The Underground Girls of Kabul (30 page)

Nader turns around to see our reactions. I know better than to ask her to look at the road when she’s driving.

She tells us they are her protégés. Nader has no children, but she has already begun to build her legacy. They are her
bachas
, in training to become the next generation of refusers.

Nader’s Boys

O
NLOOKERS ARE HUSHED
. The coach shouts Korean fighting terms with an Afghan accent. Her arms shoot out, the hands chop down, and fingers point to the floor.

Begin!

The fighters are said to be a girl and a boy. They are in identical white tunics and loose pants, with helmets covering much of their faces, making it impossible to see who is what. All eyes are on the two fighters as they begin their dance in perfect rhythm:
Hop, hop
, apart.
Hop, hop
, together.
Hop, hop, kick
. A leg shoots up, a torso blocks; a head swirls around and dips to the floor. Hit by a surge of adrenaline, they clash for a moment, clinging to each other with guttural sounds coming out. They tear themselves apart again.

The head-scarved coach interrupts: “No, no, no. Fight with your feet. Not with your hands!”

Her hand goes down.

Break
.

A quick, respectful bow, and the two panting fighters tear off their tight-fitting helmets. Under the blue helmet is a fighter with slightly fuller lips. She is taller and maybe a year or two older than red helmet, a lanky teenage boy. Both have short black hair glued to their heads and their foreheads glisten with sweat. Two other young
students in pants and tunics quietly stand up from the bench. It’s their turn now. They are eager to take over the helmets and chest pads—the eighteen students share just one set.

Another girl on the bench has been holding a can of Mountain Dew to her left eye, where she was kicked before. She puts it down and says she is ready for round two. She scored more points than her male opponent in round one, in a system no one here seems to really understand. She was a little faster; her ducking a little smoother.

Sahel leans against one of the mirrors, cracked by a flying body weeks ago. Hands on thighs, she bends her head down and breathes hard. The Korean martial art, named after “the art of hand and foot,” is her only physical exercise of the week other than the three flights of stairs she runs up and down daily to and from school. It is far more than most Afghan girls get. Nader walks up to her, patting her on the back. Sahel’s mouth curls in a smile. She is Pashtun from Kandahar with three younger sisters. She counts Nader as her mentor and honorary big brother. In her actual family, Sahel is the older brother. At seventeen, she is older than any of her
bacha posh
friends, some of whom have vanished into marriage by now. But Sahel does not intend to go quietly. She has told Nader several times by now: “I am never going to be anyone’s servant. Never.”

A crumpled bandana comes out of Sahel’s pocket; she ties it around her short hair with a knot in the back, biker style. The American eagle rests on her head as she shakes it to emphasize her refusal. She will fight for her freedom, and Nader has promised her support. Unlike Zahra, Sahel is not alone, and unlike Shukur in her time, Sahel is not the only
bacha posh
in a tribe of teenagers approaching adulthood.

A basement in the Khair Khana neighborhood of Kabul is hosting Nader’s protégés, who meet here once a week to practice tae kwon do. When Afghanistan had a medalist at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, it made this a sport of national pride, on par with football and cricket. Five overgrown
bacha posh
immerse themselves in ritualistic, intense, and explosive close-contact fighting—not at all as a hobby, but because they all aspire to become champions. And in this small underground
space, Nader coaches both tae kwon do and her own brand of organized resistance.

Every situation is addressed during downtime on the bench.

How to make yourself useful at home. How to argue for an education and a future income for the family rather than marriage. How to make contingency plans for the day your older brothers decide to put a stop to it all. How to ignore what they say about you in school.

It’s better to live outside of society than to be enslaved, Nader preaches to her apprentices. And if
she
could do it, if she could resist becoming a woman for this long, it will be possible for them, too. They have cleared the biggest hurdles already and are almost grown-ups. Soon, if they have any luck, no one will want to marry them anyway, Nader tells them. In the meantime, if they can just finish their educations and find a profession, they will be of far more value to their parents than they would be as brides for other families.

To Nader, her coaching is not political, or part of any philosophy she has studied. She keeps it practical to her
bachas:
If they resist becoming girls for long enough, both their minds and bodies will grow invincible. They will reach a point of no return, when the male traits take hold. The physical training helps build mental resolve, too, along the lines of what Nader’s warrior friend Shahed has prescribed.

“Why do you think the conservatives do not allow women to play sports?” Nader asks, by way of explanation.

“Because you touch each other?” I suggest.

Yes, that’s part of it, Nader agrees. This type of coed practice would be highly controversial above ground.

“But it is also because when we use our bodies, we do not feel weak anymore. When a girl feels the strength of her body, she knows she can do other things, too.”

Nader is not the first to make the connection between mind and body here. To the intense irritation of many Afghan conservatives, a discreet cadre of sports coaches have spent the last post-Taliban decade working with female teams. I tagged along once with Afghanistan’s only girls’ cycling team, where athletic women in head
scarves and bulky tracksuits navigated muddy backstreets on practice runs, inviting the jeers of men and burka-clad women alike. Young women on bikes are an open provocation and an obscenity on Kabul’s streets and they usually avoid inner-city practice. Instead, the coach drives them to a mountain where they can ride in peace. Several boxing clubs also allow young women to practice, sometimes in the company of young men.

Nader coaches soccer, too. Most players are regular girls in head scarves, but several Kabul teams have one or two
bacha posh
in various stages of puberty, too, as evidenced by the Facebook and cell phone photos she directs me to. The team’s
bacha posh
usually wears a bandana, or nothing at all on her head, looking defiantly into the camera as she poses lined up next to the others.

