The Dressmaker of Khair Khana (16 page)

“And it's a chance for me and for our family. I need to learn more and I want to work with professional people. I have to think about my future. I was never meant to be a tailor; you know that. It's the business and the management that I'm good at, that I really enjoy.”

Kamila's short speech only made Malika more unhappy. She saw now that her younger sister was determined to go forward with this mad idea, and Malika was willing to do anything she could to stop her.

“Kamila Jan, if it's money you need, we have it,” Malika said. “Our family is doing okay; we have plenty of work. I'll make sure that you get whatever it is that you want. But you cannot take this job. If something happens, I am responsible for you. Our parents are not here and it will be on my head. We don't need your salary and we definitely don't need the problems this job will surely bring.”

Kamila started to answer, but her sister wasn't finished. Her face flushed with indignation.

“What do you think will happen to me, to your other sisters, if you are caught? And to my husband, the father of these twins? They punish the men in the family, too, you know. Are you willing to put all of us at risk? In the name of your family and all that is sacred”--she finished by pleading to Kamila with words that forbade defiance--“do not take this job.”

For a moment they sat in silence, locked in their unhappy standoff. Kamila hated that she had upset someone she loved so dearly, but Malika's opposition had only toughened Kamila's resolve by showing her the stakes of this decision. Her life was about more than her own safety.

“I have to,” Kamila said, looking down at the floor, and then at the twins, anywhere but at her sister. She just could not believe that Malika, who had supported her through every trial she had faced for the past twenty-one years, was refusing to back her now. “God will help me because I am going to help my community. I put my life in the hands of Allah and I am sure he will keep me safe because this is work for his people. I must do this. I hope you'll understand one day.”

She was halfway out of the room before she offered the final words of the conversation--heated ones she immediately regretted.

“If something does happen to me, I promise I will not come to you to get me out of it,” she said. “It will be my responsibility.”

One week later, Kamila began working in District 10's Community Forum. Her salary was ten dollars a month. Kamila studied her Habitat leaflets every night and committed to memory Habitat's founding principles about the importance of leadership, consensus, and transparency. She also received her first formal lessons in bookkeeping. Habitat closely tracked the $9,900 that the UN provided to fund each new forum, and one of Kamila's tasks was to help detail how every production section dollar had been spent.

In time, Kamila herself began to teach a class on the Holy Q'uran in addition to her work running tailoring programs for women. Each morning, packs of students tiptoed excitedly through the foyer, working hard not to succumb to their enthusiasm and break the rules with loud shouts or giggles. It had stunned Kamila to hear through the Khair Khana grapevine that several Afghan girls she knew who had fled to Pakistan had lost interest in their studies. Now that it had been taken away, Kabuli girls of every age understood exactly how precious education really was.

Many of the students' families struggled to afford the small fee the forum charged for its classes, and some had no money for even one pencil or a few sheets of paper. But the women in charge found a way to make the donated books last longer and to use and reuse the provisions they had. The children shared everything.

Growing the home business projects remained Kamila's favorite part of the job. At the Community Forum headquarters she and her colleagues ran training sessions on the basics of tailoring and quilting. Afterward they would deliver fabric, thread, and needles to women in the Taimani section of Kabul, returning days later to pick up the sweaters and blankets the women had made.

These outings gave Kamila a close-up view of Kabul's poverty. She saw families of seven or even twelve people forced to survive for days on boiled water and a few old potatoes; she knew women who had sold the windows of their homes to feed their children. Some desperate parents she met had sent their little girls and boys, as small as eight and nine, to Pakistan to work. No one knew if they'd ever see them again. She grew even more committed to the Community Forums' efforts. With all this despair crippling her city, who was she not to do her part?

Soon, Habitat managers asked Kamila and her District 10 colleague Nuria to help with several other forums as well. An experienced teacher and an expert accountant who had finished her studies at Sayed Jamaluddin several years ahead of Kamila, Nuria supported her father and two nephews on her Habitat salary. Each morning, regardless of the cold or the rain, she and Kamila shared the forty-minute walk along the back roads to their center in Taimani, discussing their lessons for the day and ideas for future projects, including a women's center that Mahbooba had suggested they help develop.

