Kabul Beauty School (28 page)

I think that he had once been a good husband and that she had loved him. They lived with his parents, who were quite old, and Bahar happily cared for his parents as well as their two children. Her husband had been a police officer in Kabul before the Taliban came to power, and they let him stay on in the job. But this quickly turned out to be very tough for him. He was often required to enforce their ridiculous edicts about white shoes and music and such. Worse, he had to stand by and watch as the Taliban brutalized men and women for the tiniest infractions and help maintain order during public executions. At some point, he ran afoul of a group of Taliban and they turned on him. They beat him so badly that he suffered a brain injury that caused all sorts of complications—depression, memory loss, and uncontrolled rage. He couldn’t work anymore.

He became a monster. He’d lock Bahar and their children in one of the rooms in the family house and leave, sometimes for days. His parents were in the rest of the house, but they were so senile that they didn’t notice anything was wrong. There was still food in the house, so the parents foraged and fed themselves. But Bahar and the children had nothing to eat. Worse still, Bahar was pregnant with their third child. Her husband locked her up without food so often that the baby was starving in her womb. He beat her often, too. There was no one she could turn to for help—certainly not their Taliban overlords, since they never thought wives had valid grievances against husbands. Bahar’s third child was born with disabilities, doubtless because of this abuse. She is six years old now and still can’t walk.

When the Taliban were driven out, Bahar was finally able to get out of the house. She fought with her husband and told him she was going to work because he couldn’t work. Her family finally had enough to eat again when she got the job as a kindergarten teacher.

She started working at the salon after graduation. Her specialty was manicures and pedicures, and her light, gentle touch pleased the customers. They tipped her well, and her monthly income shot up from forty to nearly four hundred dollars. The only problem was still her husband. He used to call her cell phone all day long to demand that she explain what she was doing. Sometimes she had to rush out in the middle of the day because he was in the grip of one of his rages and was beating their children. She’d startle and flinch when her phone rang because she was still so afraid of him.

But as she made more money, Bahar became stronger and more independent. There were several times when I heard her speak sharply to her husband when he called and tell him not to bother her. Finally, she stopped answering the phone if he called too many times. Even when he wasn’t calling, she expressed nothing but disdain for him.

Then one day Bahar asked me if she could take a week off from work. She said she’d been saving her money to take someone in her family to an important doctor in Pakistan. I figured she was taking her child, so I didn’t ask further. But at the end of the day when Bahar was primping for rozi joma, I followed her outside to take a look at her husband. He stood waiting in his clean, dark shalwar kameez, his beard neatly trimmed, his face kind and proud. I didn’t even recognize him. Somehow the doctor in Pakistan had managed to return him to some version of the man he had been before the Taliban beat the decency out of him. I had never met this version, but clearly, Bahar was overjoyed to have him back.

THE SATELLITE PHONE RANG
in the middle of the night. On the third ring, I crawled across Sam’s body to answer it. It was some man speaking Dari, so I knew the call didn’t have anything to do with trouble in Michigan. But I had other worries when the phone rang at night, so I jostled Sam and laid the phone on top of his ear. “It’s not about Robina, is it?”

He raised his head and listened. “Not about Robina. Nothing wrong.”

Still, I had a hard time going back to sleep. I always worried about Robina and her sisters at night.

I had met Robina a few months after we moved to the Oasis. She walked into the compound one morning as I was sitting outside drinking my coffee. None of my beauticians had arrived yet, and I thought she was a customer. She wore a stylish blue jacket and shoes that looked as if they had come from Italy. I thought she might have been one of the UN workers—maybe from France or Spain—who had dodged security precautions and braved the dust to get a manicure. But when I looked her over at a closer distance, I could see that she didn’t need a manicure. Everything about her was already impeccably groomed.

“Good morning,” she said. “This is Oasis?” She held out a copy of the
Afghan Scene,
the local magazine that ran my ad for the salon.

I nodded.

“I am here for job?”

Lots of Afghan women had asked for jobs in the salon, but I didn’t want to hire anyone who hadn’t been through some sort of beauty school. I made an exception, though, for Robina. I could tell just by looking at her that she would know how to cater to my Western clientele.

Robina was thirty-three and had recently returned to Afghanistan from many years of refugee life in Iran. She came to me as an experienced hairdresser. She added a whole new look to the Oasis, with her heart-shaped face, high cheekbones, artfully highlighted red hair, and fashionable clothes. Although Topekai had a strong following by then, many of my customers weren’t always sure if my other two beauticians could fix their hair the way they wanted. In part, this was because Baseera and Bahar didn’t have a high-fashion look. My customers didn’t hesitate a second when I told them that Robina would handle their cuts or color. Customers like to see a beautician who has the sort of look about her that they want themselves.

But it wasn’t just Robina’s look that made her different from my other beauticians. Everything about her was different—everything, that is, except the difficulty of being a woman in Afghanistan.

Robina’s family had left Kabul when she was five years old, just before the war against the Russians started and long before anyone had even heard of the Taliban. They’d settled in Iran because her father was a great fan of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, a pro-Western ruler whose modernization efforts included suffrage for women. But the shah also generated huge resentment among both Islamic clerics and democrats. His overthrow in 1979 paved the way for Ayatollah Khomeini and the revolution that would wind up creating an Islamic republic in Iran. Robina’s father, however, saw the shah as a force of enlightenment in the Middle East. He even named one of his daughters after the shah’s third wife.

