Kabul Beauty School (11 page)

By the time Baseera was eight, she was still going to school but couldn’t live at home. She stayed at the house of one of her teachers and did the housekeeping there, because her mother couldn’t afford to feed her. Baseera missed her mother terribly and saw her only on Fridays, but the teacher was kind, as if Baseera were one of her own daughters. Soon Baseera decided that she wanted to be a teacher, too.

But when she was twelve, her mother engaged her to a twenty-nine-year-old government clerk. Her mother was afraid that, because she had no husband and no money, people might assume bad things about her daughters, maybe even accuse them of being prostitutes. There were also rumors floating around Kabul that men were trying to snatch young girls and sell them in other countries. Baseera didn’t understand any of this. Her cousins teased her that she was engaged to an old man, but she was still playing with dolls and paid no attention. Even at her engagement party, she raced around the room and tumbled with the other children in her fancy velvet dress. When her husband to be bent down and gave her a gold ring, she thought this was just another game.

Over the next two years, her betrothed stopped by and gave her presents, but she still paid him no attention. Then one day, she felt a terrible pain in her back and lay down at her mother’s house. When she stood up, blood streamed down her legs. She called her mother and screamed that she was dying. No, her mother told her after running into the room—this meant that it was now time for her to be married. So when she was fourteen, Baseera was married to the man who gave her the gold ring. She remembered it as a terrible day. The beautician threaded her eyebrows, and she cried from the pain of it, and then she continued to cry with fear of what would come. Her mother had told her only that her husband would do something to her after the wedding that would make her bleed some more. I later learned that mothers didn’t tell their daughters about the details of the wedding night because they wanted the girls to appear innocent of any knowledge of sex. Sheer terror was a good indication of virginity. Baseera said she cried so much before the wedding that the beautician had to keep applying her makeup over and over, because her tears kept washing it away. Later that night, men from her family and the mullah signed the nika-khat in another room while Baseera sat in her old teacher’s lap. The teacher said she was sorry that Baseera had to marry and quit school. Baseera would have made a fine teacher, she said.

When her mother shooed her into a room with her husband later that night, Baseera pressed herself in the corner and shrieked. Her false eyelashes washed away, and she pulled the big, lacquered curls from her hair in despair. Her husband stayed away from her for three days, but on the fourth he insisted. The bloody cloth was presented later to his mother.

When Baseera was nine months pregnant with her first child, there was still war in the country, but not between the mujahideen and the Russians—now the mujahideen factions were fighting with one another. Many people were fleeing Kabul, and her husband thought they should go, too. He said that they could get space on a bus leaving the city, so she agreed. But her labor pains began before they could board the bus, and she and her husband and sister-in-law went to a hospital. It was closed and all the staff was gone—and there were no lights because the power had been off for days—but it was still crowded with people hoping to find someone left who could care for them. Baseera had her first baby on the cement floor of the dark hospital. She didn’t cry out. Instead, she bit her wrist when the pain was bad and pinched her sister-in-law, who was the one who wound up delivering the baby. It was a girl. Her husband was happy about this, even though neither she nor anyone else in the family was.

Baseera had another daughter during the civil war and yet another during the reign of the Taliban. Her labor pains for the third came after the 11:00
P.M.
curfew, and everyone was afraid to take her to the hospital without official permission. But she hurt so much that she had to walk, so she went outside. Her family brought toushaks out of the house and laid them down on the sidewalk, and she had her third girl near her front steps. She had finally had a boy only a few months ago. She wanted to come to beauty school because she didn’t know anything about cutting or coloring hair. And she never wanted to wind up like her mother, so poor that she’d have to send her children to live with someone else.

By this time, all three of us were crying and had streaks of smudged makeup all over our cheeks and hands. This was the first time I had heard one of these sad Afghan stories in such detail. Roshanna’s family had certainly had a hard time, as had every Afghan family. But they had triumphed and stayed together, and she had a good job. Baseera’s story broke my heart. No wonder she seemed like a sorrowful child. It was almost as if she was still the bewildered girl of fourteen who wasn’t ready to be an adult.

