The Underground Girls of Kabul (11 page)

They look at each other. Magic is
magic
. And there is no God except Allah.

An uncomfortable silence follows. Demonstrations have been held in the previous few weeks based on the persistent rumor that foreign aid workers had tried to convert Muslims to Christianity.

Dr. Fareiba gives me the “move on” nod. She may have agreed to reveal some of her secrets thus far, but religion is a topic best not discussed with a foreigner.

Mehran and Azita

“Arms up! Arms out! Touch your toes! Make a wave! Swim into the air! Big circles! Again! Now the salute! Salute and honor your country!”

Morning gymnastics have a touch of both Montessori and military discipline. About one hundred small children make a very serious attempt at synchronicity on a recently defrosted lawn, where patches of grass have sprung up in the dry mud.

It has taken the headmaster about twenty minutes to form her troops and move through the attendance call. When she calls a name, an arm shoots up with a loud
“bale”
from boys, and a softer version from the girls inside the densely packed crowd of six- to ten-year-olds.

The head boy at the top of each S-shaped line is keeping order, and Mehran stands next to one such fellow second-grader in shirt and tie. After the wobbly gymnastics is done the two friends adopt identical poses—hands in pockets, hips forward, resting broad-legged and bored looking. Behind them, boys in pants and girls in shift dresses—but no head scarves—line up. The required school uniform color is green, and it comes in as many nuances as the school has students, since every mother outfits her own child from whatever green fabric is available at the bazaar. Mehran’s belly exceeds her pants; the
front button above the zipper has been replaced by an uncomfortable safety pin. Her toes are bare in her sandals, and in one pocket is a leftover cookie from breakfast.

The students are mostly children of Kabul’s recent-vintage professional class. Many of their parents are educated, and drop their children off here before going to work in government or for international organizations. The private institution offers English instruction and teachers who have graduated from high school. A few even hold degrees from a teaching academy.

When the headmaster calls out for a volunteer student to perform a solo song before the students, Mehran stares blankly. A girl humbly walks up to face the crowd of students, her head bowed and her hands clasped together in front of her. Mehran, still with hands in pockets, leans over to her friend and whispers something, with a nod at the girl in front of them. The friend grins widely in agreement and they giggle, before being urged to join in singing the national anthem. A few Koran verses follow, and the headmaster offers her daily nugget of life advice for the children: “Brush your teeth, cut your nails, and never lie.”

Older students are dismissed first, and they slowly pour into the two-story stone building and up the stairs, where an elderly helper has placed a red bucket of water and brown pressed soap under posters of Russian fighter jets and an Iranian passenger airline. The old woman rinses each child’s hands with a splash from a red plastic pitcher and sends them off to their classrooms. Mehran’s teacher declares that in honor of the foreign visitors on this day, she will begin with the English lesson—a class, it turns out, that will be conducted without books, and entirely in Dari.

M
EHRAN FIRST ARRIVED
here, to the school’s kindergarten, as Mahnoush, in pigtails and a pistachio dress. When school shut down for a break she left and never returned. Instead short-haired, tie-wearing Mehran began first grade with the other children. Nothing
else changed much. Some teachers were surprised but did not comment except to one another. When the male Koran teacher demanded Mehran cover her head in his class, a baseball cap solved the problem. The other children did not seem to pay much attention. The school’s high turnover of students helped, as did the school’s coed policy of not separating boys and girls for lessons or play.

Miss Momand, who started her job as a teacher after Mehran’s change, remembers being startled when a boy was brought into the girls’ room for afternoon nap time. As she helped Mehran undress it was clear she was a girl. Miss Momand was so confused she called Azita to ask why she had sent her child to school looking as she did. Azita simply explained that she had only daughters, and that Mehran went as the family’s son. It was all Miss Momand needed to hear—she understood perfectly. She herself used to have a friend at school who was a family’s only child and had assumed the role of a son.

