The Underground Girls of Kabul (23 page)

D
R.
F
AREIBA HAD
heard that her old classmate got married in the end, after having been a man for longer than most. After wondering for a while if there were women in Kabul who could shed light on what might be in store for Zahra—on what might happen on the other side of a forced marriage for an almost-grown-up
bacha posh
, I had convinced the elusive doctor to introduce me to her old friend from school. As always, there is no phone number, but together and on foot, we finally locate Shukria at one of Kabul’s busy hospitals.

It is in a small garden behind the hospital that the story of Shukria’s former self is told for the first time. No one ever asked her about it before. She describes a cocky young man in jeans and a leather jacket, who always carried a knife in his back pocket in case he needed to defend his honor—or that of a girl. Shukria thinks of him in the past tense.
Shukur
. He is dead now.

Now thirty-five, or maybe a few years older—like many Afghans, she only estimates her age and shaves off a few years to her advantage—Shukria dresses in a full-length brown robe, or abaya, six mornings out of seven and puts on her small tinted eyeglasses. She carefully applies a thick beige foundation on her weathered face and draws a dark red lipstick over her lips, trying not to smudge it too much. It helps get her into the right state of mind. She even dabs on a little perfume from a small vial she treated herself to at the bazaar. The fragrance, named Royal After Shave, was “Made in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.” It is a dark, woodsy scent. She could not bear any of the more flowery options. Shukria told the vendor it was for her husband.

Her dark curly hair is entirely tucked under a silk scarf. She owns several, in patterned silk, and she feels good putting one on. The scarf shows everybody which side of society she belongs to. She is with the women now. She needs to know it,
feel
it, herself.

The mother of three then rides the bus to work at one of Kabul’s
busiest hospitals, where she changes again, into her roomy light blue scrubs and a little cap. One style fits all; her male colleagues wear the same. The female nurses usually wear longer tunics, but Shukria always opts for the male shirt. She keeps the gold studs in her earlobes, a sole marker of femininity.

In this outfit, for thirteen hours a day, she supports her children and her unemployed husband by working as an anesthesiology nurse. The hours are longer when the sparsely equipped surgical wing fills up with the injured from a blast somewhere around Kabul.

They appreciate Shukria at the hospital, where she has been employed for more than a decade. At least she thinks so. They know she works fast and with little instruction. She rarely gets emotional, either, like some of the other nurses. It makes her useful.

The jolt of adrenaline still happens, though. Especially when she feels the shock wave of a bomb from not far away. But moments later, she clicks right into the familiar routine of walking behind a doctor doing triage, noting how close to life or death each patient is and where he or she will go next—straight into surgery or onto one of the plastic-sheeted beds. Plastic, so the blood can be more easily hosed away later. After a blast, they can arrive by the dozens, on stretchers or carried by others. It happens that a parent and a child will share a stretcher.

Shukria never studied trauma medicine, but she has seen the human body destroyed in multiple ways, each a snapshot cataloged in her brain. The sharpest images are of small bodies without legs or arms, or gaping holes on thin torsos. She can still call up the faces of surprised children looking up at her. There is often screaming and crying, but later, there is no sound in her slide show. It is silent, but in color. In the operating theater, Shukria’s job is to make them silent.

There’s never a “debrief,” or even much of a conversation after a day like that. The staff just carries on, and no one takes a break until the flow of victims begins to ebb. Shukria will wash off and take the bus back home again. In Kabul, everyone has experienced their own horrors, and most have seen a violent death.

She keeps a few pictures of herself as a young man with big, curly
hair and a serious mien. Never smiling. She smiles when she looks at the photos now, remembering what she now considers her “best time.” She sometimes gets angry with herself for not having enjoyed it more—never knowing, or perhaps acknowledging, that it would end so abruptly.

W
HEN
S
HUKRIA ARRIVED
in the family, her parents were taking no more chances. Her training began the day she was born. It would have been ideal, of course, had she actually been born a boy. But it really did not matter for the task she had been assigned at birth: to protect her older brother.

