The Underground Girls of Kabul (9 page)

The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is most often described as a strict Muslim society. Regardless of personal beliefs, the
appearance
of being anything other than very pious here can harm one’s reputation and present dangers. To complicate things further in a largely illiterate society, Afghans often differ on what exactly constitutes “a good Muslim.”
The largest religious authority in the country, the National Council of Religious Scholars, or the Ulama Council, consists of three thousand members from around the country—most of whom have a mujahideen background from the 1980s. The council has been
known to preach whatever suits its members’ shifting alliances and political purposes, frequently denouncing the presence of foreigners and issuing harsh decrees to limit the role of women in society.

Louis Duprée described this contradiction in his work on Afghanistan: “Islam, in essence, is not a backward, anti-progressive, anti-modern religion, although many of its interpreters, the human, action component, may be backward and anti-progressive.” It is the classic curse of organized religion—when its
interpretation
is hijacked by mortals as a means to control others.

To Azita faith is, and should be, personal: “I go to mosque. I go to the general prayer on Fridays. I believe when I pray that God listens, and that if you help others, God will love you more. Sometimes for my work, I go to the embassies, where people smoke and drink. I don’t do that. But I would not say anything bad about those people who do. I believe everyone can have their own idea, their own belief. So that is my version.”

W
HEN SHE RETURNS
home at the end of the day, various supplicants have already lined up outside her apartment complex, where there are no guards or any other security provisions. One needs a job. Another asks her to broker a family conflict. They will all expect a meal and a place to sleep for the night, in her two-bedroom apartment. In Azita’s words: “As an MP, you are a guesthouse, a restaurant, a hospital, and a bank.”

Constituents regularly ask to borrow money. Azita has no savings, but to decline without at least trying to offer a small travel contribution, for instance, could be seen as hostile. But it would not be as bad as turning someone away who needed a place to sleep. That is simply not done. It would risk having someone go back to Badghis saying Azita is a lazy and haughty representative who does not care about her people.

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.”

B
Y 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.”

I
T 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.

S
HUBNUM
’
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 abusive 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.

S
LOWLY
, 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.