Mehran seems to have adapted well to her new role, in the eyes of her teacher. A little too well, perhaps. She takes every opportunity to tell those around her that she is a boy. She will refuse such activities as sewing and doll play in favor of cycling, football, and running. According to Miss Momand, Mehran has fully become a boy, and neither her exterior nor her behavior is distinguishable from another boy’s. All the teachers play along and help protect her secret by letting her change clothes in a separate room when necessary.

“So is this all normal to you? Common, even?” I ask Miss Momand.

“Not exactly. But it is not a problem.”

The rules are clear: dresses for girls, pants for boys. There are no other cross-dressers attending school. But it is not for the school to get involved in a family matter, she explains. Whatever gender the parents decide upon, the school should help perpetuate. Even when it is a lie. The school has other things to worry about, such as how many armed guards are needed by the front gate. The teacher expresses some solidarity with Azita: “Mehran’s mother is in parliament. She is a good woman. We do what we must.”

“We women, or we Afghans?”

“Both.”

As for academic skills, Mehran is “intelligent, but a little lazy,” according to her teacher. She is quick to smile, and equally quick to put on an angry-looking, annoyed face when she is not immediately understood or agreed with. A few years after leaving Mahnoush behind, Mehran’s personality has grown louder. She spends breaks floating in and out of the boys’ football games and other outdoor activities, depending on where the action seems to be at the moment. And whereas most other students want to stick to friends their own age, Mehran appears eager to catch the attention of older boys, often trying to impress them and seek some attention by being obnoxious. She will yell, touch, and push those around her. Most of the time she is ignored, but at times she needs to be pulled away from a clash with an older boy. Mehran is well aware she is a girl, according to the teachers. But she always introduces herself as a boy to newcomers. Since Mehran was a girl for several years before she was remade into a boy, there should be little confusion to her in that regard.

Sigmund Freud claimed that children are not even aware of genital differences until around the age of four or five,
but in the 1980s, Dr. Eleanor Galenson and Dr. Herman Roiphe proved that children’s understanding of a sexual identity begins much earlier. According to their findings, a child can be aware of his or her birth sex as early as fifteen months.

Yet in Afghanistan, there is a certain interest in keeping children in the dark or at least blurring the lines about boys and girls. Specifics about anatomical differences are purposely not explained by many parents, in order to keep the minds of children—and especially those of little girls—“pure” for as long as possible before they marry.

It goes along with how my mother once told me the story of how she, as a ten-year-old in a more conservative version of Sweden of the 1950s, proclaimed to her mother that she intended to become a boy when she grew up. My mother had only one sister and a dim view of differences between men and women, never having seen her father
or any other men without clothes. My grandmother scoffed at her daughter and called her stupid but did not offer any explanation for why the plan wasn’t feasible.

At Mehran’s school, children are never supposed to see the opposite sex naked, either; that is absolutely forbidden. The headmaster tells me that at this stage, she is certain that to most students, what sets little boys and girls apart is all exterior: pants versus skirts.

That, and the knowledge that those with pants always come first.

O
N
F
EBRUARY
7, 1999, Azita knew she had failed, but she was too exhausted to speak or to show any reaction at all. She had just given birth—twice. She was in her mother-in-law’s small freezing house, insulated only with dried grass baked into the mud walls. The first twin had been born after almost three days and three nights of labor, one month prematurely. She weighed a mere 2.6 pounds and her breathing was shallow. Ten minutes later, her face had turned blue and she showed few signs of life as her sister arrived. She, too, was unconscious. The women who had helped Azita deliver her children did not wash the babies. Instead, they just handed them to her wrapped in cloth—it was too obvious to all those present that the children would not make it.

When her mother-in-law began to cry, Azita knew it was not from fear that her granddaughters might not survive. The old woman was disappointed. “Why,” she cried, according to Azita, “are we getting more girls in the family? What will I tell the neighbors? And the villagers?”

