The Underground Girls of Kabul (27 page)

“You shameful woman, you should not drive!”

“A car is not for you. You will destroy it!”

“Your husband should beat you!”

“Stop the car! Or we will force you!”

When she did not yield to any of their warnings, it made them angrier. She did not feel defiant so much as scared. She had to focus hard to shut out their loud words and just stare ahead, to keep her wobbling Toyota Corolla away from the curb as she drove away. By the time she finally reached Jalalabad Road, most other cars had
scattered in other directions. But one car seemed determined to race her, driving up next to her, roaring his engine for effect. As the others had failed to stop her or run her off the road, he would at least teach her a lesson by showing he was faster.

So fragile apparently is the power they hold in this country where men are born to almost all the privileges society confers, that this one felt a need to immediately rebuff a woman out of place and demonstrate strength and superiority before her. By getting into a car by herself, Nader had reached for a privilege that was not hers to be had.

She did not want to race him, but she did not slow down, either. She just kept her eyes on the road and drove faster than she really was comfortable with. When her challenger gave up after a while, she tore off the head scarf and threw it on the passenger’s seat.
Nadia
was not meant to be a driver.

Nader looked at herself in the rearview mirror. Her short, curly hair had been flattened by the scarf, and she ran a hand through it. Then she put her sunglasses back on and drove back to the house, without any more drama. Her brothers could yell at her all they wanted. It was her car. After all, she had fixed the engine herself. She had lived as a man for all of her thirty years.

L
IKE SO MANY
of the other girls, Nader was designated her family’s
bacha posh
at birth, to ensure that sons would follow. Her two older brothers had just joined the army, so the need for more sons had become acute, for her parents feared their older children would be killed in their dangerous jobs. For the parents to be left with only girls was a risk they did not want to take. They also needed a helper at home, to run errands and help shuttle the younger ones around. Nader’s mother had been told by several neighbors it was guaranteed to work—dressing her newborn daughter as a son would render magical results.

The magic arrived when two more boys were born, in addition to another four girls. The older brothers soon argued that Nader should
go back to being a girl before she came of age as a woman, so as not to embarrass them before friends and relatives.

But Nader’s life, where she was a Mehran, and later a Zahra, never took the turn of Shukria’s: Nader did not marry. She did not become a woman. In the circle of life of a
bacha posh
, Nader is one of the exceptions. Her life veered in a different direction.

Her father had watched her grow up, and had seen his girl be her happiest in pants and a turban. He thought she should decide for herself what she wanted to wear: “Do what you feel good about and what you are comfortable with. It is your own choice in this life,” he kept telling her when she was a teenager and throughout her twenties.

There was another reason to maintain the status quo: Under the Taliban, women were mostly confined to the house. But Nader would tool around town on a bike avoiding the checkpoints. Her father often laughed at the stories she brought home—of how she had fooled everyone as she went to the bazaar or even to pray with other boys. Like most everyone else in Kabul, her father had only disgust for the Taliban, and Nader’s cat-and-mouse game was their private little resistance movement. Sometimes she exaggerated the drama of how close she had come to getting caught, just to entertain him.

The entire family was ecstatic when the Taliban left. But as the Americans moved in, Nader’s aging father fell ill. With his passing, power over the family and Nader’s future was passed to her brothers. They did not marry her off, but she had a few close calls: Several proposals for marriage from relatives aimed at setting her straight were turned down.

After a few heated family arguments, Nader found her salvation: The family does not lack money, and her mother has not wanted to remarry. Since her brothers have adjacent houses of their own, Nader made a case for herself as the useful male companion to their elderly mother. Now the brothers will not have to worry about their mother, since Nader is there to protect her honor and that of the two youngest sisters. She does all the work around the house and runs errands for her other sisters’ families, too.

So far, that role has allowed her to stay in pants, a T-shirt, and the bulky pinstripe sports coat she prefers on most days. She has perfected a slightly bow-legged walk, and speaks in a low voice. When she leaves the family’s big, carpeted house in one of the better parts of Kabul where houses are surrounded by thick walls, she keeps her head down for fear the neighbors might see her. Gossip is everywhere, and she does not want to unnecessarily provoke anyone. Many know her just as a man who lives with his mother and sisters.

N
OW
,
AS SHE
approaches thirty-five, she is hoping to be out of the marriage market for good as she is simply too old for anyone to want her. And, she hopes, infertile. Watching how her brothers treat their wives and her younger sisters, she cannot imagine being ruled by a man. She went through university as a young man and holds a part-time office job at a software firm in Kabul, making some money of her own.

The power of prayer has worked well for her, too. As her four sisters developed breasts and hips, Nader’s early teenage pleadings with God revolved around staying flat-chested, bony-hipped, and premenstrual. She vowed to give anything in return for those things. God listened, and although she did bleed at fifteen, it was two full years after her younger sisters had their first menstruations. She has never let anyone touch her thick eyebrows, and she has taken every chance to let the sun burn her skin to make it a little darker and rougher. She prayed for a full beard, too, but got only a smidge of black hair above her upper lip. A sports bra one size too small keeps her chest safely minimized. Just to make sure, she slumps a little, her shoulders turned inward. There is no better compliment than when her brothers tell her she looks too much like a man. She has heard them speak among themselves, too, about how Nader may have turned into a man for good. It’s the way it should be, she reasons: “I am free now. I don’t want to go to prison.”

