The Best Women's Travel Writing

by Lavinia Spalding

  They watched Hollywood movies, but even those were viewed through the lens of their experiences. After the Taliban were overthrown and movie theaters returned to Kabul, Titanic was a runaway hit, perhaps because romance between early-twentieth century Americans felt almost like that of early-twenty-first century Afghans. A young, upper-class woman, Rose, forced by her family to marry a man from her social class, falls in love with Jack, a poor man of whom her family disapproves. Even the unhappy outcome—the two lovers parted eternally by the shipwreck—rang truer to Afghans than the typical Hollywood fare. Love-conquers-all endings seemed unrealistic. Disaster they understood. Of course, the version that was shown in Kabul theaters was censored. Scenes American audiences came to think of as Titanic’s signature moments—Jack sketching Rose in the nude, or the two lovers fogging up the windows of her fiancé’s Renault—were unceremoniously deleted.

  Nafisa showed me pictures of her and Ayub at their wedding. He was tall, square-jawed, and handsome, with a trimmed beard and deep-set eyes. She wore the heavily beaded, multicolored dress of a Pashtun bride, piles of gold jewelry, and a mournful expression. “A bride must not smile, even if she is happy,” she said. “She must act like she is sad to leave her family.” Ayub had landed a lucrative wartime job with the United Nations and was sometimes on the road for weeks at a time, as he was when we’d arrived in Kabul.

  Their wedding was less than a year ago, and Nafisa was now in her second trimester of pregnancy, her otherwise lithe body just beginning to show under her shalwar kameez. Did she miss her husband, I asked?

  “Yes,” she said, sighing. “But when he comes back it is very nice.”

  A coy smile played on her face. “Very nice?” I asked.

  “Very nice,” she repeated, looking down and blushing. She straightened herself up. “Now I must go do the laundry,” and breezily took leave of me. As she swung open the kitchen door, she glanced over her shoulder with her big brown eyes and winked.

  A couple days later, Nafisa skipped her usual afternoon nap, took a shower, picked out a fresh outfit—a soft pink silk shalwar kameez—put on perfume and makeup, and tried on five different chador before settling on one. As we all sat in the kitchen, watching her put the finishing touches on dinner, I caught her eye. “You’re nervous today,” I said. “And pretty.”

  “Inginir,” she said, using the family’s nickname for her husband—the Pashto word for “engineer” meant an educated man—“is coming home today.”

  Then, turning to me so only I could see it, she took her delicate hand, balled into a fist, and bit down on her pinky knuckle. She gasped softly, feigning breathlessness, grinned at me, then returned to stirring the stew. It was sexier than all the deleted scenes from Titanic combined.

  We saw less of Nafisa after that evening, though the four of us still slept in the couple’s room. She still joined us at night, only later than usual. Nazo, meanwhile, announced that she was having friends inquire about another young man she’d seen at the birthday party we’d attended.

  “White Suit,” she said, eyes dreamy.

  I remembered him—he was, indeed, wearing an all-white suit with a bright red shirt. He had a smooth face and was a flamboyant dancer.

  “What about Yellow Pants?”

  She laughed. Yesterday, we had contemplated some questionable meat in the freezer after one of the city’s frequent power outages. I taught her the word “expired,” explaining the labels in American grocery stores that indicated when something should be discarded.

  “Yellow Pants,” she said, flipping the end of her chador dramatically over her shoulder, “has expired.”

  I took a temporary hiatus from Nazo’s updates and Nafisa’s revelations when Laila and I took a road trip to the family’s rural village in the Ghazni province. We traveled with the younger brother of Nazo and Ayub, Asad, who fulfilled the essential role of escort and bodyguard.

  Within the confines of his mother’s house, I had kept my eyes averted from her only single son, like a proper female houseguest. But as we ventured out onto rural Afghanistan’s unpaved roads, I stole glances in the rearview mirror of our hired car. Asad’s dark, deep-set eyes were fringed by lashes so long they cast shadows on his brown cheeks. He passed time on the long drive by telling us Mullah Nasruddin jokes, laughing loudly at his own punchlines about the legendary Sufi wise fool.

