Kabul Beauty School

by Deborah Rodriguez

  We went back two days later, and it was all gone. The guards had disappeared, the gates were locked, and we could see only a dark, empty building through a crack in the wall. I heard later that they had gotten a bomb threat and decided the money they could make providing Westerners with an escape wasn’t worth the danger.

  The women watched me with solemn eyes as I approached the easel and painted a big red circle on a piece of paper. “Red,” I announced.

  Anisa translated this into Dari, and they all nodded.

  “Pretty easy so far, huh?” I added. “I bet you could have told me that yourselves!” After Anisa translated; the twenty women in pale blue uniforms all laughed. Roshanna gave me a thumbs-up sign from the back of the group.

  After an agonizing wait of five months, I was finally back in Kabul to teach color theory, which was my part of the Beauty Without Borders curriculum. I was so excited to return that it was all I could do to stop grinning. Anisa was an Afghan-Canadian hairdresser who was one of the other volunteers. We were both still pinching ourselves that we were helping to launch this amazing project.

  I took a deep breath and painted blue and yellow circles a foot below and to the left and right of the red one, as if the three balls were tucked inside the angles of a triangle. Then I mixed colors to make an orange circle between the red and yellow circles, a green circle between the yellow and blue circles, and a violet circle between the blue and red circles. I painted black lines connecting the red and green circles, the yellow and violet circles, and the orange and blue circles. It looked as if I was painting a sort of blobby, multicolored daisy. But with my three jars of primary colors, I planned to explain how they could turn a brunette into a redhead with blond highlights. Or green highlights, whatever the customer wanted.

  I had been in town for only a few days. Noor had picked me up at the airport and apologized right away that there wasn’t a room reserved for me. But I wasn’t worried about that. I told him just to drive to the beauty school and I’d find a room in the nearest guesthouse. Sure enough, we found one just down the street from the Women’s Ministry. It was in a big, clean white house with bunnies and a rooster running around in the yard. There was no hot water when I went to take a shower that night, but really, I hadn’t expected it.

  The next morning I walked to the beauty school, and it was just as lovely as I’d hoped it would be. The walls were a creamy white, and there were colorful pictures and shining arrays of product everywhere. There was the music of women’s voices, women’s laughter—the sounds of women taking care of one another—that is just part of a salon and beauty school. To me, these sounds are a sensory feast—like stepping into a hot bath or opening the door of an oven where cookies are baking—that always makes me feel good. One of the Afghan-American hairdressers was demonstrating scissor techniques on a student’s hair, and they all looked up with big smiles as I came in. Roshanna broke away from the group and threw her arms around my neck. All twenty students were dressed in blue uniforms. They looked so different from the nervous, burqa-cloaked gathering we had seen in that first meeting back at Mary’s house. I looked to see if Baseera was among them but found out later that Noor hadn’t picked her for this class.

  I told the women how much I was looking forward to working with all of them, then stayed in the background to watch. In the afternoon, I worked in the salon with some of the other hairdressers, and the students watched me. There was a funny moment when one of the women who worked in the ministry came in for a haircut. When I pulled out a blow dryer after I finished cutting, she gasped as if I had pulled a gun on her. She had never seen a blow dryer before and had no idea why I was pointing it at her head. When I turned it on and hot air blasted out, she screamed and jumped out of the chair.

  A few days later, I gathered the class for our first session and handed out small color wheels for each of the students to consult. As Anisa translated, I painted my own version of a color wheel and started to go through the basics of color theory. I talked about primary colors, secondary colors, and complementary colors. I explained that complementary colors are opposite each other on the color wheel. I pointed to the colors I had painted on my easel—red was opposite green, orange was opposite blue, and so on. They nodded.

  “Does anyone have any idea what this has to do with hair?” I asked.

  They were polite but clueless. “No,” several replied meekly.

  “Anyone want to make a guess?” I looked around the room. “Roshanna?”

  She made a little face, clearly regretting that she had ever befriended me.

  I explained that underneath everyone’s primary hair color, there is a contributing pigment. Someone’s hair might be black, but when you bleach it you often find that orange is the contributing pigment underneath. So if you want to change someone’s hair color, you have to take that underlying pigment into account and counteract it by selecting a color from the other side of the wheel. If orange is a contributing pigment but the client doesn’t want orange hair, you’d pick a hair color with a blue base—like blond—to counteract the orange. To demonstrate this, I smeared some blue paint over my orange circle and showed them how the smear turned brown. “See that?” I asked. “I’ve used the complementary color to get rid of the orange. Understand?”

  Oh yes, they all assured me sweetly. They understood.

