The Underground Girls of Kabul (15 page)

After a pause, she adds, “I hate the scarf. I hate to put it on. And the long shirts. And the bra. I refuse to wear it.” Her cheeks blush a little again, and the hair falls into her eyes as she turns her head away.

“Girls like to have beautiful houses, to color them inside and outside,” she continues. “The boys don’t care about houses or discussing how to decorate them. Men leave the home anyway, and go for work. There are things that women like to do: to cook, to clean, to make themselves beautiful. To go to weddings. Fashion. Men are not interested in any of that.”

Men, on the other hand, like to race cars, hang out with their friends, and fight. Zahra describes the ultimate man as Kabul’s current favorite character on television: Jack Bauer on
24
. To her and the other boys in the neighborhood, the American action hero symbolizes a real Afghan. A true warrior. The payoff is in every episode: When the hero is beaten half to death, he will rise again and protect his honor. Just like an Afghan, in Zahra’s view, he never fears death. And he never stops fighting.

I try something cheap: “So are boys better than girls?”

Zahra shakes her head. Absolutely not.

“Girls are more intelligent than boys, because they work more in the house and they can do more things. Men are suited for different kinds of work. They are intelligent, too, but they can do fewer things. All the work that boys can do, women can do, too. I know it, because I do it. The work that women do, men cannot do.”

The conservative older brother turned somewhat progressive teenage girl has a self-perfected logic: “You know,
women can be men, too
. Like me.”

Hard to argue with that.

W
E APPROACH A
sand pit where some young men have gathered around a three-wheeled motorbike for rent. Zahra wants to go for a ride. She strolls over to the man in charge and presses some coins into
his palm. On the bike, she begins to loop around us at high speed. She breaks out in a large smile when she feels the wind on her face. As she passes us, her hair sprayed in every direction, she stands up on the bike, for effect. When I take her picture, a neighborhood boy yells at Setareh: “Tell her not to think she’s a boy. She’s a girl.”

Climbing off the bike, Zahra says that the boy is her friend and we need not worry. He knows her secret, but he treats her like a fellow boy. “If someone beats me, he protects me.”

“Have you been attacked?”

“It happens.”

In reality, Zahra’s freedom of movement has become more limited in the past few years. She is feeling increasingly isolated. Girls have begun to shy away from her, and young boys like to challenge her. She is not entirely safe in her own neighborhood anymore, where more people seem to have an issue with how she looks. What used to be freedom in disguise is now a slight provocation to those who know. And lately, more seem to know. Zahra suspects her mother has a part in that—the family used to protect her secret, but in the last few years, her mother has tried a variety of urging, begging, and demanding that Zahra look more feminine. It is time, her mother argues, for Zahra to become a girl and develop into the woman inside of her. But Zahra still resists. Her small freedoms have become curtailed but in her mind it still beats being a woman. The idea that she would go on to repeat the life of her mother, with a husband and a long line of children, seems absurd and horrifying to her.

A
S WE SIT
down under a tree in a park, Zahra suddenly goes quiet when her Pashto teacher walks by and gives her a long stare. The female teachers in Zahra’s school have never commented on her appearance. They have seen her putting on a head scarf that is a required part of her uniform as she walks up the steps, only to rip it off the minute she walks out of class. But recently her Pashto teacher told her that what she is doing is wrong, and that it is shameful for her not to look like a girl and cover her head at all times.

As with many social issues and rules on how people should live their lives, mullahs in Afghanistan take different views on whether God has anything at all to say about
bacha posh
. It’s not a crime to dress as the other gender, but it could possibly be viewed as a sin.
According to one Islamic hadith, the prophet Muhammad “damned those men who look like women and those women who look like men and stated ‘expel them from homes.’ ”

Moses reportedly said something similar in Deuteronomy 22:5. “A woman must not wear men’s clothing, nor a man wear women’s clothing, for the Lord your God detests anyone who does this.” Still, the interpretation of both of these passages, which could be condemnations of cross-dressing, are not agreed upon by religious scholars. God and the prophets may, in fact, have had no real problem at all with cross-dressers of either sex. It is important to note as well that these writings speak of “men” and “women”—not boys and girls.