  Soon, we were back in Kabul, and our remaining time passed quickly. We spent our final days saying goodbyes, savoring last meals, exchanging gifts, and posing for pictures. By the time the four of us retired to our room together one final time, I was relieved. We were sprawled across our sleeping mats and cushions.

  Nafisa looked impatient. She kept trying to catch Nazo’s eye. Nazo was making a list of qualifications for her future husband—among them “a little fat” and “a lot of money”—when her sister-in-law interrupted her.

  “I think it is Angie’s turn,” she said.

  I felt my cheeks grow warm. “I don’t have a list.”

  “O.K., Nazo and I will help you write your list,” Nafisa said. “Number one: name begins with ‘A.’ Ends with ‘D.’ Do we know anyone like this?”

  Nazo giggled.

  “Nafisa!” I said, face growing hotter. Asad. After the roadtrip, he had been ducking into the kitchen now and then to ask me about English vocabulary, just like his sister had. I laughed a little too loudly at his jokes and tried to wipe the grin off my face after he left, all the while wondering when his next visit would be. Each time, I felt Nafisa and Nazo’s eyes boring into me as they pretended to be absorbed with the cooking.

  “You like my brother?” Nazo said. Her green eyes danced cartoonishly.

  “He is very nice,” I said carefully.

  “She says he’s very nice,” Nazo said to Nafisa, as if she were an interpreter.

  “You like him,” Nafisa said, leaning close to me. “You like us. You should marry him.”

  Nafisa’s face could look so serious, with those big eyes, that naturally downturned mouth. But surely she’s joking. Nazo nodded, looking earnest herself. I turned to Laila for a hint, but she was keeping a close-lipped smile on her face.

  “What? Marry?” I said, my voice sounding strained. “You’re kidding.”

  “No,” Nafisa said, her uncovered black ponytail flipping emphatically over her shoulder. “You marry him. You will be our sister.”

  “I can’t marry him. I hardly know him!” I protested.

  “You have known him for twelve days,” Nafisa said. She had counted the days since our road trip to the village? “That is more time than I knew my husband before I decided to marry him. And look, we are happy.”

  They were. After her husband left again, Nafisa had moped the entire day. On the one hand, it was hard for me to imagine how this kind of attraction—and yes, love—had developed after they had married barely knowing each other. It was ludicrous to discuss Asad and marriage with his sister and sister-in-law when he and I had only had a handful of conversations, never alone. Could they be that naïve?

  But then I remembered her biting down on her pinky knuckle in the kitchen. I looked at the slight swell of her pregnant belly under her shalwar kameez. All this, with a man she had only known from a few hours’ worth of supervised meetings.

  “Well?” Nafisa said.

  I had no answer for her.

  “We just want you to be our sister.”

  Nafisa had said “sister” once already, but now I began to understand. Nafisa and Nazo, their rapport so easy, like a married couple, even when they bickered. How they moved in the kitchen, never bumping into each other. Nazo told me once that she and Nafisa would have a say in whomever their remaining single brothers married, because they would be taking on a new sister as well.

  “You already feel like sisters to me,” I said, meaning it. I had never become so close to women in such a short time. In a culture that separated men and women, women developed an instant, easy intimacy within their inner sanctums. I
t had been so natural to fall into that uncomplicated closeness. But with this talk of marriage, why hadn’t they brought up the obvious? “I just can’t marry your brother, because I’m not Afghan and I’m not Muslim. I wouldn’t be acceptable.”

  “It is no problem,” Nafisa said. “You will not have to become Muslim right away. You can take your time. I will show you how to pray. Then you convert, and it will be O.K.”

  I hadn’t grown up religious, nor been particularly drawn to religion, but Nafisa made it sound so simple, so essential—a foregone conclusion—and I couldn’t help but feel a bit charmed by it. Learn to pray, the rest would come.

