Kabul Beauty School (21 page)

But it seemed that her work never improved. She continued to break things. Or sometimes, things just disappeared and I was never sure if she had thrown them away because she had broken them or if someone had stolen them. I had a hard time believing that Shaz would steal from me, because she often brought me valuables I had left lying around in the wrong place. But finally, a gold ring disappeared from my bedside table and I demanded to know what had happened to it. Shaz, her mother, our chowkidor, our cook—the whole household was caught up in an uproar of accusations and counteraccusations. Finally, Sam suggested that we all go see a psychic mullah he’d heard about. The idea was that everyone who was a suspect would stand in front of the mullah and declare his or her innocence, and then he would be able to decide who was telling the truth. I was looking forward to checking out the psychic mullah, but Shaz’s mother announced that she had found the ring on the floor of the beauty salon. So I never really figured out what had happened.

Then another problem developed with Shaz. One of the students came running into the salon crying with her hands folded up over her chest. I grabbed her, made her lie down, and screamed, “I think she’s having a heart attack.” Topekai and Baseera gathered around to talk to the girl, and she told them that Shaz had grabbed her breasts. “No,” I protested. “I don’t think Shaz would do something like that. Or if she did, she was just playing.” But two of the other students came forward to tell me that Shaz had done the same thing to them, grabbing not only their breasts but their crotches, too. One of them lifted up her tunic so that I could see the side of one breast. There were dark bruises on it.

I called Roshanna and begged her to come over. When she arrived the next day, I sat Shaz down and told her what the students said. “This is sexual harassment,” I told her. “If you were a man, they could put you in jail for this.”

Roshanna translated, but Shaz shook her head as if utterly confused. “She says she does not do these things,” Roshanna said. “She says the other girls tell lies about her.”

I didn’t know what to think. For the next few weeks, I kept asking the students if it had happened again. Several times they said yes, Shaz had grabbed them. I didn’t want to believe this because it reminded me of the ugly man who’d groped me in the mandai. I thought that Shaz might be so starved for sex or affection that grabbing the other girls seemed like the only way to get it. I was trying to rationalize her behavior because I still wanted to help her. But then one day I saw Shaz come up behind one of the students while she was putting on her shoes and grab her breasts. The student clutched herself and began to cry. I flew across the room and pushed Shaz against the wall. “That’s it,” I said. “You’re fired.”

It made me miserable to fire her. It made all the teachers and even the students miserable, too. Shaz was now part of the family; she was like the bad kid whom everyone still loves. All of us moped around for a week. One of my customers who’s a psychologist asked what was wrong, and I explained the situation. “Someone probably has done the same thing to her all her life,” the woman said. And then Shaz came back. She hung around the front of the compound all day and looked inside mournfully every time the chowkidor opened the gate. I finally walked outside and pulled her back in. I put my arms around her, and we both cried. “Just don’t ever do it again,” I told her.

Somehow, being fired seemed to change her. She started remembering to clean the bathroom. She stopped breaking so many things. Her clothes and her hair were cleaner. I was relieved because I had come to love Shaz and I wanted this visual evidence that her life could improve, just as the beauticians’ lives were improving.

Then one day Sam bumped into Shaz’s mother as she was headed for the gate, and she dropped something on the ground. It was one of the flashlights we kept near our bed so that we could find our way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. He fired her on the spot, and none of Shaz’s pleading could make him change his mind.

“If she steal small thing, one day will steal big,” Sam said.

NAHIDA, HER TALIB HUSBAND
, and their son returned to Kabul just before my third class began. They lived with her relatives while she absorbed everything my instructors and I could teach her. I knew Nahida was going to be one of my best students ever. I wished that she were staying with us at the Peacock Manor so that I could see more of her away from the school, but Sam and I would often invite her and her husband over for dinner. Nahida would rattle off business plans. She had so many great ideas! Her husband sat there like a big, dumb rock.

When Nahida left, we kept in touch by phone and e-mail. The salon she opened was hugely successful within months. She printed up business cards and handed them out at weddings. She distributed flyers that offered two cuts for the price of one when a customer brought a friend. She started to make a lot of money, and her husband liked this. But it didn’t make him a better husband. He still beat her because she refused to have sex with him—she didn’t want any more children, and he wouldn’t use birth control. He beat her for a lot of things, and when he couldn’t think of a reason, he beat her for being smart and young and pretty. And especially for being a woman.

When my friends back in Michigan asked what they could do for Afghanistan, I’d have a huge list of things they could do or send. And I’d always ask them to pray for Nahida, that she’d survive this marriage.

She was hiding some of her money, so her husband didn’t really know how successful she was. She worked so hard and was beaten so often that even the first wife started to feel sorry for her. Then Nahida began bringing presents to the first wife—sweets for her children, perfume, a new dress if they were going to a wedding, even a new television. Over time, the two wives became like sisters. Then the first wife became pregnant and had a boy. Nahida was sure this was her ticket out of the marriage. This was what she wanted more than anything in the world. She begged the first wife to convince the husband to divorce her.