Growing up in Iran, Robina had advantages that most of my girls couldn’t have imagined. She had loving parents who weren’t at all displeased to have three daughters; they doted on their daughters as much as they did their three sons. Her family was also fairly prosperous, so she and her sisters never went without food or other necessities. Her father was a wholesaler of clothes and perfume, and he’d bring home samples to his wife and daughters. The women of the family covered themselves with big scarves when they went out, especially as Iran became a harsher climate for women. But at home they wore slacks and short-sleeved shirts, just as if they were girls in Michigan.

And unlike most parents of Afghan girls, Robina’s mother and father weren’t about to force her to marry anyone she didn’t like. Iranian boys asked for her hand; when she didn’t want them, her father sent them away. Afghans who lived in Iran asked for her hand; when she didn’t want them, her father sent them away, too. Afghans who lived back in Kabul asked for her hand. Her father begged her to say no, because he couldn’t stand the idea of her moving so far away. She did say no and continued to live at home. There, she and her sisters had a kind of social life that simply didn’t exist in their homeland. They were allowed to go out with groups of young men and women—together!—for picnics, hikes, and tame little parties.

Iran had welcomed Afghan immigrants at first, but the welcome ran out as more and more Afghans poured across the border during the wars. Soon the Iranian government began slapping restrictions on the Afghans living within its borders. It became difficult for them to find jobs, own homes or cars, or even have telephones. Robina told me that many Iranians became hostile to the Afghans in their midst, complaining that Afghans were taking all the good jobs and making the schools too crowded.

Robina’s younger sisters wound up getting pieces of a university education, but Robina went instead to special courses run by the United Nations to teach dressmaking to Afghan women. While she was there, Robina got a reputation as someone who was outspoken about the ill treatment of Afghans in Iran. She was warned that she could be killed for talking like that. She continued to have strong opinions and express them but finally gave up dressmaking. Her father was afraid she would ruin her eyes, and besides, she found a beauty salon near her home that was willing to train her as a hairdresser.

This caused problems within the Afghan immigrant community, because many there thought beauty salons—especially Iranian beauty salons—were fronts for brothels. So Robina became less connected to the Afghan community and more connected to her new profession. Even though the government was cracking down on Iranians who gave jobs to Afghans, the woman who ran the salon looked out for Robina. If a government official sniffed around the neighborhood to see if there were any Afghans employed there, the salon owner would swear that Robina was either a friend or a customer.

But things continued to become harder for Robina and other Afghans in Iran. Her father lost his job as a wholesaler. He went into an industrial business with an Iranian but was robbed by his partner and had no legal redress. Two of her brothers became tailors, but they had a hard time getting enough work to support the whole family. Robina was just starting in the salon business but hadn’t built up enough of a clientele to help the family much. Then both of her younger sisters found jobs in one of the only areas open to Afghan girls: they worked as babysitters to a British family doing business in Iran.

After two years the British family told Robina’s sisters that they were being transferred to the United States. The sisters were distraught about losing both their jobs and their kind foreign friends, but the Brits said that they’d love to have the girls follow them to America and continue working as their nannies. They told them that Robina could even come along as a chaperone. The Brits would try to find sponsors for the girls, and then they would all have to get visas. The big drawback to this plan was that there wasn’t an American embassy in Iran. It had been closed since the hostage crisis following the shah’s overthrow. If they wanted to get visas, the girls would have to go back to Afghanistan and work through the American Embassy there.

Since it was only getting harder to be an Afghan in Iran anyway, the three sisters decided to seize this opportunity for a better life in America, even if it meant a brief stopover in Kabul. They had heard only bad things about Kabul—about how dirty and crowded it was, about all the destruction from the wars, about the poverty. They had heard it was the worst place in the world for women, but they decided to take a chance. Their mother wept and begged them to stay in Iran, but their father trusted that they were strong and smart enough to make their way. He figured it was just for a few months, until they got their visas for America.

So Robina and her sisters did what just about no Afghan women ever do: they traveled on their own, without a male escort. They were met at the airport by relatives and stayed with them for a few weeks. Then they found their own apartment and moved into it, only the three of them.

It’s hard for Westerners to understand just how revolutionary this was. It’s almost a rite of passage in America for girls to move to another city and get an apartment with friends as young adults. But in Afghanistan, this sort of independence was unheard of—it was an abrupt departure from the way things have been done for thousands of years. It was the kind of thing that sent out shock waves around the sisters wherever they went. Just about everyone assumed that they had to be prostitutes if they were living on their own. When they interviewed for jobs and people found out that they lived on their own, they got phone calls from the men at the companies wanting to take them out to dinner, out to parties. This is the kind of behavior Afghans associate with prostitutes.

I’ll bet ten thousand dollars there was not another group of girls living on their own like this anywhere in Afghanistan. I’ll bet there still is not. Western girls, maybe. Afghans who had been living in the West for most of their lives, possibly. But not Afghan girls who had never left the East. In a way, Robina and her sisters had been made more vulnerable because they had been raised by parents with progressive ideas about women. The problem was that these ideas didn’t match the culture to which they were returning.

Ultimately, their plan didn’t work. The Brits lost their jobs in America and moved back home, so Robina and her sisters had nowhere to go. They couldn’t go back to live in Iran because they had given up their identification cards when they moved to Kabul, and it was so expensive for Afghans to get visas for Iran that the sisters even had a hard time visiting their parents. Basically, Iran just didn’t want them anymore. The sisters were forced to stay in Kabul and continue to live on their own. They knew it was dangerous, so with the help of foreign friends they raised enough money to send the youngest sister to college in India. Robina didn’t want to leave until there was enough money to send her other sister away, too.