  I rolled my head back on the pillow, making a playful gesture of surrender to my interrogators.

  Nafisa tilted her head toward me sympathetically.

  “You think about this. When you are ready, you tell us your decision. Yes or no.”

  Back in the States, I hardly ever cried. Not at movies. Not at weddings. Rarely over a man, and only when he wasn’t watching. But I cried big, fat tears when I said goodbye to Nazo and Nafisa the next morning, before we left for the airport. Nazo nearly hugged the air out of me, which only made me cry more. The wet tears in my eyes, on my face, dampening Nazo’s black and white school uniform, my breath coming hard and ragged, shocked me. And I was doubly surprised, as I pulled away, to see Nazo’s own electric green eyes swimming and feel my own scarf damp with her tears. We both wiped at our runny noses and laughed.

  And then she was gone, late for school as usual.

  Nafisa approached next, leaning in for an embrace. Then she stopped herself, straightened up, and eyed me sternly.

  “So,” she said. “Did you make your decision? What is your answer: yes or no?”

  My jaw dropped a bit, and I studied her face. Her gaze was unrelenting, but the corner of her mouth curved upward.

  “Nafisa,” I said, feigning exasperation. I wanted to say, “I can’t marry your brother-in-law,” but I didn’t want that to come off as a rejection of him or, worse, of her and Nazo. And the truth was, my attraction to him was real, a constant ripple under my cool surface. “How about a first date?” I wanted to quip, but I knew the joke would be lost on her.

  “Should I ask him if he wants to marry you?” Nafisa offered.

  “NO!” I said, too loudly. “Please don’t.”

  “O.K., O.K.,” Nafisa said. She grabbed my hand with her slim, cool fingers. “But I would like you come back and see us, and if you married him, you could.”

  I promised to come back and see her and Nazo even if I didn’t marry him, and I felt myself getting choked up again. Then our driver pounded at the courtyard door and yelled something in Pashto. Nafisa’s eyes widened.

  “Oh no,” she said. “The driver was in traffic. You are late for the airport! You must go now.”

  We let the driver into the courtyard and rushed the luggage into the car. As I hugged Nafisa I could feel the swell of the life growing beneath her loose-fitting clothes. I hesitated, feeling tears coming on again and wanting to say something meaningful in parting. Nafisa, eyes moist, shook her head and pushed me toward the waiting car door.

  A week after I returned from Afghanistan, I dreamed that Nafisa was teaching me how to pray. She appeared in my dream exactly as I remembered her in real life: heavy-lidded dark eyes, straight nose, and slightly downturned mouth. Calm elegance. Long black hair swept up into her chador.

  Sitting on my heels at Nafisa’s side, on a crimson patterned rug she had rolled out for me, I rehearsed the flow in my head—stand up, bend down, stand up, prostrate, kneel, prostate, stand up. “Don’t worry,” she murmured in her accented English, words clipped just so. “You will know what to do. I told you I would teach you.” Her voice comforted me.

  Dawn bathed us in its soft light, and we heard the call to prayer from a distant muezzin. I turned to Nafisa, searching her face for her promise: you will know what to do.

  I woke up, groggy in the pre-dawn gray of Portland, alone in my small apartment. It was so quiet, and so beige. Gone were the plush red carpets and the sound of Nafisa and her family padding barefoot through the house, murmuring in Pashto to each other, whispering in Arabic as they prayed.

  I should have been grateful to return to American life, without daily power outages, limited clean drinking water, and NATO tanks rolling through the city. But I missed Nafisa and Nazo. And they had found their way into my dreams, which only made me miss them more.

  For weeks, I mentally replayed the dream before going to sleep in hopes that it would repeat itself. It never did. Over time, all my dreams of them, and of Afghanistan, faded as I found my way back into the rhythms and comforts of American life.

  It didn’t occur to me until later that, in my dream, I must have already made the decision Nafisa had posed before I left Kabul. She was, after all, teaching me to pray. I must have said yes.