  That afternoon at an Internet café, I sent an e-mail to my friends in Michigan telling them about my first class. As I looked at the date on the e-mail, I had such an odd combination of feelings. It was September 11, two years after the terrorists’ attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. That was the event that made the world suddenly take notice of Afghanistan and realize that Osama bin Laden and other extremists had a stranglehold on the country. That was the event that triggered America’s invasion to drive out the Taliban. And of course, that was the event that had wound up propelling me and the other Beauty Without Borders volunteers to Afghanistan. I knew that September 11 was a day of public mourning back in America, but it was an ordinary day in Kabul. As I looked out the window, cars honked and maneuvered around one another, shopkeepers arranged their wares, and pedestrians hurried along, wrapping their faces against the wind and the dust. Still, I felt a new burst of determination. I wanted to make sure that the beauty school—and the new chance that it offered the women of Afghanistan—would be one of the good things to come out of September 11.

  The next day, I thought I’d start the class by reviewing what we’d covered the day before. I picked up a lock of a young woman’s long brown hair, and said, “What do you do if you want to turn her into a blonde? What are some of the things you have to think about?” No one even tried to answer. Instead, they fidgeted, their kohl-rimmed eyes darting toward the door, toward the row of mannequin heads, toward the salon capes hanging on the wall. Anywhere but at me. Even Roshanna ducked behind one of the other girls when I looked her way. I tried some of the other concepts we had talked about the day before. The color wheel? Contributing pigments? Mixing red and yellow to make orange? They all just looked at me as if I had suddenly decided to give them the formula to build a rocket. By the end of the day, I was tired and frustrated. I was starting to doubt my ability to teach.

  On the third day, it was the same impasse all over again. I stood in front of them for hours talking about color theory, but they just didn’t get it. And they had to get it, or else they’d never be able to color someone’s hair properly. By the end of the day, they looked miserable, and I’m sure that I looked miserable, too. I decided maybe we’d just try doing some color together, using a board of hair swatches that one of the manufacturers had supplied. However, I couldn’t find it. I finally looked at the girls and clicked my scissors in the air.

  “We’re just going to have to make swatches out of your hair!” I announced. When Anisa translated this, they all shrieked and put their hands over their heads. Long hair was still a really big deal in Afghanistan. The long-haired girls felt like the romantic heroin
es from the Bollywood movies from India that they all watched, and their husbands often demanded that they keep their hair long. Even their parents wanted them to keep it long, because long hair made unmarried girls more marriageable. But I swooped around them with my scissors and snipped away small strands for a new swatch board. I got about ten swatches alone from one girl who had hair down to her butt. There was so much shrieking and laughter that one of the ministry guards finally knocked on the door. I made a face at the students and opened the door, thinking that the guards were going to want to march me out to the street for making too much noise. “You make us happy with all that laughter!” they said, smiling apologetically. “But please not so loud. People are asking what goes on in here.”

  That night I lay on my miserable bed at the guesthouse and cried. I had been so excited about starting this beauty school, but now I felt as if all I was doing was torturing the students. What I was telling them seemed so simple to me—it had always seemed simple to me—but they were still clueless. I knew they weren’t stupid. We had carefully interviewed them to make sure we picked hairdressers who would really be able to make use of what they learned and make their own businesses stronger. And they had caught on to the other concepts quickly. So it seemed that this was my failure—my big, fat Afghanistan failure—and I didn’t know what to do about it. Then Val and Suraya started pounding on my door.

  When I had gotten my room at this guesthouse five days earlier, I saw that it was full of Afghans who had been living in Europe, America, or Australia. They had returned for various reasons—some to work for NGOs, some to look for family property that had been abandoned during the wars, some to visit old friends. I was thrilled to find myself in the midst of them, thinking this was the best of all possible combinations: Afghans who also spoke English. But it turned out that most of them had very little interest in speaking to me. They were caught up in the excitement and heartbreak of rediscovering Kabul, and they were eager to use their native tongue again, not English. I’m sure I would have been the same way, but it made it hard for me to make friends. I was terribly lonely there until I saw someone else who looked as out of place as I felt. That was Val, a Serbian-American photographer and husband of a gorgeous Afghan-American journalist named Suraya. The three of us became instant, indispensable friends.

  “After three days of class, they just look at me like I’m speaking Greek,” I told them. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to teach them anything!”

  “You have to be patient, Debbie,” Suraya said.

  “It’s been three days already!”

  “More patient than that. These women have been so traumatized. They’ve fled war after war after war, and they’re still surrounded by chaos. And lots of them haven’t even been out of their houses for years.”

  “I know that,” I said. “That’s why I thought they’d be so ready to learn something new.”

  “Yes, but they haven’t had to learn anything new in ages. You know, it’s like a car—if you haven’t driven it in five years, it’s not going to start up right away. That’s what their brains are like.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not a freaking mechanic. I don’t know how to get them started again.”

  “Didn’t you do disaster relief training?” Val asked. “Doesn’t some kind of short-term memory loss come with post-traumatic stress?”

  After we hung around and ate some dinner, I thought back to my disaster relief training in 2001, before I’d even known where Afghanistan was on the map. All of a sudden, it seemed so obvious to me that these women—and maybe everyone in Afghanistan—had post-traumatic stress syndrome. It might be true that I was a lousy teacher, but they’d been through so much and were still going through so much that it had to be hard to concentrate on new things. It would be hard even if they were working with someone who’d been teaching all her life. So I bucked up and determined to try again.

