The Underground Girls of Kabul (6 page)

Her father, Mourtaza, decided the family had to leave. His family had grown, with three more daughters and one son arriving after Azita, and he could not find a way to take them to Pakistan. Instead, they made a difficult journey back to their remote home province of Badghis. The apartment in Kabul was boarded up, the store left behind. It would be ransacked, but there was nothing they could do to stop it—everyone they knew was fleeing, too. After packing all they could in a small car, the family drove off as refugees in their own country. As their car became a target for snipers the family abandoned it by the road, continuing for eighteen days by bus and by foot, sleeping in mosques and trying to avoid rebels and looters along the way. Those are days Azita cannot recall anymore; her brain has buried them somewhere.

When they reached what they saw as a semblance of civilization again—the city of Herat in western Afghanistan—they were certain of survival, as war had not yet reached nearby Badghis. Her youth would end there, and she would not return to Kabul for many years.

She remembers being angry about the war, and that she had not been able to take any of her books with her, from the small library her father kept in the house.

“Did you have a favorite book?” I ask her in the car, as she describes her last days in Kabul.

“Of course.
Love Story
.”

“Oh. I read that, too.” I had found it at my grandmother’s house once, in my mother’s collection of books. “Do you remember the quote at the end? ‘Love means never having to say you’re sorry’?”

“Yes, yes.” Azita smiles and her eyes drift off a little. “It was difficult for me to understand, but I cried a lot in the end when she died. I cried a lot. When I grew up I understood the exact meaning. I watched the movie, too, several times.”

“Have you ever been in love?”

She looks at me, silent for a moment before she speaks.

“I love my husband, Jenny.”

Dr. Fareiba

T
HOSE WHO MAKE
it here are the lucky ones.

Most often, the promise of new life arrives by car. Poor hydraulics and patchy road make the heavily pregnant patients under powder-blue burkas sway in the backseat of the battered Toyota Corollas. The sign on the gate shows a crossed-out machine gun: No weapons allowed. That rule will be disregarded, as most everywhere else in Afghanistan. The guards, who have watched each car barrel down the hillside, give a nod to swing open the steel doors. Inside is a two-story hospital, where a handful of doctors work in shifts at this sole medical clinic in a largely Taliban-controlled area of thirty-two thousand people. Some patients are nomads; most are from poor, rural families.

On average, one hundred and sixty-six new Afghans are born in the maternity ward here each month, according to the hospital’s records. It rests in the middle of a quiet flat plateau in the Wardak province, about an hour’s drive from Kabul. Quiet, that is, on a good day: A few miles north of the hospital is an American military base—the primary target for rocket attacks by insurgents, as all resistance to foreign troops is dubbed. Those insurgent fighters take aim at the foreign enemy from several angles, the hospital squatting between
themselves and the target. When fired, the rockets arc through the sky above the little hospital and often hit just outside the grounds. At times, they fall a bit short and hit the hospital.

Thermal cameras on unmanned drones hum in the air above, trying to discover the rockets while they are still on the ground, often mounted on makeshift piles of stones and sticks, connected to batteries and timers. If the drone operator spots something of interest, an attack helicopter armed with machine guns, rockets, and missiles can be dispatched in a preemptive attack.

Regardless of who aims to kill whom out there, most efforts inside the clinic frantically revolve around life. Nobody will ask patients what family or clan they belong to, or who they may have been fighting outside the gate. Every ragged, hollow-eyed child is cared for, every pregnant woman is ushered inside. The men will wait outside, leaning back in rows on benches along a yellow stone wall with a backdrop of snowy mountains, while the fate of their families plays out in the hospital. Most are in the typical villager dress of white cotton pants, vests, and plaid turbans, with open sandals or plastic shower shoes also in the iciest of winter.

Inside, layers of burkas, hijabs, and shawls are pulled back by sunburned henna-painted hands. The hands often look older than the faces underneath, with their soft cheeks and unwrinkled eyes. A few mothers-to-be have only recently become teenagers. Every few hours, a woman’s struggle to have a son ends here, inside a white-tiled room, where three gynecological chairs have been covered with black plastic bags. A baby boy is triumph, success. A baby girl is humiliation, failure. He is a
bacha
, the word for child. A boy. She is the “other”: a
dokhtar
. A daughter.