Families showed their gratitude for the forum's presence by protecting the women as much as they could. “Tell Nuria and Kamila a new Talib is patrolling the neighborhood; they should be extra careful this morning,” the father of one of her students whispered early one morning to a little girl who answered the school's door. He had come running over to warn the women as soon as word of the neighborhood's new minder had reached him. Kamila, Nuria, and three dozen little girls spent the next half hour huddled together on the drafty floor in total silence while the Talib knocked again and again on their door, until at last, hearing nothing, the soldier gave up and moved on. An hour later, once Kamila could convince her heart to stop racing, classes were back up and running.

Everyone, it seemed, had learned how to adapt. And that held for Kamila's house, too. With their sister spending most of her time at the Community Forum, Saaman and Laila had taken over the day-to-day management of the business, naturally assuming the new roles they had been preparing for. Kamila knew the girls could handle the work, but she was delighted to see how easily they took charge of teaching the students and fulfilling all their contracts. Kamila still went to Lycee Myriam most weeks to do the marketing. She also kept for herself the task of visiting Mandawi Bazaar, whose shopkeepers preferred not to place orders in advance but to sift through the dresses Kamila and Rahim brought them and purchase the ones they liked. The downtown bazaar was too far from Khair Khana for her younger sisters to make the trip, Kamila decided, and she refused to let them take the risk of getting caught on their own, far from home. She and Rahim were used to such work and Kamila wanted to keep it that way.

As for Kamila's own protective older sister, things had improved--but only slowly. The weeks immediately following the fight with Malika had been painful, filled with a wordless tension that Kamila found difficult to bear. She missed her sister intensely and craved the advice and encouragement she had relied upon her whole life. She ached with the strange sensation of having lost a loved one she still saw every day.

At last Malika came to Kamila after overhearing her tell the girls about a District 10 embroidery project one evening as the girls were wrapping up their work. For the first time, she seemed resigned to Kamila's decision, though she was still clearly far from being at peace with it.

“Just promise me that you will be discreet and keep your work hidden; don't carry any UN papers or Community Forum forms they could find if they search your bag,” she said. She had waited until the younger girls had gone to bed and the two of them were sitting alone in the living room, near Kamila's old sewing station. Kamila detected the lingering note of disappointment in her sister's voice, but concern and love clearly predominated. “And if you have to carry money around the city to pay the women you work with, then take Rahim and get a taxi for goodness' sake. I know that you know what you are doing and that you think all the tailoring work has taught you how to move around the city as if you're nearly invisible, but remember that they only have to catch you once to destroy everything. Your name, your family, your life. Everything. Don't trust anyone other than your colleagues, and never talk about your work in public, even if you think you are the only ones on the street. Be careful all the time: don't ever let your guard down and get comfortable, even for a moment, because that's all it takes for them to arrest you. Okay?”

Kamila wanted to speak but the words failed to come. She nodded her head, over and over, and hugged her sister tightly.

And she prayed she would be able to keep her promise.

Danger in the Night Sky

Loud voices jolted Kamila from her sleep. In a fog she pulled herself upright and found herself sitting on the worn vinyl seat of an old Pakistani-made bus. “We are on the way to Peshawar,” she remembered, now almost fully awake and realizing the bus was no longer moving. Something must be wrong. . . .

