It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War (12 page)

Women of Jihad series for the
New York Times Magazine
, November 2001.

I was getting photographic material and access I wasn’t seeing in other publications and decided to pitch my first story to the
New York Times Magazine—
which was entirely separate from the newspaper, with a different set of editors. They accepted. It was another milestone for me: my first publication in a magazine, and one of the publications most renowned for powerful documentary spreads.

The period after September 11 gave young photographers who hustled—and who were willing to go to places like Pakistan and Afghanistan and eventually Iraq—an unparalleled opportunity to make a name for themselves. Those weeks in September launched an entire generation of journalists who would come of age during the War on Terror.

 • • • 

W
E EDGED CLOSER TO THE INVASION.
Ordinary Pakistanis, loyal to their Muslim brothers across the border, began sneering at us, the infidel journalists, and staging protests in the streets. Men doused effigies of President Bush in kerosene and ignited their lighters, screaming, “Down, down America.” I was caught up in the middle of these protests, cloaked in my tentlike chador, one of few women among the men.

One day I went to one of these demonstrations with a handful of my male colleagues. Though I was dressed as a Muslim—respectfully, with not a strand of hair showing—the Pakistanis knew I was a foreign woman simply because I was carrying a camera, working, trespassing in a man’s world. To them, that was enough to merit a quick feel on any part of my body. They perceived foreign women based on what they saw in movies, often porn movies: easy and available for sex. I tried not to make a scene in front of my peers. I didn’t want my gender to determine whether or not I could cover breaking news, so I continued photographing, ignoring the sweeping of hands on my butt, the occasional grab.

Once President Bush went up in flames, my colleagues were nowhere to be found. I tried to focus on shooting, but this time there were not a few hands on my butt but dozens. And this time it wasn’t a subtle feel but an aggressive, wide-handed clutch, butt to crotch, back to front. I kept shooting. A combative Western woman would elicit terrible anger from these men. I tried holding my camera with one hand and swatting them with the other. It didn’t work. I tried turning around, looking the men in the eye and saying “Haram,” which means “forbidden, sinful, shameful,” to show them I understood that their actions were unacceptable in Islam.

It didn’t work. Adrenaline was raging all around me, adrenaline of hundreds of unmarried, sexually frustrated men who had no work and little education. They hated the West for America’s policies in their region, even more so for the war that was about to happen. Effigies burned around me. The masses screamed, “Down with America!” I had fifteen hands on my butt. I paused, lowered my camera with its beast of a lens—about five pounds and twelve inches long—and waited for the next hand.

The second I felt something, I did a karate back-kick I’d learned in middle school.

I turned around, “
Haram!
Don’t you have sisters? Mothers? Aren’t you Pakistani men Muslim? Would you allow another man to treat your sister or mother like this?”

And I whacked the man directly behind me over the head with my lens. His eyes rolled back in their sockets, and he staggered.

The men around me suddenly stopped and stared.

I didn’t wait to find out what happened to him; instead I sprinted back to the car, where I found my male colleagues, lounging, all of them smitten with their afternoon’s work, checking the backs of their digital cameras for their prizewinning photographs, completely oblivious to what I had gone through to compose even one frame.

 • • • 

T
HE
P
AKISTANI GOVERNMENT BEGAN
monitoring our movements closely. At Green’s Hotel the cluster of journalists sat around discussing the possibility of being attacked by fundamentalists or Taliban sympathizers in the middle of the night. It was terrifyingly thrilling. A few of us prowled the hotel looking for escape routes: back doors, the roof, our bedroom windows. I wondered about young, curious Mohammed from the embassy. Was he back in Afghanistan? Was he fighting?

Alyssa was wide-eyed and manic, convinced the Taliban were coming any minute. She chose the ledge outside our window as our escape route; if they came, she said, we would crawl along the narrow ledge and jump to the next building only a few feet over.

It wasn’t enough, we thought; we need a disguise. We enlisted the help of our female Pakistani interpreter and went to the market to buy blue burqas and the golden, rubbery shoes worn by Afghan refugees in the camps. Our interpreter explained that there was an art to walking in a burqa; we couldn’t just rely on the giant blue sheath to disguise us. She gave us a lesson in burqa walking. In our cramped hotel room we donned our burqas, tight netting concealing our eyes, and walked back and forth, from wall to wall.

“Not so confident,” she instructed. “Hunch your shoulders. Focus your eyes on the ground. You American women are too self-confident. Humble. Be humble.”

She tried to strip away the self-confidence we had spent years building up. We pretended to climb onto the backs of trucks by climbing on and off the bed, our burqas tangling around our ankles, tripping us as we crumbled to the floor in fits of anxious laughter.

 • • • 

O
N
O
CTOBER 6,
the night before the United States bombed Afghanistan, I got an e-mail from Uxval. “I want a girlfriend in flesh and blood,” it said, “not an Internet girlfriend.”