  Angie Chuang is a writer and educator based in Washington, D.C. Her work has appeared in The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011, Lonely Planet’s travel-writing anthology Tales From Nowhere, the Asian American Literary Review, Washingtonian magazine, and other venues. She is on the journalism faculty of American University School of Communication. She is working on a nonfiction book manuscript centered on her relationship with an Afghan American immigrant family and travels with them in Afghanistan. The names of the Afghans and Afghan Americans have been changed to protect them and other family members in Afghanistan, who have been threatened for collaborating with an American journalist.

  LUCY McCAULEY

  Beneath the Surface

  Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man.

  —Henry David Thoreau, Walden

  We drove to Walden Pond that day to escape an unseasonably humid Monday afternoon in June. I knew that Fareed and Samir weren’t particularly strong swimmers, but I didn’t give that much thought at the time. They had grown up in other countries and were now at MIT, working on their doctorates. I wanted to be the first to show them Walden.

  We walked the path along the shore until we reached the bend that opens onto a small cove and where you can just see, if you know it is there, the trail to the site where Thoreau’s cabin once stood. The late afternoon hung heavy and overcast, the evergreens a smoky-blue smudge against the sky.

  When I remember that day, I think about how the place where you arrive can look so different from the place you later leave. How experience transforms the shape and color of things. The life-guarded beach and its few clusters of people lay far behind. We had this secluded shore to ourselves, watched only by pines, birches, and oaks. We spread the blanket, shed layers of clothes down to bathing suits, used a toe against each heel to coax off shoes.

  I watched Fareed watching me. I watched him back: long brown legs; a smooth, ample chest; a kind face. I first met Fareed on a dance floor in a club downtown. I was captivated by his eyes, which shone with visions my eyes had never seen—of ochre-colored deserts, of marketplaces alive with mirrors and lamplight. When the dance ended, like a child Fareed took my hand and led me off the floor. So familiar it had felt from the beginning, his hand cradling mine.

  In the pond, the water was cool but warmed as we moved, making our way across the cove, the three of us talking and treading water. We would pace ourselves, take this slowly. Samir had learned just that year to swim, taught by an uncle in the gulf at Beirut. At some point, surprisingly close to the shore, the water turned suddenly frigid and I knew the bottom had dropped out beneath us. After maybe twenty minutes Fareed fell behind, and I half-consciously watched his broad arms arcing as I swam, talking with Samir.

  And then Fareed was gone. A rippled empty surface where his body had been. Me, treading water, not ten crawl strokes away.

  Then he sprang into the air, a graceful whale breaching. Ah, I thought, he was just teasing. But then I saw his arms slapping water like the wings of a wounded bird. A still surface again, one perfect ring marking like a bul
l’s eye where he’d been.

  “Go!” Samir shouted. And as if shaken from sleep I darted toward the ring, just as Fareed resurfaced briefly. I saw the black outlines of his eyes, flung wide.

  Then, empty water. Water that I grabbed but that did not contain the shoulder I reached for, the hand, finger even, the bunch of hair. Unthinkable, the idea that he could not resurface, yet that fear tore at my ear, mocking me.

  Then he was there again, and this was my chance to coax him onto his back, like some fumbling magician trying to levitate a body.

  Later Fareed would speak of looking up at water the color of baby moss. It was almost too easy, he told me. Just to rest at the bottom looking up at that moss-green water. His whale-like catapult in the air was his last call for help.

  I grew up trusting water. We spent summers at the Carolina shore, my father teaching me to float, balancing the small of my back on his palm as the waves tossed me.

  Fareed never learned to float. He told me that, growing up in Pakistan, he had learned a few strokes, but never got a chance to know what it felt like to be tired in water, to learn when it’s time to get out.

  These are things we discovered about each other only after that day at Walden. Until then, all the unanswered questions had still danced between us, and we’d only begun to grapple with the more difficult ones. Fareed was seven years younger than I, but most problematic for us, his family was devoutly Muslim. Although he considered himself an atheist, he told me he could never go against his family so profoundly as to marry a Westerner.