The Underground Girls of Kabul (19 page)

I ask the youngest jean-clad sister if she will get married one day. She shrugs. Probably. She does not seem upset by the prospect, and if she is, this is not the place to show it. Her female cousins are either engaged or married by now. She is a top student at school, and if it were up to her, she would like to study to become a children’s doctor. But that will be in God’s hands. Or rather, her future husband’s. She politely explains how she hopes he will allow her to work.

The features of her sister are strikingly similar, but the sister, three years older and now turned into a woman, is distinctly feminine, with a nose ring, a long braid down her back, and a red Punjabi
dress. She already has a future husband picked out for her, someone whom she has never met and knows little about.

As Sakina reenters the room, she admits that they are “a little late” with their youngest daughter. Her father and brothers have already begun to demand she wear a head scarf more often. And her body is just at the beginning of becoming a woman, so she does not have much time left now. But as long as she is turned back before puberty, no harm will have been done. She will follow a long tradition of girls in her family who have become excellent wives and mothers. As a bonus, she will have spent her youth cultivating an assertive, confident kind of womanhood.

The young rock star in the corner listens to her mother but says nothing. She just looks at her hands resting in her lap. Her rough hands have not been offered any henna painting, and her nails are chewed down to the quick.

W
HEN
I
INSIST
to Setareh that we splurge on an actual lunch break between visiting families, we are soon reminded it is not what women do in this residential part of Kabul. We settle on the only option—a hole-in-the-wall where kebabs are grilled over whitening coal outside in the sun—and try to look confident as we enter and endure the stares from the all-male clientele. A nervous waiter ushers us into the back of the restaurant, into a room that doubles as a storage space. As we sink into an overused leather sofa covered in plastic, we are surprised to discover that two other women are already there, seated by the opposite wall. They seem to be in their twenties, and one of them immediately looks down before our eyes can meet. The other, well covered with a black scarf conservatively tucked and pinned around her face, looks straight back at me.

I recognize the steady gaze.

But Setareh has strong opinions about the way I frequently strike up conversations with strangers, so I study the kebab options in Dari on my greasy menu some more. When I look up again, the young woman is smiling at me.

“You are American, yes?” she asks. “I like to practice speaking English when I meet foreigners.”

“I’m Swedish, actually,” I say, returning her smile. “But we can practice together if you want.”

Setareh gently touches my hand in warning. The chatty American is the side of me she likes the least. It is both impolite and potentially dangerous, she has let me know several times. But I go on, telling our lunch companions that we are working on a little project where we are meeting girls who grow up as boys. In fact, we have interviewed a few dozen by now. The shy girl looks up at her confident friend in bewilderment. Setareh almost chokes. The conservative-looking girl just laughs.

“Yes. Yes. I am one of them. I was a boy.”

“I had a feeling.”

We grin widely at each other.

Her nickname is Spoz, and she is the youngest of six sisters in her family. They have just one brother, who arrived as number three. Before he was born, the family needed some magic, and once he was born, he needed a friend to play with. So the three younger sisters took turns, each playing the role of a boy for the first decade of their respective lives. Spoz says she had fun under the Taliban, roaming around outside and playing football, with her hair cut short. She learned to challenge boys in sports, fights, and conversation. Right before her tenth birthday, she was turned back. Now she is nineteen, and sees nothing but opportunity beyond her studies at Kabul University.

It makes her a very unusual young woman, as she is one of a few thousand female university students in the entire country. Many fathers do not allow their daughters to be educated beyond the ages of ten or twelve. Economic and security factors are most often cited, but some also say that it’s just not “necessary” to educate a girl who will be married anyway. Too much education can potentially make a girl less attractive as a spouse, as she may develop plans to work or simply become too opinionated.

But Spoz’s father, just as Azita’s once did with his daughter, has
taught her to dream big for herself: “I am happy God made me a girl, so I can become a mother. In my heart I am still a boy, but it is my choice to wear women’s clothing now. It’s only important to be a
bacha posh
in the head, to know you can do anything.”

Now that she is a woman, she would never want to be anywhere other than in this part of the world, she says. Why? Women in the West “have relations” with thousands of men, and that is just wrong, she believes—a woman should be with only one man.

Setareh is mortified again, and I hasten to mention that I don’t think that is true where I come from, or most anywhere for that matter. The pious former
bacha posh
interrupts me, offering a reassuring compliment of my all-black styling by Setareh: “No, no. I can see you are different from how you dress.”

She aspires to become an engineer, and says her deep faith has strengthened her grasp of women’s rights. But a
bacha posh
upbringing does not necessarily lead to liberal views on all things gender. Spoz is only one example of how an Afghan girl who is very religious and from a conservative family can have a firm grasp of women’s rights while still advocating strict rules for them. She believes girls approaching puberty should absolutely not look like boys, and that women absolutely need to be well covered in Afghanistan.

“We are two kinds of humans,” she explains this belief. “We are too different. But only in the body. Nothing else. A woman is a very beautiful thing. In order to protect something beautiful, you should cover it. Like a diamond. You cannot just put it on the street, because everyone would just come and take it.”