W
OMEN AND SPORTS
are a classic conflict in a culture of honor, similar to that of war. The point of athletic events was to have women admiring male competitors from the sidelines, and later presenting the winner with his reward. The more segregated and conservative the society, the harsher the restrictions on women’s sports.

More than a hundred years after the Olympics were revived, Saudi Arabia dispatched its first two female athletes to the 2012 Games in London. Afghanistan sent one—a female runner. In a measured concession, Brunei and Qatar also allowed a few women to participate for the first time. In those countries, women in sports are still a sensitive cultural issue, with a lot of detractors. The same tired historical arguments are still made, often with references to religion or invalid science: Too much physical exercise could be dangerous for women. Men who watch them could get too excited by catching glimpses of female bodies in motion. And the (more important) male athletes may become too distracted to engage in competitive sports at all if women were on the field. And what might be the point of winning, or even playing honorably, if women are not cooing on the sidelines?

The real reasons for those governments’ reluctance to have women practicing sports are, of course, exactly what Nader has figured out: A
woman who feels her own physical strength may be inspired to think she is capable of other things. And when an entire society is built on gender segregation, such ideas could cause problems for those who would like to hold on to wealth and power.

H
ANGAM
,
AN EIGHTEEN
-
YEAR
-
OLD
Tajik
bacha posh
, joins us. Like Sahel, she has a bandana tied around her head. Hers is in a paisley pattern, and she is panting after having just left the floor. It was not her best game, she tells Nader, admitting to being distraught. She had backed into another car as she was trying to park outside. One of the taillights broke, and she worries that her father will be upset. The car is precious to him. Nader tries to calm her. Her father will be forgiving. With all the gossip the family has had to endure about Hangam’s lingering male appearance, her father has still not succumbed to public pressure. He tells neighbors and others to “mind their own business” when they question how he runs his family. There have been many
bacha posh
in Hangam’s family, going back generations. Most have eventually moved abroad, as those with money can do.

Her younger sister has a ponytail that sits high on her head. She does not wear a head scarf unless she goes outside. She chimes in about their father. “He offered me to become a
bacha posh
, too, but I said no.”

When I met Hangam’s father a few days earlier, he told me marriage has not entirely been ruled out for his daughter, if she is willing and remains in Afghanistan. He described her potential husband as “someone educated or liberal; enlightened.” The husband must allow Hangam to wear men’s clothing if she prefers it, and let her work outside the house, should she want to use the education her father has given her. For he would never allow his daughter to marry “a useless man,” he told me.

Such a man might be hard to find in Kabul, but, he believes, not impossible. When he was young, the Russians taught him women should be part of society and not stashed behind closed doors. When he took his family to live in Iran during the Taliban years, he saw
bacha posh
of all ages in their neighborhood in Tehran. His interpretation was that Iranians are clever enough to realize that religious and cultural impositions
can be ignored when a country is run by backward-striving people. And that a little resistance is sometimes a good thing. If Afghanistan deteriorates after foreign troops pull out and there is another civil war, he will attempt to return to Tehran. Worst case scenario, he will send Hangam abroad to live on her own. He has the means: He works at a prison, and influences who stays behind bars and who doesn’t. And there are always those who pay good money to have their cases “revisited.”

A
FTER TAE KWON
do practice ends, the girls plead for a group shot, lining up against the mirrored wall. They bicker about who gets to be next to Nader. The group of young men finally arrange themselves in a formation fanning out from Nader, who stands broad-legged with one hand in her jean pocket as the ringleader. They all angle their hips forward and pose with their chins down and lips pressed together. Puberty has so far not caused them much trouble—they followed Nader’s instructions on how to pray for their chests not to develop. She has helped them stabilize deeper voices, too.

“Show me your best move,” I ask of Sahel in the parking lot as we break for the night and are about to part ways.

Before I understand where she is going, she spins backward twice and gently kicks me in the lower back. The other girls whistle in appreciation and offer high fives all around.

“Be careful. She’s just a girl,” Hangam shouts.

T
HE SIX GIRLS—
including Nader—do not know that their basement in Kabul is just one microcosm in something much bigger, that goes beyond the capital, and beyond Afghanistan.

In immigrant communities all over Europe and the United States, there are women from many other conservative cultures who have their own stories of growing up as boys, for reasons of survival or a desire for freedom. With time, and through dispatches from friends from India, Iran, and elsewhere around the Middle East, I slowly begin to realize that Nader’s attempt at resistance can be found in
many places where segregation exists and boys are preferred. And that it is a global phenomenon which remains mostly underground. That women in some places take the radical action of refusing their own gender, or change that of their daughters, is not very flattering to societies considering themselves to be somewhat evolved. Nor is it kindly viewed by male religious and political leaders.

But evidence of
bacha posh
variants in other countries is not hard to come by once the right questions are asked. Just across the border in Pakistan, Setareh can present one distant cousin after the other who live as young men, working or going to college. They, too, are
bacha posh
, or
alakaana
in Pashto, often designated as such from birth.

In Urdu-speaking areas of Pakistan and India, they are called
mahi munda
, or “boy-girl.” In India, there is
a longstanding Hindu tradition of
sadhin
, whereby girls take on the role of honorary men through renouncing their sexuality. Author Anees Jung observed many girls in short hair masquerading as boys detailed in her 2003 book
Beyond the Courtyard
. “
It’s normal around here,” one of the women interviewed in the book explains.

In Egypt, famous deep-voiced balladeer Umm Kulthum began performing dressed as a boy at her father’s insistence, to avoid the shame of having a daughter on stage. Middle East scholar and development expert Andrea B. Rugh observed multiple cases of
women dressing as men for purposes of work and practicality in the country during her fieldwork in the 1980s.

In parts of Iraq, Kurdish girls have been described by locals just like Zahra: as something in between women and men.