Her mother had been married at age thirteen to a man thirty years her senior. She was his second wife. His first wife had failed to conceive, but Shukria’s mother quickly became pregnant, to the joy of everyone except the childless first wife: Her shame was underscored and worsened by the newly arrived teenage bride’s fertility. But the new wife’s baby died after just a few months of life. So did the next one, the following year. When a third infant son fell ill, suspicion fell on the first wife that she had tried to poison him and had killed the two sons who had come before, since she had helped bottle-feed them formula.

Shukria’s mother, the teenager, gradually settled upon wife number one as the culprit. One day a fight broke out, and each wife took aim at the other’s face with kitchen tools. When their husband entered and tore his bloodied first wife away, she dropped to the floor and cried uncontrollably, begging him to divorce her. “I will never give you a divorce,” he responded. Then he beat her with his fists until she lay silent and unconscious on the floor.

It was never spoken of again in the family, but it was decided that day that the next child born should be given the task of safeguarding the remaining son, should he survive. Whether he had been poisoned or not, no one would ever know.

That next child, arriving later in the year, happened to be a girl.
She was given the formal name Shukria but introduced to the world as Shukur.

Growing up, Shukur always knew her special role, and she felt proud to be her brother’s companion. Together, they became the two princes of the household, distinctly set apart from the five sisters who followed. Shukur shared a separate bedroom with her brother, while her mother, father, and six sisters all slept together in another room. It is common in an Afghan family to assign older siblings to take care of the younger ones, but Shukur had an even more specific task.

She was to follow the family’s most precious asset—their son—at all times, as his guardian. They did everything together: They slept in the same bed. They prayed. They attended school. What she first ate, he then ate. What she first drank, he then drank. If there was a threat from another child, Shukur would shield his body with hers. She never questioned it; she was told it was an honor for her.

Besides, it gave her an opportunity to explore life beyond the confinement her sisters endured. Not that she had much idea what they did with their days. Shukur and her brother never spent a minute more than necessary inside the house. There, they would always eat first, speak first, and never be bothered with any of the mundane things that were expected of the sisters, such as washing, cleaning, and cooking. That was not for boys.

Together, they owned the world outside, climbing trees and exploring the hillsides around Kabul. Shukur’s friends of both sexes always knew she had been born a girl. So did the rest of her extended family and most of the neighbors. But it was not out of the ordinary—one of her female classmates was also passing as a boy. It was another family, with its own reasons; no one would pry further.

As the brothers grew into teenagers, they would have even less contact with girls as they learned that mingling too much with the fairer sex would appear unmanly and invite weakness into their hearts. The brothers joined a gang of eight young men who roamed the town in Fonzie-style short leather jackets and tight jeans, their hair groomed to look Western.

To impress one another, and to cultivate their honor, they would pick fights with opposing gangs. What she lacked in raw strength Shukur made up for by being quick on her feet. Never once did she consider presenting herself as a girl when she was challenged. That would have meant immediate defeat—and shame.

At prayer hours, she prayed in the men’s section at the mosque with the others, placing her hands on her stomach like the men, instead of on her chest, the way women are supposed to do. To her friends she was accepted and respected as an honorary young man. On the bus once, Shukur pulled a knife on a boy who sat down and attempted to harass a female student. It wasn’t something she needed to consider; it was a reflex. Women should be protected from men by other men; she knew it was how society was arranged and it was for the best.

At times, Shukur’s little gang was guilty of mild harassment, too. More than once, they roamed dangerously close to girls, who pleaded with them to stay away so that their parents would not be upset. The gang did not care so much about the girls; the point was to provoke the girls’ brothers.

The boys knew about love, but it was not something they liked to spend their time thinking about. They knew girls did, though, and the boys would play along sometimes, just to see how far the girls would go—how much they were willing to risk. Shukria learned early that love was something that could distort one’s head and that should be left to the weaker sex. The minds of women were especially susceptible to being led astray by poetry and books. The minds of men, on the other hand, were more focused and better equipped for solving important problems and building things. Or so she was taught.