“Tell him that I am bad, tell him that I shame him by working outside the home, tell him to divorce me because I only cause trouble for him,” Nahida implored her.

“I will try,” the first wife promised.

The first wife began to whisper these things in the Talib’s ear. She pointed out Nahida’s many failings as a wife and how people in their neighborhood laughed at him because he couldn’t control her. She told him that she herself couldn’t bear to live in the same house with this disrespectful upstart. The Talib took heed of what his first wife was saying. He beat Nahida even more to try to force her to become a fitting wife.

But finally, to keep peace with the first wife, he agreed to divorce Nahida. He even agreed to let Nahida take their son—“the spawn of that evil woman,” according to the first wife’s whispers—even though fathers almost always get to keep the children in a divorce. Nahida moved back into her parents’ house, and they were overjoyed by her return. Now she has her own salon, with several employees. She exports handicrafts from the provinces, works as a translator, and speaks at women’s conferences. She tells me she doesn’t care if she ever marries again, and what’s more, she doesn’t have to.

I
n late spring, I suddenly lost half my funding from the German NGO that had pledged to pay for the second and third classes. The NGO was sponsored by the German government, and its own funding had been cut, so the bad news rolled downhill to me. I had already accepted twenty-five girls for the next class but now had funding for only twelve and a half of them. I’m not a fund-raiser. I’m clueless about how to write up grant proposals and do all the stuff that gets projects funded. So I fell back on the only way I know how to make money. I decided that I would build up the salon business and ask Topekai and a few bright students like Baseera to put in more hours after school with our paying customers. I figured I could bankroll the next class with the salon profits, since there are precious few luxuries for Westerners living in Kabul, and they were eager for some pampering.

I put together flyers about the salon and left them in places that foreigners frequent, like the Western restaurants and the store where they buy alcohol. I also asked the customers who came in to take flyers with them and spread the word in their compounds. Lots of new people started calling to make appointments. Now I had the challenge of telling them how to get to the Peacock Manor in the absence of street signs and addresses. So my directions went something like this:

Go to the Internet café near the rotary in Shar-e-Now, the one near the emergency hospital with the red and white paint on the wall. Take a right, and you’ll then be on the main street in Shar-e-Now. Before you get to the bombed-out movie theater you’ll see a bright yellow building. Turn right there, then drive past the street with all the dead cows. Continue past the old warlord house, then go left at the next street. You will see a blue-and-white-striped box and a sign that says ASSA in black letters. Just ahead, there’s a gray building with a lot of Afghan men hanging out in front, a tailor shop, a compound with a blue gate, and a hand-pump well on the corner. My guesthouse is the one with the blue gate. If you tell me when you’re coming, I’ll be the foreign woman with a yellow scarf standing on the well and talking on her cell phone. There will probably be a small crowd gathered around me.

Lots more people started to come to the salon, meaning that Topekai, Baseera, and Bahar—another bright student from the second class—were exposed to a wide range of foreigners. At first, it seemed that every Westerner who came to the salon did something to shock them.

One young woman came in and wanted a bikini wax. “She is bride?” Topekai asked me, erroneously assuming that Americans also went in for prenuptial hairlessness.

I shook my head. “She’s going off for a week in Cyprus with her boyfriend.”

Another woman came in the door and made a big show of unwrapping her head scarf and struggling out of her long coat. Then she pulled her shirt tightly over her belly, so that we could all see a tiny bulge. “I’m pregnant!” she shrieked joyfully.

Bahar beamed. “You husband, he is happy?” she asked.

“Oh, I’m not married,” the woman replied. “I’m going it alone.”

Another woman came in and introduced herself as someone on the diplomatic staff at one of the embassies. When she took off her coat, all the Afghan beauticians glanced at one another and then ducked their heads to keep from laughing. The woman was wearing a blouse that revealed her chubby midriff and a hideous miniskirt that just barely managed to stretch over her very ample bottom. Even I was shocked! As I cut this woman’s hair, I could hear my girls laughing in one of the back rooms. When she left, I poked my head in the room to see what all the hilarity was about. There was Baseera with her skirt pulled up around her thighs and a pile of towels stuffed in her underwear, strutting back and forth. “I am diplomat!” she said as she sashayed around the room. “I am
big
diplomat!”

Little by little, though, my beauticians became accustomed to the foreigners’ odd ways and learned to maintain straight faces and a professional demeanor. I knew this was a good thing, because if they learned to cater to the foreign crowd, they’d really be able to make good money.