But in Afghanistan, references to Islam can be made by anyone, at any time, for any purpose. No matter the issue, a person may cite an appropriately vague hadith, said to represent the thousands of (often contradictory) opinions and life events of the prophet Muhammad, or a recollection of what a mullah has once said. Such determinations—and they are usually exclaimed with absolute certainty—of what is Islamic or not are liberally distributed by Afghans both young and old, by those who hold university degrees and by those who use only their thumbprints to sign documents. The constant references to religion lead many Afghans to believe that any new rule imposed on them is indeed mandatory for being “a good Muslim.”

The crippling catch-22 in Afghanistan is that as soon as someone refers to God, the prophet Muhammad, the Koran, or anything Islamic at all, anyone who questions that statement is also potentially questioning God. And in that, he or she could be suspected or accused of blasphemy. To avoid that potential danger, most contradictory and at times confusing interpretations of Islam remain unchallenged in Afghanistan.
The Koran can be read in many ways, even by those who can read, and there are thousands of hadiths used
to express different rules. So the scope for interpreting Islamic law and putting it into context is immense, according to scholars.

As there is no strictly organized clergy, the very
title of mullah is open to anyone who is viewed as having some religious credentials. The mullah can be an illiterate farmer who doubles as a religious leader for the village. Considering that a mullah can be the one to declare a newborn girl a son in order to help out a son-less family, some religious leaders not only condone
bacha posh
but also encourage and accept it when deemed necessary.

Zahra is not aware of any specific Islamic rules on the issue of what to wear; nor does she know of one interpretation or another of them. But she is an observant Muslim who prays, and she told her Pashto teacher what made sense to her: “It is my body and you should leave me alone.”

As the teacher muttered and walked away, several girls at school were astonished that Zahra had spoken back to a male teacher on a religious issue. Some were told by their parents to stay away from her after that.

Still, Zahra has gained some popularity for one reason: She is the closest many of the students in the all-girls school will come to conversing with a boy of the same age. At times, they let Zahra stand in for their movie-star fantasy, pinching her cheeks, joking to one another that she is “such a cute boy.” Sometimes, a giggly girl will want to take the play further, asking Zahra to hold her hand and declare that they are engaged.

Zahra doesn’t really like any of those games, but she plays along, so as not to alienate anyone further.

W
HEN WE CLIMB
out of the car on another day, Zahra greets us on her bicycle. Smiling and waving, she runs up to the car and opens the door on my side. When she leans in, I instinctively do the same and kiss her three times on the cheeks, in a classic Afghan greeting, before I realize my mistake. It’s used mostly as a greeting for people
of the same gender. Three boys are standing behind another car looking at us. I apologize to Zahra, who is very polite: It’s not a problem. I had completely forgotten the routine we had almost perfected last time: a firm handshake, followed by the American high five that Zahra always seems to execute more smoothly than I do.

At the house, Zahra’s mother, Asma, has prepared an overwhelming lunch. She and Zahra’s father, Samir, want to thank us for our interest in their daughter. For this occasion, Asma has been cooking for two days, and on the table is a big serving plate of fried rice with slices of carrot and onion, chunks of meat and raisins, and the special dried herbs sent from Andkhoy hidden inside the rice, Uzbek-style. The
quorma
is luxurious: a whole chicken cooked in tomato sauce.
Manto
are carefully folded dumplings with minced meat inside, steamed in a cooker with onions. There is a large plate of minced tomato, cucumber, and onions that have been tossed with thick mayonnaise. All food is prepared with the expensive vegetable oil used for special occasions, marked “USA” and “Vitamin A fortified.” It is a World Food Program item openly sold at one of the bazaars, and considered to be better than the Pakistani versions. The dessert has already been set out; it’s
firiny
, a creamy version of rice pudding with a shivering poison-green Jell-O on top. Pepsi cans are lined up next to drying oranges and darkened bananas. The fruit is a rare treat from Pakistan.