That night I was more determined than ever to make this school work for Baseera and others like her. My sole concern was continuity. I worried that there was only Noor to watch over the school when the American hairdressers weren’t there. Not only did he know little about hairdressing, but he wouldn’t even be allowed to walk into the school once it opened. There just wasn’t anyone in Kabul who was qualified to run the school on a daily basis. As I went to bed that night, I wondered if I would be able to take a longer chunk of time—say six months—away from my own customers to work here. I wondered if I could stand being away from my mother and sons for that long or if I could ever learn to get around Kabul with the same ease that Mary did. I had my doubts about whether I was up to this. Still, I felt that someone from the team would eventually have to stay in Kabul to keep the school going.

“WAKE UP!”

I opened my eyes to see Mary bending over me. The last thing I remembered was the mullah rousing me at 4:30 in the morning with the call to prayer, after I finally fell asleep on one of the toushaks in her living room. My cough had gotten so much worse during the night that the force of it was shaking the wooden partitions in my bedroom. I’d tried to muffle it so that I wouldn’t wake everyone else up, but I could hear sighs and people tossing in their blankets all around me. So I finally went downstairs, hoping to get a few solid hours of sleep. I was scheduled to leave in a few days, but I was afraid the airlines wouldn’t even permit me to get on a plane. Concern over the spread of SARS was at its height, and I heard that the airlines were putting people into quarantine if they had bad coughs. I was already sad about leaving Afghanistan but didn’t want to stay here—or in Pakistan—in some back room filled with SARS suspects.

“Wake up, Debbie,” Mary said again as my eyes closed. “I have something I want to show you.”

The light coming in the windows was dim, and there wasn’t much noise yet from the street. I knew it had to be really early if the noise from the street hadn’t begun. “What time is it?”

“Put your clothes on.” Mary’s voice trailed behind her as she went outside. “You need some fresh air.”

Before I knew it, we were in a taxi headed out of the city. When I asked her what we were doing, she shook her head mysteriously. One of her Afghan helpers—a boy named Achtar, whose arm had been mangled in an accident—was sitting in front with the driver, and he just smiled at me. The taxi went so far out of town that it finally left all the kebab stands, gas stations, and melon wagons behind, and started up a mountain road. It stopped, and we got out. I couldn’t see why we were stopping, because there was nothing there but the mountain and the road. Then Mary and Achtar started off on a little path through the rocks, and I followed them. We walked and walked, and finally came to a rock bridge over a stream, and everything was green beneath us. Farther downstream, young girls carried buckets of water on their heads. I saw a village in the distance. Some men walked toward us on the path, and they exchanged sharp words with Mary. I asked her what they said. “Taliban territory,” she replied. We walked past fields and over more bridges. Again, men walked past us and said something to Mary, and again she snapped back at them. When I asked her what they said, she shrugged. “Taliban territory.” We finally came to an old, old city where a narrow street wound between walled compounds.

I was really a mess. I hadn’t had my morning coffee, my head wasn’t covered, and my sweater was so short that it didn’t even cover my butt. I was just so wrong for this place, but Mary kept on going as if this was the most natural thing in the world. Then we got to Achtar’s house, which was a hut made from sun-dried mud bricks.

“He made the bricks himself,” Mary said, and Achtar pointed out the bits of straw glinting in the bricks. “He also built the hut himself,” she continued. “He’s very proud of this, because his family used to live in a tent.” Achtar ushered us inside, where his father sat on the carpet waiting for us. He looked as if he were a thousand years old, with a chest-length white beard, a black turban with a bolt of blue plaid cloth wrapped around it, and indistinct gray eyes that drifted around the room. I realized that he was blind. Achtar’s mother came into the room carrying a big pot of tea. She was tiny, not much bigger than the boy. I was half afraid that I’d get dysentery from the tea, but it would have been impolite to refuse it. So I drank the tea while Mary talked and talked. It was like a dream, sitting there with the boy and the tiny woman and the blind man, and I could feel the cool, clean mountain air settling my cough. I was struck by the idea that beyond the war-torn buildings and the sad stories of the people who had survived the bombs, there was something magical about Afghanistan. I wondered again if I could live here myself, as Mary did. I wondered if I could be as sure-footed among these people.