The woman who returns home with a son can be celebrated with a
nashrah
ceremony, where music is played and prayers are said. Food and drink will be brought out in abundance. The new mother will be presented with gifts: a dozen chickens or a goat to celebrate her achievement. She may even be offered a few pounds of butter to help her breast-feed her baby boy to become healthy and strong. She is
elevated to a higher status among women. She who can deliver sons is a successful, enviable woman; she represents both good luck and a good wife.

If a daughter is born, it is not uncommon for a new mother to leave this delivery room in tears. She will return to the village, her head bowed in shame, where she may be derided by relatives and neighbors. She could be denied food for several days. She could be beaten and relegated to the outhouse to sleep with the animals as punishment for bringing the family another burden. And if the mother of a newborn has several daughters already, her husband may be ridiculed as a weakling with whom nature refuses to cooperate, a
mada posht
. Translation: “He whose woman will only deliver girls.”

One kind of child arrives with the promise of ownership and a world waiting outside. The other is born with a single asset, which must be strictly curtailed and controlled: the ability to one day give birth to sons of her own. She, like her mother before her, has arrived in what
the United Nations calls the worst place in the world to be born.
And the most dangerous place in which to be a woman.

“W
E ARE THE
Pashtun people.
We need the son
.”

Dr. Fareiba emphasizes each word in hoarse, broken English. It should not be too hard, even for a foreigner, to understand this fundamental fact of her country. As with many women here, her weathered face betrays no precise age, nor will she offer a number. But she will gladly speak of everything else in short, assertive bursts with one corner of her mouth perpetually turned into an upward smirk. She has brought me through a back door into the disinfectant-smelling, bare-bones hospital for an education on the need for sons after extracting a promise that I will not attempt to speak to any of the husbands outside, which could alert them to the presence of a foreigner and endanger the hospital.

Dr. Fareiba’s patients share many circumstances with the majority of Afghanistan’s women, whose lives are far removed from that of Azita and others in Kabul. These are the invisible women, now only
temporarily out of the view of their husbands. For some, it is the only time they are allowed to have contact with people outside their own family. Most are illiterate and very shy, even in front of other women. Some hold hands and hesitate to step up to the examination table for the first time, where bulging bellies are carefully touched by doctor’s hands.

Dr. Fareiba is known by reputation. She is greeted with respect as she sweeps around the corridors in her work uniform: a burgundy leather coat and a floor-length velvet skirt. She peeks into every room, where women nurse their newborns under thick polyester fleece blankets, or line up along the walls to see the gynecologist. Some smile; others hide their faces. The children, who have come with their mothers, do not smile. Much of the donated brightly colored clothing they wear is either too large or too small. None of them have anything resembling overcoats, and they, too, wear open sandals on soil- and dust-blackened feet. Only one little girl has a pair of red rubber boots. She looks to be around six years of age, with a matted mop of brown hair. Her pale gray eyes quietly follow the movements of the younger siblings left in her charge while their mother is seen by one of the doctors.

Dr. Fareiba asks a few questions of each patient, smiles, and then turns around to give me a matter-of-fact summary. Each contains a life story:

“The husband left her after three of her babies died. Now married to her nephew, as his second wife. She is twenty-five, and pregnant again.”

“Seventeen. First child. Married to her older uncle.”

“Twenty-one. Three children. Her husband is a powerful man, with many wives.”

Birth control is available for free at the hospital. The doctors urge patients to wait at least three months between pregnancies for a better chance of carrying a child to term. Whether patients actually use any form of contraception has less to do with ideology or a conservative husband and more with the practical circumstances of life here. Too much snow, heavy rain, or a mudslide in the spring may
block the roads from a small village when time comes to refill a prescription or submit to another injection. Or there simply may be no car, or no gas for the car, or no one to drive it. That also contributes to
eighteen thousand Afghan women dying each year of complications from childbirth; about fifty women per day, or one every half hour.

