Kabul Beauty School (10 page)

When Noor got out of the van, we walked over to the closest group of men. Noor told them that we were looking for about ten workers to move boxes, and half of the men jumped to their feet. A crowd of them followed us across the street. Roshanna and I climbed back into the van, and then all the men who had followed us dove for the entrance of the van. A knot of them got stuck in the door, all arms flailing and faces straining and turbans flying; then one of them managed to grab the back of the passenger seat and pull himself through. About five more tumbled into the van after him, and then another pushing, writhing knot formed in the door. Noor was outside shouting, pulling men away. Finally, another few men got into the van and Noor slammed the door shut; then we headed off to find the shipping container. The men who had made it inside crowded on one side, so they didn’t have to sit near us women. They spoke to one another softly and nodded at me courteously.

The shipping container was lodged at the back of a hospital compound, along with several containers of medical supplies. Noor had to go off to take care of some other things, leaving me and Roshanna alone with the men. Then a man came out of the hospital with a battery-operated tool, and he worked on the big bolts that held the door closed. The outer door was soon cranked open to reveal a big sheet of plywood. When the men pried that aside, there were all the boxes of our beauty products. Two thousand cubic feet of them.

I went to reach for one of the uppermost boxes, and the men rushed forward with outstretched arms and shocked looks on their faces. Roshanna started to laugh. “They’re not used to seeing a woman work this way,” she said.

“We’re all going to have to work this way.” I tipped the box, and it suddenly slid out of my arms, spilling bottles of shampoo all over the ground. The men started picking up the bottles, then addressed a question to Roshanna. They talked back and forth for a few minutes, and she laughed again. “They want to know why you didn’t just wash your hair back in the United States!”

Then Roshanna had to leave, and the men and I were on our own. Since I had to look inside every box because they weren’t marked, I tried to do as much sorting inside the shipping container as I could so we’d have less to move back in later. I kept digging my way toward the back of the container. When I’d find hair color or makeup, I’d toss it to the man in back of me, and he’d toss it to the man in back of him—the chain extended to the ground outside, where one of the men made an orderly arrangement of boxes. The first time I threw a box, it hit the man behind me in the chest and almost knocked him over. I think he figured that a woman wouldn’t really be able to toss it that far.

Soon, though, the men got used to working side by side with me. By then they were tossing boxes to me from the top of the load, up near the roof, and I was doing my best not to fall over. We finally finished sorting and repacked the container, with the boxes that had to be moved to Mary’s near the door. At the end of the day, I gave each of the men some samples of shampoo and conditioner. They must have compared products after they left, because when they came back the next day it seemed they all had developed preferences for one scent or another and wanted new samples. Then friends from an NGO loaned me their cars and drivers. It was about a forty-five-minute drive from the shipping container to Mary’s house, and we had to make fifteen trips, but we managed to move all the boxes of hair color and makeup to her third floor in one day. It was a good thing, too, because that evening it began to rain.

When it first started, everyone in Kabul was thrilled. There had been a drought for seven years, and it had baked the city streets into hard clay, which the thousands of cars and water buffalo and walkers ground into fine grit. Early in those first few rainless mornings of this trip, the skies had been clear. But after just a few hours of traffic, the dust and diesel fumes drifted upward like a yellow fog, hiding the sun, the mountains, even the highest buildings. I was as happy as anyone about the rain, because I had developed the worst cough of my life thanks to the dust. I hacked and hacked all night long, waking people on the other side of the wooden partitions in our bedroom on Mary’s second floor. But the rain only seemed to make things more miserable. The streets turned into mud, and the sewers alongside them overflowed with fecal matter. It was impossible to go anywhere without becoming covered with mud. Whenever it stopped raining for a day, the streets dried out, and the dust was a bigger problem than before. My cough became worse and worse.

And I worried that the rain was going to postpone the biggest item on our agenda: a meeting with prospective students for the school. We had decided that the first women we wanted to reach out to were hairdressers who were already in business. We wanted to help them become more successful. Since there wasn’t yet a reliable mail system in the city, Noor had spent several days before I arrived wandering around, looking for beauty salons. He knocked on the door of every salon and delivered hundreds of invitations to a meeting at Mary’s house. Since public transportation was unreliable even on dry days, we weren’t sure how many women would be able to make it through the mud and the rain. And we didn’t know if the women we sought would be able to break away from their husbands and fathers for this unusual and thus suspicious occasion: a gathering of hairdressers.

I STOOD ON MARY’S ROOF
and peered down to the street below. Against the mud, there was a puddle of blue that shifted and shook with excitement. Hairdressers had arrived for the meeting! Most of them were in blue burqas, but a few were in pale yellow ones—and some were in ordinary street clothes with dark scarves. I spotted several more burqas streaming purposefully down the street toward the house to join the others. I ran down Mary’s stairs, overjoyed.

Some thirty women filed into the house as Mary and I greeted them at the door. They settled themselves on the toushaks in the living room, then rolled the fronts of their burqas up so that the cloth framed their faces like heavy curtains. Some of the women had babies, which they jiggled in their arms to keep them quiet. I went around the room with a platter of baked goods. One of the younger women was stunning, with huge green eyes and brown hair and about the loveliest smile I’d ever seen. She took a small cake and put her hand on my arm.

“Thank you,” she said in a voice about an octave lower than I expected. “Thank you.”