There was one more dreamlike place that I visited before leaving. Westerners had started to whisper of an Irish pub—the first bar in the post-Taliban era—that had opened in Kabul, and a few of us went to try to find it. We drove around the neighborhood where it was reputed to be without seeing any signs of a bar; then finally someone decided that the gate with the really big cluster of buff-looking guys with machine guns and no turbans had to be the place. They checked our passports, searched us, made us sign our names on a sheet, and then they opened the gate. When we stepped inside, it was as if we had jumped four thousand miles. There were tables with umbrellas and gardens. Inside the building there were a bar to lean against, pool tables, and dartboards. The place was crowded with people from all over the world; I was sure I could hear a different language at every table. You couldn’t actually buy liquor, no doubt because the proprietors had promised the authorities that they wouldn’t sell alcohol. What you could buy were coupons, and then you traded the coupons in for drinks. We had a lot of fun that night, getting away for a few hours from the dusty, crowded, complicated Kabul just outside the gate.

We went back two days later, and it was all gone. The guards had disappeared, the gates were locked, and we could see only a dark, empty building through a crack in the wall. I heard later that they had gotten a bomb threat and decided the money they could make providing Westerners with an escape wasn’t worth the danger.

T
he women watched me with solemn eyes as I approached the easel and painted a big red circle on a piece of paper. “Red,” I announced.

Anisa translated this into Dari, and they all nodded.

“Pretty easy so far, huh?” I added. “I bet you could have told me that yourselves!” After Anisa translated; the twenty women in pale blue uniforms all laughed. Roshanna gave me a thumbs-up sign from the back of the group.

After an agonizing wait of five months, I was finally back in Kabul to teach color theory, which was my part of the Beauty Without Borders curriculum. I was so excited to return that it was all I could do to stop grinning. Anisa was an Afghan-Canadian hairdresser who was one of the other volunteers. We were both still pinching ourselves that we were helping to launch this amazing project.

I took a deep breath and painted blue and yellow circles a foot below and to the left and right of the red one, as if the three balls were tucked inside the angles of a triangle. Then I mixed colors to make an orange circle between the red and yellow circles, a green circle between the yellow and blue circles, and a violet circle between the blue and red circles. I painted black lines connecting the red and green circles, the yellow and violet circles, and the orange and blue circles. It looked as if I was painting a sort of blobby, multicolored daisy. But with my three jars of primary colors, I planned to explain how they could turn a brunette into a redhead with blond highlights. Or green highlights, whatever the customer wanted.

I had been in town for only a few days. Noor had picked me up at the airport and apologized right away that there wasn’t a room reserved for me. But I wasn’t worried about that. I told him just to drive to the beauty school and I’d find a room in the nearest guesthouse. Sure enough, we found one just down the street from the Women’s Ministry. It was in a big, clean white house with bunnies and a rooster running around in the yard. There was no hot water when I went to take a shower that night, but really, I hadn’t expected it.

The next morning I walked to the beauty school, and it was just as lovely as I’d hoped it would be. The walls were a creamy white, and there were colorful pictures and shining arrays of product everywhere. There was the music of women’s voices, women’s laughter—the sounds of women taking care of one another—that is just part of a salon and beauty school. To me, these sounds are a sensory feast—like stepping into a hot bath or opening the door of an oven where cookies are baking—that always makes me feel good. One of the Afghan-American hairdressers was demonstrating scissor techniques on a student’s hair, and they all looked up with big smiles as I came in. Roshanna broke away from the group and threw her arms around my neck. All twenty students were dressed in blue uniforms. They looked so different from the nervous, burqa-cloaked gathering we had seen in that first meeting back at Mary’s house. I looked to see if Baseera was among them but found out later that Noor hadn’t picked her for this class.

