabul's streets: the patrols of the Amr bil-Maroof wa Nahi al Munkir, the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Suppression of Vice, which had been styled after a similar ministry in Saudi Arabia, one of the few countries that supported the Taliban. Fanning out across the city, the Amr bil-Maroof assumed the role of “chief enforcers of moral purity.” Just the name Amr bil-Maroof was now enough to frighten men and women alike. These passionate foot soldiers energetically enforced the Taliban's unique interpretation of Pashtunwali-influenced sharia, or Islamic law. They performed their tasks with a zeal and a severity that even their leaders in Kandahar sometimes found dreadful.

Many of them were barely old enough to grow a beard and wore no uniform, just white or black turbans and shabby shalwar kameez, a baggy knee-length shirt and loose-fitting pants, sometimes covered by a vest. They carried shaloqs, the wooden batons that had so terrified Malika that day in front of the doctor's office, as well as metal antennas and leather whips. At the time of prayer the Amr bil-Maroof's men put their whips to work corralling shopkeepers and yelled at their brothers to “close their stores and come to the mosque.” They patrolled the streets day and night looking for rule-breakers, especially women. If a woman dared to pull back her chadri to steal a look at something she wanted to buy at the market, or if a wrist accidentally slipped out while she crossed an intersection, a member of the Amr bil-Maroof would appear from nowhere to apply swift and brutal “justice,” right there for all to see. Rarely did a man come to the rescue of a woman who was being beaten; everyone knew he would be next if he tried to help. The Talibs hauled their worst offenders, including women accused of infidelity, off to prison, a black hole from which only time and sometimes, for lesser crimes, family money could--occasionally--free them.