It had been nearly four years since another bus ride had taken Kamila, with her new diploma in hand, from Sayed Jamaluddin back to her home in Khair Khana on the day the Taliban arrived. Kamila thought about it often--how much had happened since then. She and her sisters had lived through so much, and she was no longer a nervous teenager preparing to teach school. Now she was an entrepreneur and a community leader with the Women's Community Forum program, and she was on her way to a training session in Peshawar hosted by her international bosses: Samantha, the unrelenting head of UN Habitat who had battled both her own superiors as well as the Taliban to keep the Community Forums running; and Anne, who headed Habitat's programs in Kabul. There would be other foreigners there, too, teaching the Community Forum workers such as herself classes in leadership, management, and business skills. It was an extraordinary opportunity to meet and exchange ideas with talented Habitat women who worked all around Afghanistan. Gathering everyone together in Kabul was impossible given the Taliban's rules, so the women were traveling to Pakistan, where the UN had moved much of its Afghan staff.

Shouts again interrupted Kamila's thoughts.

Through the window of her chadri, Kamila watched as a young Talib yelled questions at Hafiza, her traveling companion and Habitat colleague. Sitting next to Hafiza was Seema, another Community Forum organizer on their team. The soldier, Kamila assumed, must have boarded the bus at the government checkpoint on the edge of Jalalabad while she was dozing.

“Where are you coming from?” the Talib shouted. “Who is your mahram? Where is he? Show him to me.”

Not only were the women riding to Pakistan without a mahram but they were headed to a meeting hosted by foreigners who worked for the United Nations. Relations between the Taliban and international agencies in Afghanistan had worsened steadily during the past few months, and the Amr bil-Maroof was again warning that Afghan women were not to be employed by foreign aid organizations. If the angry Talib now questioning Seema found out about their jobs, there would be big problems for them all.

Kamila sat quietly, thinking through every possible scenario that might help them escape the trouble they were in. Her years of visiting the shops at Lycee Myriam and Mandawi Bazaar with Rahim had taught her there was usually a way out of such situations if she could find the right words. A few weeks earlier a member of the Vice & Virtue forces bounded into Ali's store just as Kamila was unwrapping the dresses the shopkeeper had ordered. Thinking fast on her feet she explained to the soldier that she was here visiting Ali, a member of her family. “Thank you very much for checking on us; my relatives and I appreciate all the hard work that you and your brothers are doing to keep our city safe. We have great respect for the Amr bil-Maroof,” Kamila had told the soldier. “I've just come to see my cousin here to try to sell a few dresses to support my brothers and sisters at home.” The soldier looked almost persuaded but not quite. “Now surely you have more important work to do to find real lawbreakers and keep this neighborhood free of danger and dishonor for all of us, no?” In the end, that seemed to satisfy him and he left her with a warning to “be careful” to speak only with men in her family and to get back home right away, as quickly as possible. “Women should not be out on the streets.” Ali remained silent and terrified throughout the exchange, and he asked Kamila afterward how she had dared to speak like that to a Talib. Her answer showed how much she had learned during the years of visits to Lycee Myriam with Rahim: “If I didn't speak to him like a brother,” Kamila replied, “he would have been sure we were guilty of doing something wrong, which we were not. You are like my family and we are only trying to work on our family's behalf. If I did not explain myself, there could have been problems for you and me and Rahim.” Experiences like this had taught her that many of the men who now worked for the government could be reasoned with as long as one was polite, firm, and respectful.

So far, she now observed, the soldier on the bus was still talking to them, and that was a good sign. If things got quiet, then they were in real danger.

Just then Seema pointed toward a middle-aged man who was sitting a few rows behind her.

“He is our mahram,” she said, leaning her covered head toward a bearded gentleman who had a kindly, open face that suddenly went tense with fear.

The soldier turned his black-rimmed eyes toward the middle-aged man and stepped toward his seat, towering over him.

“Is this true?” he demanded.

Kamila and her colleagues were too frightened to look at each other across the aisle of the bus. School examinations had prevented both Rahim and Seema's son, their usual mahrams and travel companions, from accompanying them on this trip. Eager to get to their training, the women had decided to go ahead on their own, despite the risks. Rahim had done all he could to help, including purchasing the women's tickets in his own name, though they all knew this would be of little help if they were caught without a male chaperone. The three colleagues had agreed to say, if they were stopped and questioned, that they were family traveling to Peshawar to visit relatives. A few minutes into their journey they had decided on one more precaution and asked their fellow passenger, the man who now sat terrified behind them, to say he was their uncle if the Taliban appeared. This had become standard practice in Kabul, since widows and women without sons or male family members still had to do their shopping, visit their relatives, and take their children to the doctor. The man reassured them with a smile. “No problem, I am here,” he had promised.