“What is your name?” I tried to remember the words in Dari.
“Namet chest?”

“Baseera.” She repeated it slowly so that I’d catch all the syllables and the roll of the
r
at the end. “Baseera.”

I tried to replicate the music of her voice, and she laughed. “Good,” she said.

She had a face that looked as if it liked to laugh. I was ready to admit her into our first class right then and there.

Mary and I handed out a number to each of the women and took their pictures with the numbers, so that we’d know later who we were talking about. We explained to them that in-depth interviews with Noor would follow and that not all of them would be part of the first class of twenty. Since their faces weren’t covered anymore, Noor couldn’t come in the room. So Mary translated as I welcomed them to the meeting. I explained who I was and what our plans were for the school, then told them I needed to ask them some questions so that we would know how best to design the school to serve them. But first, I said, I’d like them to tell me a little about themselves.

This was like removing a cork from a bottle. Their stories started to pour out at once. Mary got the women to settle down and tell their stories one at a time, then quickly translated.

One woman who looked as if she were my age but was much younger—I was starting to notice how common this was—said she had worked as a hairdresser before the Taliban and had just started again in the last year. She said that she had been wearing the burqa for fifteen years. When she first took it off, the sun was so blinding that it took her three days to be able to walk around without shielding her eyes from the light.

Another woman said she had not been allowed out of her home in eight years. She said that she was depressed and very bored, and that she had come to this meeting without telling her husband. She thought there was a chance her husband might let her come to beauty school if he knew how much money she could make. She had been cutting her daughters’ hair at home, and then her daughters’ teachers’ after they admired her work.

I pointed to Baseera, who was looking at me with wide eyes. “Can you tell us your story?” I asked.

She nodded, and Mary began to translate. “This young lady has been a hairdresser for eight years. Even during the time of the Taliban, she still made money working on hair.”

In fact, Baseera was the sole support of her family during those years, because her husband lost his government job when the Taliban took over. She had customers who were wives of the Taliban, and they would come to her house for wedding hair and makeup even though it was forbidden. Their husbands would drop them off and pretend that they were just visiting. The women would leave Baseera’s house with their hair and makeup hidden under their burqas and their manicures hidden by gloves. Then she got a warning that the Taliban were going to raid her house. She broke her mirrors into pieces and buried them and her other supplies in her yard because it was too dangerous to throw them in the garbage. When the Taliban came, she had to let them in, and they tore her house apart. They beat her husband and put her in jail for two days. Tears flowed down her cheeks as she told this story, and she wiped them away with the hem of her burqa. I had to put my arms around her and hold her. She was twenty-nine years old, but she seemed more like a child. One who both laughed and cried easily.

Then Mary prompted the next woman to speak, and the stories continued. I figured that the women had averaged about ten years as hairdressers. Now I wanted to know how they did things and what they actually knew, so that we’d know how to design the school’s curriculum. So I started pointing to different women and asking questions. How long do you leave a perm solution in? Do you work on women with lice? How do you handle hair that has henna in it? Do you reuse a comb if you’ve dropped it? At this point, the attitude in the room shifted. While the women had been happy to tell their stories, they now seemed anxious that they might appear ignorant. If I had understood Afghan culture better, I would never have put them on the spot like that. I would have questioned the women in private. I didn’t realize that I was toying with their pride in their work, and some of the women got angry. These most often turned out to be the women who knew the least while acting as if they knew the most. Still, I wish I’d handled it differently.

By the end of the meeting, though, everyone seemed to be excited about the school. I was probably more excited than anyone, knowing how much these women were going to be learning and how it would change their businesses. I thought of the boxes of wonderful products we had just moved and could imagine the women trying them out for the first time—breathing in all those exotic fragrances, rubbing the silky conditioners through their fingers. The women began to leave, pulling their burqas or scarves back over their heads. Many of them kissed me on their way out the door. Just as Baseera was kissing me good-bye, Roshanna arrived, and the two of them spoke for a minute.

“I want to know more about this one,” I told Roshanna. “Can you ask her to stay a few minutes longer?”

So the three of us settled on Mary’s toushaks, and Roshanna began asking questions. “She comes from Mazar-e Sharif, in the north of Afghanistan,” she began. Then she listened and translated while I held Baseera’s hand, because she had started to cry again.

Baseera said that, in the late 1970s, the war against Russia was raging near Mazar. Bombs had fallen near the children’s school. Her father was a progressive thinker and wanted Baseera’s two older sisters to stay in school—she herself was only three years old at the time—so he moved the whole family to Kabul, where Baseera’s mother’s brother lived. The father found a nice house for them. He performed what is called a
garroul,
meaning that he gave the owner a large sum of money for the house; after five years, the family could either get some of the money back or keep the house. After they were settled in Kabul, the father went back to Mazar to conduct a final piece of business, but he never returned. Baseera’s anguished mother waited for months to hear from him and finally had to assume that he was killed either by the Russians or by the mujahideen, even though no one ever found his body. She took a job cleaning a school, and eventually, all the girls were students there. In five years, the terms of the garroul were up, and Baseera’s mother decided they should take the money and move to a house that wasn’t as nice. Her wages were meager, and the family was becoming poorer and more ragged. Her brother said that he would take care of collecting the money for her. This role was expected of him as the oldest male relative. But when Baseera’s mother asked him for the money, her greedy brother refused to give it to her and ordered her out of his home. So the family now had no house and no money.