With the privileges attached to being her father’s second son came responsibility. Running to the bazaar, buying food and supplies, hauling heavy bags of flour and cans of cooking oil—it all fell upon her. The eldest son was spared—he always enjoyed a higher status than the family’s
bacha posh
—but Shukur was made to do hard physical labor. It was especially onerous when she got her period. Mentioning the event to her father was unthinkable: It would paint her
as a woman, and worse, the bleeding would mark her as impure and weak. So beginning in the late summer and early fall of her fifteenth year, Shukur contended with stomach cramps as she filled a wheelbarrow full of mud at a nearby pit and ran it to the house to prepare the roof for winter. During the summer, the mud roof usually dried and cracked, so in the months leading up to each icy, cruel winter, it had to be patched up again. Between the mud runs, Shukur would squat down and hug her legs, trying to block out the pain and warm her stomach. Her mother never asked, and her father could never know. Shukur loved her father and wanted to do anything she could to please him by being a perfect son.

She is grateful her period came late; her younger sisters started their menses far earlier, in their early teens. But when Shukur turned thirteen, just like Zahra, her hips did not round out below her waist. She forced her voice to take a turn for the deeper, just like those of the other boys. Her chest remained flat.

She had learned from her mother that a child comes from a woman’s body. The actual birth seemed disturbing to her. Her mother, like many other Afghan mothers, told her that the baby would suddenly burst out from a hole in a woman’s stomach. It was just one of the reasons Shukur was relieved to think that she would never get married—confident that she was needed more by her family. Shukur imagined she would take over from her father the task of providing for them all. Her father, a security officer at the airport, retired when she was barely fourteen, and Shukur decided to pursue an education to become a nurse. She had really wanted to become a doctor, but it required several more years of study and would be costlier. She would need to work and earn an income so she could remain a son to her father and a brother to her sisters.

That was the plan.

S
OON DANGERS BEGAN
to present themselves. As Azita’s life radically changed around this time, in the early 1990s, so did Shukur’s. But her family remained in Kabul throughout the civil war that
followed the Communist rule. Shukur was seventeen on the day three mujahideen arrived at the door. Stricter dress codes for women had just been instituted in Kabul, with mandatory head coverings. The fighters had heard stories of a woman who dressed like a man and they had set out to correct the abomination. Shukur was at home in the Darulaman neighborhood where she had grown up, in jeans, a slouchy shirt, and the Afro-like hairstyle she had cultivated. The fighters stood by the door and demanded to see the cross-dressing criminal they had been told lived at the house. At first, her father would not budge. But Shukur stepped forward and plainly said she was likely who they were looking for. The two men studied her and exchanged looks before one spoke up, in an authoritative tone: “Okay. You look like a boy and you are completely like a boy. So we will call you a boy.”

With that, Shukur had been mujahideen-approved as a credible male. The fighters left and never returned. But they were harbingers of darker days ahead. Her parents began thinking it might be impossible for Shukur to stay a man, especially since their relatives constantly complained—they, too, were turning more conservative and scared. Some argued it was inappropriate to have an adolescent girl in the family who passed as a boy. As always, reputation and honor were at stake.

So when her three-years-older cousin one day blurted out “You are engaged,” Shukur reacted the way she normally did to an insult: She punched him in the face. As he howled, his hands went to his nose. He knew better than to hit back at his cousin.

And he had told the truth.

Shukur’s uncle had made the winning argument to her parents: It was now too dangerous for their daughter to carry on living like a man. As the Taliban rode in, instituting full-on gender segregation in Kabul, cross-dressing was officially banned. As a rule, women were not to go outside at all, and if they did, they needed to be completely covered so as to not inspire lust in men and contribute to the downfall of society. The family had to protect Shukur—as well as itself—the
uncle had told her parents. The best way was to marry her off. And there was the money, of course, that the husband’s family would provide for getting Shukur as a bride, he reminded them. Why say no to a decent bride price in these uncertain times?