In another room, three women from the same village are in various stages of pregnancy with complications, but the cost of a car ride could not be justified for just one, or even two of them. So the first two had to wait for the third to go into labor. Only then were they all three driven together, as fast as the car would go. Despite efforts to stem maternal mortality, Afghanistan still ranks among the world’s worst countries to give birth in,
on par with the poorest and most war-torn nations in Africa. But the odds for survival at this clinic, in the middle of a battlefield, are better than at a home birth.

“She is forty,” Dr. Fareiba says of a patient in a postdelivery room. The woman is lacking several front teeth, and has bracelets stacked up on each arm. “A miscarriage. But she has ten live children. Only girls. So she tries for a son, again and again.”

When a new wife is blessed with two or three sons as her first children, she will not be pressured to have many more after that. If a few girls follow, that is fine, too. But at a streak of only “girl, girl, girl,” in the doctor’s words, most women will keep trying for a son. It’s a one-sentence explanation to the population question: A total of four or five children is perfectly acceptable to most parents in Afghanistan—but only if that number includes mostly boys.
The life expectancy of a woman here is forty-four years, and she spends much of it being pregnant. Most couples know how to limit pregnancies if they want to, but the pressure to have another son often overrides any concern for a woman’s survival.

Dr. Fareiba pokes into the blanket of a new mother, who lies on a bed facing the wall. She has been silent since her delivery. The doctor sweeps up the small bundle from her side and turns to the nurse trailing her every step. They nod at each other: Yes, it’s a girl.

She is only a few hours old, and she does not have a name yet. Her eyes have been lined with kohl, “for magical luck,” and to protect her from the evil eye. The baby blinks a little, and her tiny mouth gasps a few times. She is perfect, down to her tiny, grasping fingers. Yet to many in Afghanistan, she is
naqis-ul-aql
, or “stupid by birth,” as a woman equals a creature lacking wisdom due to her weak brain. If she survives, she may often go hungry, because feeding a girl is secondary to feeding a son in the family, who will be given the best and most plentiful food. If, in her family, there is a chance of the children going to school, her brothers will have priority. Her husband will be chosen for her, often before she reaches puberty. As an adult, very few of life’s decisions will be her own.

L
OOKING AT THE
revered Dr. Fareiba, though, it is hard to imagine that she would allow a man to rule any aspect of her existence. She herself has defied tradition by working under almost every form of government in the past twenty years, as well as no government at all, since there was always a need for female doctors. Dr. Fareiba has delivered “maybe one thousand babies,” by her own estimate.

“But why do only sons count here? What is it that women cannot do?” I ask.

Dr. Fareiba raises her hands in the air to express frustration. She already explained this: It is not about capability. Men and women just have different roles and different tasks. It is about how society is arranged and what works. It is about how it’s always been.

The pressure for sons is not just perpetuated by men, either. Women need sons just as much, Dr. Fareiba says, using herself as the example. Her three sons are not only her proudest achievement; they are essential to the survival of her family. Who other than a son protects and cares for his parents, should they survive to old age? If the family needs to flee from yet another war? In case of a dispute, or a violent conflict, with another family? There is no social security, little health care, and virtually no rule of law in Afghanistan. There is
just unemployment, poverty, and constant war. In this environment, the number of sons equals a family’s strength, both financially and socially. They are insurance. A 401(k). A bank. Dr. Fareiba’s sons will support and ensure not only her life but her family’s longevity and legacy.

Dr. Fareiba has a daughter, too. But she will be married off to a man of her parents’ choice, and move away to live with her husband’s family. The ownership of an Afghan girl is literally passed on from one male—her father—to the one who becomes her husband. He will take over the ruling of her life, down to the smallest details if he is so inclined. Dr. Fareiba may not even see her daughter again, if her future son-in-law and his family decide to move far away. On the other hand, when her own sons marry, they will take their new brides back to Dr. Fareiba’s house to start new families there. More sons will hopefully be born, and her family will grow larger and stronger.