  And the next day, I had a breakthrough. I was trying one more time to get across the idea of the contributing pigment as something you had to counteract in order to get the color right. They were all looking at me with courteous incomprehension—blank if benign stares—and I was groping around for an analogy. “Think of it as Satan!” I finally said, pointing at a patch of orange paint. “It’s this evil thing in the hair that you have to fight. You have to use the opposite color to keep it from taking over.”

  And suddenly, one of the students got an aha! look on her face. This was Topekai, a young woman with dark, intelligent eyes and a quick, decisive manner. I pulled Anisa closer and asked Topekai one question after another to make sure she really understood. I was so excited that I kissed her on both cheeks—twice—and led her back to the rest of the class, hugging her so tightly that she could hardly walk.

  “Tell her to teach them,” I told Anisa. “She’ll know how to put it in the words that they’ll all understand.” I explained the contributing color concept again, and Anisa translated. Topekai—blushing with pride but speaking in a strong, clear voice—explained it in her own words. Then another two girls said they understood. I broke the class into small groups so that those three students could work with the rest of them. Finally, everyone got it. After that, the color class was a huge success. I’d whip questions at them—like “You’ve got a woman who’s a natural level four and she wants to be a warm eight, so what do you do?”—and they’d whip the answers right back at me. When we got to the foiling part of the class—my own Achilles’ heel—I gave them a demonstration, then left to have a cigarette. When I came back, they had their mannequins perfectly foiled. Each little folded packet was like origami, a work of art.

  After that, it was pure joy for me to come to the school every day and work with the students. Their diligence amazed me. I knew that most were juggling children and often abusive husbands and mothers-in-law, that they lived in homes without water or electricity or any of the amenities Westerners take for granted, that they braved sneers and skepticism from people who believed women should stay at home. But they showed up on time every day, incredibly focused on making better lives for themselves. Their skills progressed rapidly, and I knew they’d leave at the end of the term with everything they needed to run successful businesses.

  It was also a joy to be there because I could see that they were having fun gossiping and giggling and fussing with one another’s hair. At the end of the day, they’d often turn on a tiny radio and try to find some music. If they did, they’d show me how they danced at weddings. Some of them told me this was the first time they’d really had fun in years. The beauty school and salon were like a hothouse, and these girls were like flowers that had been stunted and stepped on—but still, never broken. Now they were bursting into bloom before my eyes. It was fun to be around them. And as they talked and either Roshanna or a translator told me what they were saying, I learned even more about Afghanistan—sad stuff as well as funny stuff. One day, Topekai and two of the other girls were talking back and forth as they were practicing on their mannequins with perm rods. I wasn’t really listening since I still didn’t speak much Dari, but I kept hearing odd English-sounding words. Had they really said “Titanic” and “Leonardo DiCaprio”?

  Finally, I asked Roshanna what they were laughing about. “We were remembering how the Taliban weren’t just hard on beauticians,” she said. “Sometimes barbers got in trouble, too!”

  It seemed that, even though such things were strictly forbidden, foreign movies still made their way into Afghanistan under the Taliban’s radar. The movie Titanic was an especially big hit on this underground circuit, and the Afghans were quite smitten with its stars. The men coveted the look of Leonardo DiCaprio’s hair in that movie. As I recall, it was sort of long on top and hung to the middle of his cheeks. However, that style ran counter to the look that the Taliban had decreed proper for a Muslim man—short hair, long beard. Finally, one cagey barber figured out how to profit from the new trend. He popularized a cut that had some of the DiCaprio length on top but not
so much that it couldn’t be tucked under a prayer cap. One of his customers blew it, though—he took off his prayer cap, his long, DiCaprio locks fell out, and someone ratted to the Taliban. They started checking under other prayer caps to see if there were any more blasphemous haircuts in Kabul, then traced it all back to the barber. They threw him in jail for a few days. Truly a prisoner of fashion!

  WE STOOD ON THE STREET outside the red door, sniffing the air. “It doesn’t smell like a restaurant to me,” I said.

  “Two people swore to me that they served food,” Val said. “Let’s go in and find out. If they offer us a massage instead of wonton soup, we’ll leave.”

  The sign on the building said that this was a Chinese restaurant, but that meant nothing. Most restaurants that catered to Westerners—meaning they sold alcohol and had mixed-gender dining—didn’t put up signs for fear of drawing hostile attention. Many of the places that claimed to be Chinese restaurants were actually brothels. But Val and Suraya and I had a craving for Chinese food, so we pushed the door open and went in. There were actually tables inside with people sitting at them. This was a good sign, even though the waitresses were serving drinks in skirts that were slit all the way up to their thighs. This is just not a look one sees in Kabul. Someone at another table leaned over and told us that they used to wear miniskirts but it caused too much of a ruckus outside, with Afghan men crowding around trying to look into the door. “Men were falling off bicycles!” the person at the next table said. This is the way people in Kabul always seem to describe the public reaction to women who stand out too much.