Azita felt nothing. The year before, she had crossed the doorstep of her primitive new home as the property of a poor farming family, carrying only one thing of value—a womb. Her husband already had a wife whose womb was the very reason Azita had been drafted as wife number two. The first wife had given birth to a daughter, but her second child—a son—had died. After that, she had only miscarried. It was what had prompted the mother-in-law to seek out
a second young and healthy wife for her son. With Azita came the promise of a better future for the family in a small farming village perched on a hillside and even more isolated from the outside world than Badghis’s provincial capital of Qala-e-Naw. At the time it was reachable only by horse or donkey, or by foot.

The ten-person household, with two husbands who were brothers, their three wives, and all the children, was run by Azita’s mother-in-law. She wielded her power down to the smallest details of the lives of her sons’ wives. She decided how chores were distributed among them; when they ate and what; who spoke and what the conversation should be about. She also held the keys to the food pantry. Following her rules meant the difference between eating and going hungry.

When Azita first arrived, she was tasked with several jobs. She soon learned how to handle the cows—one for milking and three for fieldwork—the ten sheep, and the flock of chickens. In the spirit of an older sister and as someone who had grown up very differently, she soon began offering opinions and ideas on how the family did things. Azita suggested they wash their hands before eating, that they cut their nails, and that they help one another with the children. She advocated for them all to join forces and bring much more water into the house, to combat poor hygiene and disease. She suggested that the men and women of the family share meals—a radical idea in a household that strictly separated men and women except at night, when a husband was expected to sleep together with one of his wives. Having more contact within the family made sense, Azita argued, and it was how she had been brought up.

None of her ideas were well received.

A particular provocation was the many dresses Azita had brought with her from her family home. Each woman in the village household owned only two dresses—one that was for special occasions such as weddings and should not be worn otherwise, and the other a regular dress that was to be worn for ten days before it would be washed, since water was so scarce. Azita was told that if she wanted to wear fresh clothes more often, she could fetch her own water from the faraway well.

Next, Azita protested her mother-in-law’s system for keeping the wives in check, when any sign of insubordination rendered a response by her walking stick. The first wife was beaten most often, as she made the most mistakes. It upset Azita, and she argued against it. That escalated to yelling and finally, one day, Azita stepped in to shield her husband’s first wife, jerking the stick away and breaking it in two. Infuriated, she threatened her mother-in-law: “I will beat you back. I am not afraid of the Taliban, and I am absolutely not afraid of you.”

Islam does not condone the beating of wives, she added. Women should not beat other women, either. The old woman stared at her daughters-in-law, silently fuming before turning around and leaving them both. The family’s longtime ruler of its women had no plans to abdicate. Mute obedience was not only expected of the family’s wives—it was the norm and a prerequisite for their lives to work. As Azita had taken it upon herself to shelter her husband’s illiterate and shy first wife, things threatened to spiral out of control. So the mother-in-law took the issue to her sons, who agreed something needed to be done. Since Azita was from the city, they concluded, whatever evil she had picked up there needed to be stemmed. There was still time for the newcomer to be recalibrated into a normal wife, and to remove whatever ideas a decadent Kabul upbringing had instilled in her.

They were to be beaten out of her.

T
HE FIRST BLOW
came as a surprise to Azita. She had never seen her father beat her mother, and she had rarely been slapped as a child. Now, her husband would use a wooden stick or a metal wire, when one was available, for regular preemptive beatings without a specific cause, just to make sure there would be no arguing with his mother. Sometimes, he just used his fists.

“On the body. On the face. I tried to stop him. I asked him to stop. Sometimes I didn’t.”

“And sexually?”

Azita goes silent.

“It is not called rape in Afghanistan if your husband forces himself on you,” she says. “People would think you are a stupid woman if you call it that.”

A woman’s body is always available to her husband, not only for procreation, but for recreation as well, since male sexuality is seen as a good and necessary thing. If a wife does not submit, the husband could feel frustrated and look elsewhere, the thinking goes, which would then endanger the fundament of a family and with that society as a whole. Predominantly
Christian countries did not recognize marital rape as illegal, either, until fairly recently, as one of the original purposes of marriage itself was to legalize sex. In the United States, marital rape was not criminalized in all states until 1993; in the United Kingdom, 1991.