Samir, in a great mood and still wearing his well-worn khaki flight uniform, has been dismissed early from his work piloting helicopters for the Afghan air force. He balances his youngest, a fourteen-month-old girl, on one knee. The baby is wearing a red jumpsuit and has little hair; without the announcement of her gender, no observer would know for sure. Dressing little boys and girls in blue or pink was
a marketing gimmick invented in the United States in the forties. Before then, all children were mostly dressed in white, with lace and ruffles. Pink was actually regarded as the more masculine, fiery color before it came to be the signifying color for a baby girl.

A three-year-old boy tries to climb up onto his father’s other knee,
only to be gently brushed away. The other siblings move around the table; they are too young to be invited to sit with the grown-ups and too old to earn a place in someone’s lap. Still, Samir gives everyone a good chunk of attention. He beams when speaking of his children. “I am so happy I have a big family. The dream of every parent is for their children to give them grandchildren. And if they don’t have children, it’s a big problem. I was lucky.”

Samir smiles at Asma. Nine children puts her above Afghan women’s national average of six surviving children. Zahra, at fifteen, is number three, with four sisters and four brothers.

Asma and Samir are first cousins in an arranged marriage. According to Samir: “It was both our parents’ choice. And Asma’s choice.”

Asma shouts in protest. “
Neee neeee!
It was you who came to my home a hundred times and told me you wanted to marry me.”

Samir chuckles. “
You
wanted to marry
me
—I still have your love letters.” He turns to me: Asma found him irresistible; is that so hard to imagine? “I will show you a picture from my youth, and you will see I was very handsome.”

He corrects himself: They were lucky, too, in what their parents decided for them. Most marriages are not like theirs. The big family, however, was Asma’s doing. “It was your fault,” Samir throws out in the direction of his wife, grinning. “Maybe you want another one?”

She grins back at him. There are four sons in the family already and her work is more than done. “I have told you the factory is closed. I have put a lock on it!” Their youngest was unplanned. When Asma went to the doctor for a sore throat, she learned that she was three months pregnant.

Samir roars with laughter as he is reminded of her surprise, and starts to shovel up rice with a fork over to his own plate. Another child would be hard. They have almost outgrown the apartment already and cannot afford to go anywhere else. They rented it from a wealthier relative when they returned from Peshawar after the Taliban years. Their time in Pakistan was not bad—the family ran a small
carpet business there. But during those years Samir was unable to fly, and it was almost unbearable for him. He was never quite a carpet dealer, like his relatives.

Asma worries about her overgrown
bacha posh
daughter: “At first, I only had two daughters, and when Zahra wanted to wear boys’ clothing, I was pleased. I liked it, since we didn’t have a boy then.” She hesitates before continuing: “Now, we don’t really know.”

Samir agrees it’s time for Zahra to change: “I have told her one thousand times that she needs to cover herself in long coats and let her hair grow out. But she says it’s her own choice. She’s even taller than her older sisters now. She refuses. Maybe she has some of me in her.” He says it with a father’s sense of pride.

Asma is not amused by her husband’s relenting on Zahra’s appearance, and she is eager to convince Samir that something is not right any longer in how their daughter looks.

I have told her that we have met many girls like Zahra, although so far, all have been younger. But what is it like in the West? Asma wonders, urging me to explain what the universal rules are for what women should look like. “If you walk in the street in your country and a girl had short hair and looked like a boy, do you think it’s shameful?”

I weigh my words carefully, noting that Zahra is listening intently.

“It’s very common for girls to have short hair and pants, and it’s not considered shameful.”

Asma is not satisfied. “But what do
you
think?”

“I have met many girls who live like boys here,” I say, trying to turn it back to her. “It is a choice within each family. But I am not sure if it is a good thing for the girls, or if it is a problem. Perhaps it can be both?”

But Asma is not interested in psychological consequences. She is more concerned with the social ones. “It could maybe be a shame in Afghan culture, now that Zahra is older.” She pauses. It’s something she has been thinking a lot about lately. But there is no manual for this; Zahra certainly doesn’t look like a woman just yet. For some
reason, she has not developed as quickly as her sisters, although she is physically normal, Asma explains: “She has what other girls have.”