Now, however, the danger was real and not just theoretical, and this man wanted nothing to do with them. Staring at the Kalashnikov, he deserted them.

“No, it is not true,” the man said quietly. “I am not their mahram. They are not with me.”

The Talib seethed.

“What kind of women are you?” he shouted at Hafiza and Seema. Then he turned and shouted to the driver, “I am taking these women to prison. Now. Call another bus to take the rest of your passengers to the border.”

Kamila knew she had to step in.

“My brother, with much respect, I must tell you we are meeting our mahram at the border,” Kamila began. “My name is Kamila, and my brother Rahim is our mahram. He was with us, but I have forgotten my luggage at home and he has gone back to get it for me. He will meet us at the border.”

The young soldier was unmoved.

“How can you call yourself a Muslim? What kind of family are you from? This is a disgrace.” The barrel of his AK-47 now hovered just inches from Kamila's forehead.

Remembering the paper ticket, Kamila pulled it from her bag, hands shaking.

“Look, you see, here is our proof.” She pointed at the slip of paper with Rahim's name written on it. “This ticket is under my brother's name for all of us. He is our mahram. He will meet us at the border.”

Hafiza and Seema looked on from their seats, motionless.

“We do not wish to violate the law,” Kamila went on. “It is difficult for my aunties and me; we would not choose to travel without our mahram. We know the rules, and we respect them. But we cannot go to Pakistan without all our bags and the presents we have in them for the children. How can we go to see our family with nothing? My brother will meet us very soon with our luggage.”

The standoff wore on. The soldier asked for her father's name and her family's residence. Then he asked once more about her brother. Twenty minutes passed. Kamila imagined being taken to prison, wondering what she would tell her mother and Malika if she were arrested. This is exactly what her older sister had warned her about when they finally reconciled a few months back, and why she had begged her not to accept the Habitat offer in the first place. Kamila thought of her own harsh words from several months earlier.

“If something does happen to me, I promise I will not come to you to get me out of it. It will be my responsibility.”

Now she only hoped her sister would forgive her if she was hauled off to jail here in Jalalabad. Malika was right; it took only a moment for everything to go horribly wrong.

Ignoring her fear and relying on her faith and her experience, she kept on talking, calmly and deferentially. Eventually Kamila realized that she was wearing the soldier down and he was beginning to tire of the situation. He was still angry but she sensed he was growing restless and was ready to move on to more docile offenders.

The Talib peered at her through the rectangular screen of her burqa. His words came out in a deep growl.

“If you didn't have this ticket I would never allow you to go to Pakistan. Do not travel again without your mahram. Next time it will be prison.”

He turned around and stepped off the minibus, returning to his post at the checkpoint. Kamila tried not to look in his direction as the driver pulled away and returned to the road once more. The driver, she noticed, looked as pale and shaken as she felt.

For the next hour the women sat stunned and silent, drained of words and energy. The adrenaline that had fueled Kamila's courage was long gone, and she slumped against the window, saying her prayers and thanking Allah for keeping her safe. In a few hours they would be in Peshawar; their training would begin the next day.

When she returned to Kabul, Kamila told her family nothing of what she had encountered on the way to Pakistan. She did not want to worry Malika--or to prove her worst fears right. And she wanted to spare her younger sisters and the students the reminder of what they already knew: the world outside their green gate remained full of danger. Poverty, food shortages, and the merciless drought had drained the life out of everyone in the city, including the Taliban's own soldiers, who patrolled the barren capital in their shalwar kameez with little to protect them against the freezing winter. They were struggling to survive almost as much as the citizens they ruled. No one, it seemed, had the energy to fight anymore. Even the Kabul Zoo's lone lion, Marjan, a gift from the Germans in far better times, looked exhausted.