At the same time, she is sure that if Afghanistan would become more modern, clothing would matter less. “I’m a Muslim, and I hate this kind of clothing,” she says, pointing to her black coverage. She would wear the head scarf anywhere to respect and demonstrate her faith, but she wears the full covering only because it is necessary in her conservative country. “We have been in war for thirty years. We are not very developed here. This is not the time to experiment with clothing.”

W
E MEET AT
the cramped offices of the
Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, of which Dr. Sima Samar is the chairwoman.

A former minister for women’s affairs, Dr. Samar walks in wearing a white
peran tonban
and flat sandals, set off by white pearl-drop earrings peeking out from under her thick gray hair. The muted colors of her clothes match her office. Plush leather chairs are draped in Indian paisley throws. Her latest-model BlackBerry rattles on vibrate mode on a side table.

Sima Samar’s longtime work as a doctor and as an advocate has taken her around the world to accept awards and speak as an authority on some of the worst human rights crimes in Afghanistan: domestic violence, self-mutilation, rape, and child marriage. She is the country’s perhaps most respected advocate for women and children, and I am eager to talk with her about my research.

By now, I have arrived at the conclusion that it can in fact be an empowering experience for a girl to live like a boy for a few years, as more such examples of successful women, resembling the stories of Azita, Sakina, and Spoz have surfaced: In the northern Balkh province, a female official says that spending a few years as a boy child later helped her make the decision to go into politics. The female principal of a Kabul boarding school described how it was a way for her to get an education under the Taliban and allowed her to go to university once they were gone. For those whose lives are not solely devoted to survival, where creating a
bacha posh
is primarily a way of adding to the family income, it seems clear that some time on the other side can benefit both ambition and self-confidence.

However, no one can agree on when the boy years should precisely end before a girl is at risk of becoming “strange in the head,” when the charade may have gone too far. So are there any risks at all? And is anyone looking out for these children, or are they always at the mercy of their parents’ arbitrary judgment?

There are few universally recognized rights for children on gender.
The word itself is not mentioned once in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which lists other rights, such as those to education and freedom of expression. The concept of a “childhood,” and what it should entail, is a fairly new one, even in the Western world. And gender is rarely discussed in the context of customary law or in international conventions; it is one of those seemingly untouchable issues, since religion and culture vastly differ among countries and conservatives lobby hard against anything that could potentially question heterosexuality as the norm. The right to live and present as a specific gender, at any given time, is nowhere specified. And perhaps it shouldn’t be.

When I have probed those with knowledge of the area, including several Afghans working with women and children for the United Nations and international NGOs, about how
bacha posh
can exist right under the surface in Kabul, they have told me that they would never dream of advancing the issue on their organizations’ agendas. Not only is it the private business of Afghans, but it would also potentially be too confusing to the foreign aid workers who love to help little girls—who look like girls.

“The foreigners like to teach
us
about gender,” one longtime local Afghan UN employee put it when I inquired as to why she had never mentioned this practice in her work, which is focused on women and children. The UN official even had personal experience: Her own daughter has asked to wear pants and get a short haircut so she can play outside more with some other boys and
bacha posh
in the neighborhood. So far, her mother has not allowed it.

My hope in meeting Dr. Samar is to finally learn whether Afghanistan’s
bacha posh
are of any concern to those protecting the human rights of women and children. Or if they ought to be.

But like most other Afghans I have asked, Sima Samar is certain: There is nothing strange about girls pretending to be boys. Probably nothing harmful either. Her own childhood friend from Helmand lived as a boy for many years before immigrating to the United
States. Samar’s colleague at the commission also had a
bacha posh
who was turned back to a girl at age sixteen, and who now, a few years later, thrives at Kabul University. Much like Carol le Duc also suggested,
bacha posh
is logical in Afghanistan, Samar declares. To her, it is not a human rights issue of any sort. Ideally, of course, children should choose what they wear, she says, although few do in Afghanistan. She hedges her comment by adding that if cross-dressing had the potential to confuse a girl she would discourage it, since, in her words, “girls are confused enough in this country.”

Still,
bacha posh
was never part of that confusion, to her knowledge.

“Are you interested in this?” I ask, at last.

Ever the diplomat, Dr. Samar smiles. “Why are
you
interested in this?”

I pause, considering that the last thing I want to do is to inspire a new human rights issue where there is none or draw government attention to
bacha posh
. Or any of their parents. Instead, using a recent argument from Azita, I suggest that the fact that girls live in disguise is perhaps another symptom of a deeply dysfunctional society. Maybe it is also a little troubling that nobody knows what consequences it may have for the minds of children. And doesn’t the need to hide your birth sex have everything to do with a person’s rights?

Sima Samar raises her eyebrows a little when I have finished.

“Well. That is interesting. To this, I wasn’t paying attention, to be honest.”

She smiles again, as if to mark that she does not have much more to say.

As I leave, after what can only be described as a demonstrable lack of interest by one of the country’s most prominent activists, I wonder if the complexities of
bacha posh
may simply be too controversial for a politically savvy Afghan to touch. That may explain why it has remained under the surface for so long, and is still denied even by the expatriate Afghans I have approached. As with sexuality here, gender determines everything. But one is never supposed to talk about it, or pretend it exists.

Zahra

I
T WAS JUST
a small blink, and she wanted to take it back.