I STOOD ON MARY’S ROOF and peered down to the street below. Against the mud, there was a puddle of blue that shifted and shook with excitement. Hairdressers had arrived for the meeting! Most of them were in blue burqas, but a few were in pale yellow ones—and some were in ordinary street clothes with dark scarves. I spotted several more burqas streaming purposefully down the street toward the house to join the others. I ran down Mary’s stairs, overjoyed.
Some thirty women filed into the house as Mary and I greeted them at the door. They settled themselves on the toushaks in the living room, then rolled the fronts of their burqas up so that the cloth framed their faces like heavy curtains. Some of the women had babies, which they jiggled in their arms to keep them quiet. I went around the room with a platter of baked goods. One of the younger women was stunning, with huge green eyes and brown hair and about the loveliest smile I’d ever seen. She took a small cake and put her hand on my arm.
“Thank you,” she said in a voice about an octave lower than I expected. “Thank you.”
“What is your name?” I tried to remember the words in Dari. “Namet chest?”
“Baseera.” She repeated it slowly so that I’d catch all the syllables and the roll of the r at the end. “Baseera.”
I tried to replicate the music of her voice, and she laughed. “Good,” she said.
She had a face that looked as if it liked to laugh. I was ready to admit her into our first class right then and there.
Mary and I handed out a number to each of the women and took their pictures with the numbers, so that we’d know later who we were talking about. We explained to them that in-depth interviews with Noor would follow and that not all of them would be part of the first class of twenty. Since their faces weren’t covered anymore, Noor couldn’t come in the room. So Mary translated as I welcomed them to the meeting. I explained who I was and what our plans were for the school, then told them I needed to ask them some questions so that we would know how best to design the school to serve them. But first, I said, I’d like them to tell me a little about themselves.
This was like removing a cork from a bottle. Their stories started to pour out at once. Mary got the women to settle down and tell their stories one at a time, then quickly translated.
One woman who looked as if she were my age but was much younger—I was starting to notice how common this was—said she had worked as a hairdresser before the Taliban and had just started again in the last year. She said that she had been wearing the burqa for fifteen years. When she first took it off, the sun was so blinding that it took her three days to be able to walk around without shielding her eyes from the light.
Another woman said she had not been allowed out of her home in eight years. She said that she was depressed and very bored, and that she had come to this meeting without telling her husband. She thought there was a chance her husband might let her come to beauty school if he knew how much money she could make. She had been cutting her daughters’ hair at home, and then her daughters’ teachers’ after they admired her work.
I pointed to Baseera, who was looking at me with wide eyes. “Can you tell us your story?” I asked.
She nodded, and Mary began to translate. “This young lady has been a hairdresser for eight years. Even during the time of the Taliban, she still made money working on hair.”
In fact, Baseera was the sole support of her family during those years, because her husband lost his government job when the Taliban took over. She had customers who were wives of the Taliban, and they would come to her house for wedding hair and makeup even though it was forbidden. Their husbands would drop them off and pretend that they were just visiting. The women would leave Baseera’s house with their hair and makeup hidden under their burqas and their manicures hidden by gloves. Then she got a warning that the Taliban were going to raid her house. She broke her mirrors into pieces and buried them and her other supplies in her yard because it was too dangerous to throw them in the garbage. When the Taliban came, she had to let them in, and they tore her house apart. They beat her husband and put her in jail for two days. Tears flowed down her cheeks as she told this story, and she wiped them away with the hem of her burqa. I had to put my arms around her and hold her. She was twenty-nine years old, but she seemed more like a child. One who both laughed and cried easily.