However, I occasionally found myself in the awkward position of having to turn customers away because I was the only beautician they trusted to do their cuts and color, and I didn’t have enough time to take care of all of them. In the States, girls go to beauty school for an entire year. Then they often work at a quick-cut place for several years before they get a job at a nice salon. They work for a few months there as shampoo girls or assistants to the experienced stylists before they have their own customers. My Afghan beauticians got only twelve weeks of beauty school and a few hours apprenticing in the salon, meaning that they weren’t yet prepared to give Western customers the quality they expected. But I knew they could do a good job if they got more practice because they were highly motivated. So I really focused on making them more marketable. If a customer came in wanting a cut and highlights, I’d tell her that I’d do the cut but that I would have Bahar do the foiling—that she did it better than I did, which was true. I also decided to add more services. I had discovered an ob-gyn table way in the back of the shipping container, where I was still making weekly visits to get more supplies. I had no idea why the table was there but realized I could use it for massages, facials, and even pedicures. A Canadian massage therapist had been training Topekai and Baseera, so this was perfect. I started telling customers that we were doing massages and pedicures. The pampering side of the salon—especially the pedicures—really began to boom. In one two-week period, we worked on feet that hailed from Bosnia, Australia, London, the United States, Germany, France, Switzerland, Russia, and the Philippines.

We also started to dabble in the Afghan bride business. This was a surprising development, as I had never anticipated doing bridal makeup. That was what I was training my students to do, and the drag-queen look just wasn’t my specialty anyway. But it turned out that there were a number of Afghan women who had been living in the West for years, returned to the country, and gotten engaged here. Their parents wanted them to go through the traditional Afghan engagement and wedding routine, but these girls were gagging at the idea of extreme makeup and mile-high hair. The first Westernized Afghan woman who found herself in this fix pleaded with me to do her wedding. I agreed, but I set the price high, charging $300 for her makeup and $10 for each member of her bridal party. The going rate for an Afghan bride was about $100 to $160, but I wanted to set my prices so that there would be no danger of my salon competing with those of my students. This first bride came in with all her relatives and friends, and I worked on her makeup for about five hours. I could have done it in two, but it seems that the traditional approach is to stretch it out over five hours and make it an event. At her wedding the bride told everyone that I had done her makeup, so I started to get a lot of calls from other brides in the same predicament.

Even with this extra business, I still wasn’t making enough to pay all the expenses for the school. I had been getting lots of calls from men who wanted to come in but had turned them all down because men simply were not allowed inside beauty salons in Afghanistan. But I ran into so many foreign men who begged me for haircuts and even manicures that I started to feel sorry for them. Afghanistan can be really intense for foreigners who are here a long time. They’re locked up in their embassy or NGO compounds all the time, and when they leave their walls to do some outside work, they never know if their vehicle is the one that will attract a bomb. Whenever I’m out in my car and see one of the four-wheel drives belonging to a big NGO or a tank from one of the peacekeeping forces, I tell my driver to drop back a few hundred feet just in case they’re targeted. So I felt sorry for these men who needed a little luxury in their lives. I also knew they could provide a good income stream. I started working on them in the late afternoons and evenings, after both the school and the regular salon were closed and all my girls had gone home.

But just as all these efforts to expand the salon business began to work, Kabul’s security situation became really bad. It was election season again, only this time the stakes were even higher. Afghan men and women would be voting by secret ballot for a new president in October. There were nearly twenty candidates running, and there was a lot of strife among the different factions putting up candidates. There was also an undercurrent of suspicion in some areas that the United States was going to rig the election to create a victory for its favorite candidate, the current president, Hamid Karzai. And of course, the Taliban was opposed to the elections no matter who won. There had been an increase in kidnappings and bombings and overall violence, and the American Embassy was telling Americans to keep a low profile.

The United Nations had an alert system that applied to its own employees, but most of the NGOs and embassies in town followed their lead. Green City meant you could go just about anywhere, White City meant you could go only to a few highly secure sites outside the compound, and Red City basically meant you should figure out how to evacuate. The United Nations was on White City most of the time in those months. Even though the Peacock Manor didn’t have White City security features—no concertina barbed wire on top of the compound walls, no bomb-filmed windows, no rocket barricade on top of the building—some of the foreigners still managed to sneak out to my salon.

I ignored the alerts myself. It didn’t seem to me that so much fear was warranted as long as you were cautious and respected the culture. My strongest reaction to the White City alerts was annoyance, because they were bad for business. But many of my customers couldn’t manage to maneuver around the White City restrictions. They called to cancel their appointments and wail that they were stuck inside their compounds. After I got a number of these calls, I had a bright idea.

“How about if we come to you?” I asked. “If you can line us up a bunch of customers, I’ll take Sam’s car and fill the trunk with products. Then the girls and I can do hair in your compound for an afternoon.”

Before long we were making regular forays to the different NGO compounds around town. Our customers were so grateful—and so happy for the diversion—that they were giving great tips. After one of these trips, the girls were bouncing in their seats because they had made so much money in tips—and that was on top of what I would be paying them for the work they had done. I asked Baseera how much she had gotten in tips.

“Fifty dollars!” Her green eyes glowed. “My husband not make so many in two weeks!”

SAM KEPT LOOKING AT ME
while I was trying to read a book. We were in our room and the television was on, but he wasn’t following the Bollywood drama. He was staring at me whenever he had the chance, even though he’d deny it when I’d catch him at it.

“What is it?” I said for about the fifth time. “Why are you looking at me?”

He sighed and tapped his pen against his mug of tea, as if it were an egg that he was trying to crack. “I need send money home,” he finally said.