I told the women how much I was looking forward to working with all of them, then stayed in the background to watch. In the afternoon, I worked in the salon with some of the other hairdressers, and the students watched me. There was a funny moment when one of the women who worked in the ministry came in for a haircut. When I pulled out a blow dryer after I finished cutting, she gasped as if I had pulled a gun on her. She had never seen a blow dryer before and had no idea why I was pointing it at her head. When I turned it on and hot air blasted out, she screamed and jumped out of the chair.

A few days later, I gathered the class for our first session and handed out small color wheels for each of the students to consult. As Anisa translated, I painted my own version of a color wheel and started to go through the basics of color theory. I talked about primary colors, secondary colors, and complementary colors. I explained that complementary colors are opposite each other on the color wheel. I pointed to the colors I had painted on my easel—red was opposite green, orange was opposite blue, and so on. They nodded.

“Does anyone have any idea what this has to do with hair?” I asked.

They were polite but clueless. “No,” several replied meekly.

“Anyone want to make a guess?” I looked around the room. “Roshanna?”

She made a little face, clearly regretting that she had ever befriended me.

I explained that underneath everyone’s primary hair color, there is a contributing pigment. Someone’s hair might be black, but when you bleach it you often find that orange is the contributing pigment underneath. So if you want to change someone’s hair color, you have to take that underlying pigment into account and counteract it by selecting a color from the other side of the wheel. If orange is a contributing pigment but the client doesn’t want orange hair, you’d pick a hair color with a blue base—like blond—to counteract the orange. To demonstrate this, I smeared some blue paint over my orange circle and showed them how the smear turned brown. “See that?” I asked. “I’ve used the complementary color to get rid of the orange. Understand?”

Oh yes, they all assured me sweetly. They understood.

That afternoon at an Internet café, I sent an e-mail to my friends in Michigan telling them about my first class. As I looked at the date on the e-mail, I had such an odd combination of feelings. It was September 11, two years after the terrorists’ attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. That was the event that made the world suddenly take notice of Afghanistan and realize that Osama bin Laden and other extremists had a stranglehold on the country. That was the event that triggered America’s invasion to drive out the Taliban. And of course, that was the event that had wound up propelling me and the other Beauty Without Borders volunteers to Afghanistan. I knew that September 11 was a day of public mourning back in America, but it was an ordinary day in Kabul. As I looked out the window, cars honked and maneuvered around one another, shopkeepers arranged their wares, and pedestrians hurried along, wrapping their faces against the wind and the dust. Still, I felt a new burst of determination. I wanted to make sure that the beauty school—and the new chance that it offered the women of Afghanistan—would be one of the good things to come out of September 11.

The next day, I thought I’d start the class by reviewing what we’d covered the day before. I picked up a lock of a young woman’s long brown hair, and said, “What do you do if you want to turn her into a blonde? What are some of the things you have to think about?” No one even tried to answer. Instead, they fidgeted, their kohl-rimmed eyes darting toward the door, toward the row of mannequin heads, toward the salon capes hanging on the wall. Anywhere but at me. Even Roshanna ducked behind one of the other girls when I looked her way. I tried some of the other concepts we had talked about the day before. The color wheel? Contributing pigments? Mixing red and yellow to make orange? They all just looked at me as if I had suddenly decided to give them the formula to build a rocket. By the end of the day, I was tired and frustrated. I was starting to doubt my ability to teach.

On the third day, it was the same impasse all over again. I stood in front of them for hours talking about color theory, but they just didn’t get it. And they had to get it, or else they’d never be able to color someone’s hair properly. By the end of the day, they looked miserable, and I’m sure that I looked miserable, too. I decided maybe we’d just try doing some color together, using a board of hair swatches that one of the manufacturers had supplied. However, I couldn’t find it. I finally looked at the girls and clicked my scissors in the air.