Then Mary prompted the next woman to speak, and the stories continued. I figured that the women had averaged about ten years as hairdressers. Now I wanted to know how they did things and what they actually knew, so that we’d know how to design the school’s curriculum. So I started pointing to different women and asking questions. How long do you leave a perm solution in? Do you work on women with lice? How do you handle hair that has henna in it? Do you reuse a comb if you’ve dropped it? At this point, the attitude in the room shifted. While the women had been happy to tell their stories, they now seemed anxious that they might appear ignorant. If I had understood Afghan culture better, I would never have put them on the spot like that. I would have questioned the women in private. I didn’t realize that I was toying with their pride in their work, and some of the women got angry. These most often turned out to be the women who knew the least while acting as if they knew the most. Still, I wish I’d handled it differently.
By the end of the meeting, though, everyone seemed to be excited about the school. I was probably more excited than anyone, knowing how much these women were going to be learning and how it would change their businesses. I thought of the boxes of wonderful products we had just moved and could imagine the women trying them out for the first time—breathing in all those exotic fragrances, rubbing the silky conditioners through their fingers. The women began to leave, pulling their burqas or scarves back over their heads. Many of them kissed me on their way out the door. Just as Baseera was kissing me good-bye, Roshanna arrived, and the two of them spoke for a minute.
“I want to know more about this one,” I told Roshanna. “Can you ask her to stay a few minutes longer?”
So the three of us settled on Mary’s toushaks, and Roshanna began asking questions. “She comes from Mazar-e Sharif, in the north of Afghanistan,” she began. Then she listened and translated while I held Baseera’s hand, because she had started to cry again.
Baseera said that, in the late 1970s, the war against Russia was raging near Mazar. Bombs had fallen near the children’s school. Her father was a progressive thinker and wanted Baseera’s two older sisters to stay in school—she herself was only three years old at the time—so he moved the whole family to Kabul, where Baseera’s mother’s brother lived. The father found a nice house for them. He performed what is called a garroul, meaning that he gave the owner a large sum of money for the house; after five years, the family could either get some of the money back or keep the house. After they were settled in Kabul, the father went back to Mazar to conduct a final piece of business, but he never returned. Baseera’s anguished mother waited for months to hear from him and finally had to assume that he was killed either by the Russians or by the mujahideen, even though no one ever found his body. She took a job cleaning a school, and eventually, all the girls were students there. In five years, the terms of the garroul were up, and Baseera’s mother decided they should take the money and move to a house that wasn’t as nice. Her wages were meager, and the family was becoming poorer and more ragged. Her brother said that he would take care of collecting the money for her. This role was expected of him as the oldest male relative. But when Baseera’s mother asked him for the money, her greedy brother refused to give it to her and ordered her out of his home. So the family now had no house and no money.
By the time Baseera was eight, she was still going to school but couldn’t live at home. She stayed at the house of one of her teachers and did the housekeeping there, because her mother couldn’t afford to feed her. Baseera missed her mother terribly and saw her only on Fridays, but the teacher was kind, as if Baseera were one of her own daughters. Soon Baseera decided that
she wanted to be a teacher, too.
But when she was twelve, her mother engaged her to a twenty-nine-year-old government clerk. Her mother was afraid that, because she had no husband and no money, people might assume bad things about her daughters, maybe even accuse them of being prostitutes. There were also rumors floating around Kabul that men were trying to snatch young girls and sell them in other countries. Baseera didn’t understand any of this. Her cousins teased her that she was engaged to an old man, but she was still playing with dolls and paid no attention. Even at her engagement party, she raced around the room and tumbled with the other children in her fancy velvet dress. When her husband to be bent down and gave her a gold ring, she thought this was just another game.