My professional high crashed. I called him immediately.

“Please, Uxval,” I begged in my mediocre Spanish, which failed me whenever I was upset. “I love you. I need to stay here just a few more weeks. The war is about to begin, and I will be home soon.”

“No.
No quiero esperar más.
” (I don’t want to wait anymore.) He had waited for three weeks. His voice was cold.

The telephone line crackled. Alyssa was sleeping, and I burrowed myself in the tiny bathroom with the stained toilet, pleading with him to wait for me.

“Please, my love. I am working for the
New York Times
! It is so important for my career to be here. A few weeks is nothing. Just give me a little more time.”

He was resolute. “I want a girlfriend who is here with me every day. Not on e-mail or on the phone.” He hung up.

I cried out loud, waking Alyssa with my sobs. “What happened?” she asked. “Is everything OK, baby?”

“Uxval just broke up with me.” I felt stupid even uttering the words. We were about to go to war.

“Oh, baby, I am sorry. But don’t worry about him . . .” she trailed off, half-asleep. “There will be others. If he can’t understand your life now, it will only get worse.”

 • • • 

T
HE
U
NITED
S
TATES BEGAN
its aerial bombing campaign in Afghanistan. None of the journalists in Peshawar tried to cross into Afghanistan at that point; as far as we knew, the Taliban still controlled the country. It would be suicide to go in until the Taliban fell. But we knew the fall of the Taliban was imminent.

The morning after the campaign started, I returned to the mosque where I had routinely visited and photographed Pakistan’s women fundamentalists. From the moment I entered, I felt uneasy. As a journalist, I assumed I would be viewed as a neutral observer, not as a propagator of American actions overseas. But in the doorway of the mosque one of the women I had photographed said, “Please. The bombing has started. The Americans are killing our Muslim brothers. You, American, are not welcome here anymore.”

I soon went off my long-sought-after assignment for the
New York Times
, claiming I needed a break, and flew almost nine thousand miles back to Mexico City. My roommate Michael greeted me at the door of our apartment with a confused look.

“What are you doing here? Isn’t the Taliban about to fall?”

“Uxval dumped me last week.”

“
So?
You came home for
that
?”

I wanted to board the next flight back to Pakistan. I felt like an idiot. “Yes. I need to see him face-to-face.”

I put my camera bag and luggage down in my room, put on my gym clothes, trudged over to my dismal, smelly gym, and got on the cheap stair-climber. I was so confused by what I had done. I was no longer heartbroken, no longer crying. For the first twenty-four hours after arriving in Mexico, I didn’t even call Uxval.

He heard through friends that I was back and showed up at my door as if nothing had ever happened and picked me up and carried me directly to the bedroom.

Uxval had no idea what I had sacrificed professionally to fly home to win him back. His life was exactly as I had left it: working during the day, riding bikes in the afternoon, drinking icy beers at night. I wanted to hate him, but I was deeply in love with him. Less than a month later, on the morning of my twenty-eighth birthday, we watched the fall of Kabul on television in Mexico City, and I imagined all the journalists I had met in Peshawar scrambling over the border to get the story. I couldn’t have been farther from the action. I wasn’t sure whether I had made the right decision in flying back to Mexico—whether I wanted my personal life or my career to dictate the decisions I made, where I lived, and how I lived. But I knew that I felt unsettled, watching Kabul fall on the small TV we’d bought after the attacks of September 11. I was in the wrong place.

The Taliban’s only remaining Afghan stronghold was in the southern part of the country, in Kandahar. As they had in Peshawar, journalists were now camping out in Quetta, the Pakistani city closest to Kandahar, so they could rush in after the Americans attacked. I called Marcel in New York and let him know I wanted to go back. The
New York Times Magazine
put me on assignment. I promised Uxval I wouldn’t be gone long.

 • • • 

I
N
Q
UETTA
a whole new group of about a hundred journalists was holed up in the incongruously luxurious five-star Serena Hotel, one of several hotels in South Asia built by the Aga Khan, the billionaire leader of an Islamic sect. We indulged in long breakfasts, visited the horrific Afghan refugee camps, and waited for the border to open.

Quetta was even creepier than Peshawar; there were no shops or places to walk around, and two cinemas showing American movies were attacked after the bombing started. Alcohol was banned, so we drank a lot of tea, occasionally swigging some smuggled whiskey out of water bottles. World-renowned photojournalists—everyone from Gilles Peress to Alexandra Boulat to Jerome Delay—stayed in rooms just down the hall from mine. I walked around starstruck and giddy.

One morning I was having breakfast and my phone rang. It was Uxval. My eyes lit up, and I stepped away from the table to spew my daily
Te quiero
s (I love you’s) before heading out to work. When I sat back down at the table, Gilles Peress, who had covered Iran and Bosnia, among many other conflicts, looked at me, expressionless, and said, “Was that your boyfriend?”