“We’re just going to have to make swatches out of your hair!” I announced. When Anisa translated this, they all shrieked and put their hands over their heads. Long hair was still a really big deal in Afghanistan. The long-haired girls felt like the romantic heroines from the Bollywood movies from India that they all watched, and their husbands often demanded that they keep their hair long. Even their parents wanted them to keep it long, because long hair made unmarried girls more marriageable. But I swooped around them with my scissors and snipped away small strands for a new swatch board. I got about ten swatches alone from one girl who had hair down to her butt. There was so much shrieking and laughter that one of the ministry guards finally knocked on the door. I made a face at the students and opened the door, thinking that the guards were going to want to march me out to the street for making too much noise. “You make
us
happy with all that laughter!” they said, smiling apologetically. “But please not so loud. People are asking what goes on in here.”

That night I lay on my miserable bed at the guesthouse and cried. I had been so excited about starting this beauty school, but now I felt as if all I was doing was torturing the students. What I was telling them seemed so simple to me—it had always seemed simple to me—but they were still clueless. I knew they weren’t stupid. We had carefully interviewed them to make sure we picked hairdressers who would really be able to make use of what they learned and make their own businesses stronger. And they had caught on to the other concepts quickly. So it seemed that this was my failure—my big, fat Afghanistan failure—and I didn’t know what to do about it. Then Val and Suraya started pounding on my door.

When I had gotten my room at this guesthouse five days earlier, I saw that it was full of Afghans who had been living in Europe, America, or Australia. They had returned for various reasons—some to work for NGOs, some to look for family property that had been abandoned during the wars, some to visit old friends. I was thrilled to find myself in the midst of them, thinking this was the best of all possible combinations: Afghans who also spoke English. But it turned out that most of them had very little interest in speaking to me. They were caught up in the excitement and heartbreak of rediscovering Kabul, and they were eager to use their native tongue again, not English. I’m sure I would have been the same way, but it made it hard for me to make friends. I was terribly lonely there until I saw someone else who looked as out of place as I felt. That was Val, a Serbian-American photographer and husband of a gorgeous Afghan-American journalist named Suraya. The three of us became instant, indispensable friends.

“After three days of class, they just look at me like I’m speaking Greek,” I told them. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to teach them anything!”

“You have to be patient, Debbie,” Suraya said.

“It’s been three days already!”

“More patient than that. These women have been so traumatized. They’ve fled war after war after war, and they’re still surrounded by chaos. And lots of them haven’t even been out of their houses for years.”

“I know that,” I said. “That’s why I thought they’d be so ready to learn something new.”

“Yes, but they haven’t had to learn anything new in ages. You know, it’s like a car—if you haven’t driven it in five years, it’s not going to start up right away. That’s what their brains are like.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not a freaking mechanic. I don’t know how to get them started again.”

“Didn’t you do disaster relief training?” Val asked. “Doesn’t some kind of short-term memory loss come with post-traumatic stress?”

After we hung around and ate some dinner, I thought back to my disaster relief training in 2001, before I’d even known where Afghanistan was on the map. All of a sudden, it seemed so obvious to me that these women—and maybe everyone in Afghanistan—had post-traumatic stress syndrome. It might be true that I was a lousy teacher, but they’d been through so much and were still going through so much that it had to be hard to concentrate on new things. It would be hard even if they were working with someone who’d been teaching all her life. So I bucked up and determined to try again.

And the next day, I had a breakthrough. I was trying one more time to get across the idea of the contributing pigment as something you had to counteract in order to get the color right. They were all looking at me with courteous incomprehension—blank if benign stares—and I was groping around for an analogy. “Think of it as Satan!” I finally said, pointing at a patch of orange paint. “It’s this evil thing in the hair that you have to fight. You have to use the opposite color to keep it from taking over.”