Over the next two years, her betrothed stopped by and gave her presents, but she still paid him no attention. Then one day, she felt a terrible pain in her back and lay down at her mother’s house. When she stood up, blood streamed down her legs. She called her mother and screamed that she was dying. No, her mother told her after running into the room—this meant that it was now time for her to be married. So when she was fourteen, Baseera was married to the man who gave her the gold ring. She remembered it as a terrible day. The beautician threaded her eyebrows, and she cried from the pain of it, and then she continued to cry with fear of what would come. Her mother had told her only that her husband would do something to her after the wedding that would make her bleed some more. I later learned that mothers didn’t tell their daughters about the details of the wedding night because they wanted the girls to appear innocent of any knowledge of sex. Sheer terror was a good indication of virginity. Baseera said she cried so much before the wedding that the beautician had to keep applying her makeup over and over, because her tears kept washing it away. Later that night, men from her family and the mullah signed the nika-khat in another room while Baseera sat in her old teacher’s lap. The teacher said she was sorry that Baseera had to marry and quit school. Baseera would have made a fine teacher, she said.
When her mother shooed her into a room with her husband later that night, Baseera pressed herself in the corner and shrieked. Her false eyelashes washed away, and she pulled the big, lacquered curls from her hair in despair. Her husband stayed away from her for three days, but on the fourth he insisted. The bloody cloth was presented later to his mother.
When Baseera was nine months pregnant with her first child, there was still war in the country, but not between the mujahideen and the Russians—now the mujahideen factions were fighting with one another. Many people were fleeing Kabul, and her husband thought they should go, too. He said that they could get space on a bus leaving the city, so she agreed. But her labor pains began before they could board the bus, and she and her husband and sister-in-law went to a hospital. It was closed and all the staff was gone—and there were no lights because the power had been off for days—but it was still crowded with people hoping to find someone left who could care for them. Baseera had her first baby on the cement floor of the dark hospital. She didn’t cry out. Instead, she bit her wrist when the pain was bad and pinched her sister-in-law, who was the one who wound up delivering the baby. It was a girl. Her husband was happy about this, even though neither she nor anyone else in the family was.
Baseera had another daughter during the civil war and yet another during the reign of the Taliban. Her labor pains for the third came after the 11:00 P.M. curfew, and everyone was afraid to take her to the hospital without official permission. But she hurt so much that she had to walk, so she went outside. Her family brought toushaks out of the house and laid them down on the sidewalk, and she had her third girl near her front steps. She had finally had a boy only a few months ago. She wanted to come to beauty school because she didn’t know anything about cutting or coloring hair. And she never wanted to wind up like her mother, so poor that she’d have to send her children to live with someone else.
By this time, all three of us were crying and had streaks of smudged makeup all over our cheeks and hands. This was the first time I had heard one of these sad Afghan stories in such detail. Roshanna’s family had certainly had a hard time, as had every Afghan family. But they had triumphed and stayed together, and she had a good job. Baseera’s story broke my heart. No wonder she seemed like a sorrowful child. It was almost as if she was still the bewildered girl of fourteen who wasn’t ready to be an adult.
That night I was more determined than ever to make this school work for Baseera and others like her. My sole concern was continuity. I worried that there was only Noor to watch over the school when the American hairdressers weren’t there. Not only did he know little about hairdressing, but he wouldn’t even be allowed to walk into the school once it opened. There just wasn’t anyone in Kabul who was qualified to run the school on a daily basis. As I went to bed that night, I wondered if I would be able to take a longer chunk of time—say six months—away from my own customers to work here. I wondered if I could stand being away from my mother and sons for that long or if I could ever learn to get around Kabul with the same ease that Mary did. I had my doubts about whether I was up to this. Still, I felt that someone from the team would eventually have to stay in Kabul to keep the school going.
“WAKE UP!”
I opened my eyes to see Mary bending over me. The last thing I remembered was the mullah rousing me at 4:30 in the morning with the call to prayer, after I finally fell asleep on one of the toushaks in her living room. My cough had gotten so much worse during the night that the force of it was shaking the wooden partitions in my bedroom. I’d tried to muffle it so that I wouldn’t wake everyone else up, but I could hear sighs and people tossing in their blankets all around me. So I finally went downstairs, hoping to get a few solid hours of sleep. I was scheduled to leave in a few days, but I was afraid the airlines wouldn’t even permit me to get on a plane. Concern over the spread of SARS was at its height, and I heard that the airlines were putting people into quarantine if they had bad coughs. I was already sad about leaving Afghanistan but didn’t want to stay here—or in Pakistan—in some back room filled with SARS suspects.