There is an expression sometimes used for
bacha posh
who have aged themselves out of the marriage market. She is
mardan kheslat
: “like
a man.” It can be either a condemnation or a compliment, an expression of admiration and respect for a woman who has the mind and the strength of a man.

For a woman to live as a man is especially controversial as she comes of childbearing age and lives through her fertile years, the way Zahra is experiencing. But when she becomes too old to have children, she is no longer a sexual threat to society, and she may earn a grudging acknowledgment or at least tolerance from a wider circle as an honorary man, just as Carol le Duc described the woman called “Uncle” she once met. By then, she is of no use as a woman anyway. Only then—when her body is no longer fit to be appropriated by others for childbirth, does it become more her own. An infertile Afghan woman is considered less of a woman, and that is exactly the point: She is a woman who has renounced the feminine.

Nader is not the only
bacha posh
who has refused womanhood and now lives as a man in Afghanistan.
Forty-five-year-old Amir Bibi in Khost, the violent province bordering on Waziristan, carries a gun and sits on the local
shura
, where she is seen as a village elder and her opinions have bearing. Meeting Swedish correspondent Terese Cristiansson in 2010, she explained that she had been given permission not to marry by her father, who brought her up as his son among seven brothers.

Another woman who holds the role of an honorary man in her community is fifty-year-old Hukmina. She, too, lives in Khost, in the small village of Sharaf Kali, with both the Pakistani Taliban and unmanned drones above as everyday threats. There, she is a member of the local provincial council, rides horses, and carries a gun with her at all times. She fought the Russians during the war, and she certainly does not fear the Taliban. Having been brought up as a companion to her brother, she tells us she “never had the thoughts of a woman. If I felt like a woman I would not be able to do these things.”

She says she is supported by a whole group of women in her province who live like men. There used to be ten, but two died.

B
OTH
W
ESTERN AND
Eastern history is filled with Hukminas and Amir Bibis and Naders. In almost every era, there have been women who took on the role of men when being a woman was made impossible. Many of those whose existences are remembered are preserved were warriors, since wars are a manly business deemed worthy of recording.

In the first century, Triaria of Rome joined her emperor husband in war, wearing men’s armor. Zenobia was a third-century queen in Syria who grew up as a boy and went on to fight the Roman Empire on horseback. Around the same time in China, Hua Mulan took her father’s place in battle, wearing his clothes. Joan of Arc was famously said to have seen an archangel in 1424, causing her to adopt the look of a male soldier and help fight France’s war against England.

The Catholic Church seemed to not only accept women dressing as men but also to admire and reward those who showed bravery and displayed other male traits.
In a study of medieval Europe, professor Valerie Hotchkiss of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign described the phenomenon of cross-dressing women as revolving around avoiding marriage, renouncing sexuality, and forever remaining virgins. Both
Scivias
, a twelfth-century collection of religious texts by Hildegard von Bingen, and
Summa Theologica
by Thomas Aquinas mention how women dressing in male clothing may be permitted in circumstances of necessity. In other words: war.

Dutch historians
Lotte C. van de Pol and Rudolf M. Dekker also documented more than a hundred women who lived as men between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Many were discovered to be women only when their bodies were carried off the battlefield. These women “existed throughout Europe,” mostly as sailors and soldiers, and likely there were many more who will never be known.

They took on a male identity for reasons similar to the
bacha posh
in Afghanistan today: Some needed to support themselves and their families. Others needed to disguise themselves to travel or to escape a forced marriage. Some managed to disguise themselves to study, since higher education was closed to women. A few who were found
out faced prosecution, but there is evidence indicating some leniency was given to those who had fought for their countries.

In the 1600s,
orphan Ulrika Eleonora Stålhammar supported herself and five sisters in Sweden by enlisting in the army, eventually attaining the rank of corporal and fighting the Russians. She was only one of several Swedish women known to have fought alongside men in male dress to escape a forced marriage.
Briton Hannah Snell famously served with the marines in India in the mid-1700s as James Gray, and several dozen Englishwomen have been recorded as having served as men in the British Royal Navy, initially unbeknownst to their commanding officers.
German women were also found on the battlefield in the guise of men, as was Geneviève Prémoy of France, who was eventually knighted by King Louis XIV. Women living as men were
among the conquistadors in South America, and in North America women clandestinely took part in the Civil War.

By the nineteenth century in Europe, the frequency of women who dressed as men seemed to diminish. Historians attribute it to an increasingly organized society where various forms of civil registration such as border controls and mandatory medical examinations for soldiers made it more difficult for women to pass as men. A more dysfunctional, primitive society works in favor of those who want to disguise themselves; the less papers or checks of any kind, the better–circumstances still true for much of Afghanistan today.

But women who live like men can be found in Europe to this day.

I
N NORTHERN
A
LBANIA
and Montenegro, the centuries-old practice of “sworn virgins” has been documented for a little over a century. There,
British anthropologist Antonia Young tracked down women still living their lives as men in the early 2000s. Similar to Afghanistan, Albania has a tribal society with its ancient customs still preserved. Society is traditionally strictly patriarchal and patrilineal, where children are thought to stem directly from the blood of the father, and the woman is considered merely a carrier.

The family structure is focused on producing sons, and exterior markers such as dress determine a person’s rights. Young girls move in with their husbands’ families when they marry. The men protect the family, ensure its status, and take care of elderly parents—even holding their souls after death, according to old beliefs. A man can also inherit property and avenge and settle blood feuds.