Kamila continued to keep quiet months later when she heard that Wazhma, a friend and Community Forum colleague, had been arrested. It seemed that a neighborhood woman had turned her in to the Amr bil-Maroof for teaching girls in one of the nearby districts; two Taliban had waited for her early in the morning and took her away as soon as she arrived to open the Community Forum school. Though Samantha and Anne, with help from the UN system, were fighting hard to get her out of jail, the Taliban had not yet released her, and rumors of her mistreatment--though unproven--were spreading quickly. Several days into her detention, Wazhma sent word to Kamila through Habitat coworkers who had come to see her in prison that she should stop her work immediately. “Please tell Kamila she should not go to Community Forum anymore,” she had said. “Tell her she is too young and has a long life ahead of her; she should not take such risks. I know the forum work is important, but nothing is worth her life.” Kamila listened to her friend's warning, but she would not be swayed. She went on working, now even more aware--as if she needed another reminder--of the very real threats she was facing every day. “God will keep me safe,” she told herself. “I trust in my faith.”

And then all at once a new epidemic hit the city. Thankfully it had nothing whatsoever to do with the Taliban: it was Titanic fever.

The epic Hollwood romance had made it to Afghanistan, and like their brethren around the world, young people all over Kabul were swept up in their obsession for the movie. Bootleg VHS tapes of the film were now flying across the city, passed in secret from friend to cousin to neighbor. One acquaintance of Kamila's hid her copy in the bottom of a soup pot that she transported across the Pakistani border; a classmate of Rahim's buried his among tunics rolled up in the bottom of suitcases he carried from Iran. The film could now be found in underground video stores across the capital, and though the pirated cassettes had often been dubbed so many times that entire passages were garbled and had to be skipped over, most people didn't care: they just wanted to hear a few bars of “My Heart Will Go On” and to follow yet again the ill-fated struggle of the star-crossed lovers whose happiness was impossible.

The Taliban's standard arsenal of weapons proved useless against Titanic. They scrambled to fight the film's wicked influence, beginning with the “Titanic haircut,” which they outlawed. They dragged boys they found wearing the floppy-in-the-front style to the barbershop for a full buzz cut. When that strategy proved futile the soldiers went after the barbers themselves, arresting nearly two dozen for giving aspiring Jack Dawsons “the Leo look.” Wedding cakes in the form of the famous ocean liner grew popular and were also banned; the Taliban branded them “a violation of Afghanistan's national and Islamic culture.”

Still, the craze continued unabated. Entrepreneurs rushed to turn the film's tidal wave of popularity into profit and helped rename the market in the dried bed of the Kabul River, which was now brown and parched from the drought, “Titanic Bazaar.” Businessmen plastered the name and image of Titanic to anything they could find--storefronts, taxis, shoes, hand lotion, even vegetables and lipsticks. Kamila had seen the movie herself with a group of friends at the home of a girl whose father was close with the local Taliban commander. Afterward she commented to Rahim that it seemed there was nothing in Kabul that remained untouched by the saga of Rose and Jack. “Now that,” she said, “is marketing.”

Aside from the Titanic interlude, life continued on much as it had, interrupted occasionally by the excitement of a letter from Mr. Sidiqi, who wrote from Iran to thank Kamila and the girls for sending money to him and Najeeb through friends and relatives. Mrs. Sidiqi was now living with the girls most of the time, and they watched in sadness as she struggled against her worsening heart condition. They worried continually for her health but Mrs. Sidiqi would have none of it; she refused to stay still and instead busied herself around the house with cooking and cleaning. Her greatest joy now seemed to come from being surrounded by her girls and the young women who arrived at her house each day to work. If Taliban rules and her own fragile constitution conspired to prevent her from being out in the world, at least she could still hear what was happening in her community through the stories of these young ladies.