“Wake up, Debbie,” Mary said again as my eyes closed. “I have something I want to show you.”
The light coming in the windows was dim, and there wasn’t much noise yet from the street. I knew it had to be really early if the noise from the street hadn’t begun. “What time is it?”
“Put your clothes on.” Mary’s voice trailed behind her as she went outside. “You need some fresh air.”
Before I knew it, we were in a taxi headed out of the city. When I asked her what we were doing, she shook her head mysteriously. One of her Afghan helpers—a boy named Achtar, whose arm had been mangled in an accident—was sitting in front with the driver, and he just smiled at me. The taxi went so far out of town that it finally left all the kebab stands, gas stations, and melon wagons behind, and started up a mountain road. It stopped, and we got out. I couldn’t see why we were stopping, because there was nothing there but the mountain and the road. Then Mary and Achtar started off on a little path through the rocks, and I followed them. We walked and walked, and finally came to a rock bridge over a stream, and everything was green beneath us. Farther downstream, young girls carried buckets of water on their heads. I saw a village in the distance. Some men walked toward us on the path, and they exchanged sharp words with Mary. I asked her what they said. “Taliban territory,” she replied. We walked past fields and over more bridges. Again, men walked past us and said something to Mary, and again she snapped back at them. When I asked her what they said, she shrugged. “Taliban territory.” We finally came to an old, old city where a narrow street wound between walled compounds.
I was really a mess. I hadn’t had my morning coffee, my head wasn’t covered, and my sweater was so short that it didn’t even cover my butt. I was just so wrong for this place, but Mary kept on going as if this was the most natural thing in the world. Then we got to Achtar’s house, which was a hut made from s
un-dried mud bricks.
“He made the bricks himself,” Mary said, and Achtar pointed out the bits of straw glinting in the bricks. “He also built the hut himself,” she continued. “He’s very proud of this, because his family used to live in a tent.” Achtar ushered us inside, where his father sat on the carpet waiting for us. He looked as if he were a thousand years old, with a chest-length white beard, a black turban with a bolt of blue plaid cloth wrapped around it, and indistinct gray eyes that drifted around the room. I realized that he was blind. Achtar’s mother came into the room carrying a big pot of tea. She was tiny, not much bigger than the boy. I was half afraid that I’d get dysentery from the tea, but it would have been impolite to refuse it. So I drank the tea while Mary talked and talked. It was like a dream, sitting there with the boy and the tiny woman and the blind man, and I could feel the cool, clean mountain air settling my cough. I was struck by the idea that beyond the war-torn buildings and the sad stories of the people who had survived the bombs, there was something magical about Afghanistan. I wondered again if I could live here myself, as Mary did. I wondered if I could be as sure-footed among these people.
There was one more dreamlike place that I visited before leaving. Westerners had started to whisper of an Irish pub—the first bar in the post-Taliban era—that had opened in Kabul, and a few of us went to try to find it. We drove around the neighborhood where it was reputed to be without seeing any signs of a bar; then finally someone decided that the gate with the really big cluster of buff-looking guys with machine guns and no turbans had to be the place. They checked our passports, searched us, made us sign our names on a sheet, and then they opened the gate. When we stepped inside, it was as if we had jumped four thousand miles. There were tables with umbrellas and gardens. Inside the building there were a bar to lean against, pool tables, and dartboards. The place was crowded with people from all over the world; I was sure I could hear a different language at every table. You couldn’t actually buy liquor, no doubt because the proprietors had promised the authorities that they wouldn’t sell alcohol. What you could buy were coupons, and then you traded the coupons in for drinks. We had a lot of fun that night, getting away for a few hours from the dusty, crowded, complicated Kabul just outside the gate.
Kabul Beauty School Page 9
