Kabul Beauty School

by Deborah Rodriguez

  This graduation was held in the backyard of the PARSA house. It wasn’t as fancy as the first graduation. Not as many dignitaries showed up, although I was thrilled to welcome a contingent from Care for All Foundation, the relief organization that had brought me to Afghanistan that first spring. My students and their families were dressed in their finest. Baseera and some of the others came in beautiful silk Afghan gowns heavy with beads and embroidery. Some of the girls came in sexy sequined saris, and some—like little Hama—in their very best Western blue jeans with tailored white blouses. Sam had given me a pair of weighty gold earrings for the occasion. Between those, my long false eyelashes, and three pounds of hair extensions, I could hardly keep my head up. When the girls walked to the stage to get their diplomas, they carried their mannequin heads like babies and placed them gently on a table so that they all faced the crowd. The winning mannequin had a glittering map of Afghanistan spread across her eyes like a party mask, along with a luminous peacock on one cheek, its feathers curling gracefully along the neck.

  AFTER THE SECOND CLASS GRADUATED, I really tried to ramp up the salon business. I now wanted to make money not only to fund the third class and maybe a fourth but also to move away from Ali. We were still stuck with him on the Peacock Manor lease, but there was no reason that we couldn’t move the school and salon and our own quarters sooner and rent the Peacock Manor rooms to someone else. I also wanted to put aside money for Hama’s plane ticket to America while Karen and I figured out how to get her a visa.

  Topekai, Baseera, and Bahar started to work more hours in the salon. I asked Hama to work in the salon, too, even though she hadn’t turned out to be a very good beautician. I let her practice occasionally on Shaz, who often stood in the doorway watching my girls work. Shaz was looking better all the time. I had given her some clothes so that she didn’t have to wear her old rags anymore. She had started smiling and talking more, probably because we finally figured out that she couldn’t hear us if we talked on her left side. It turned out that she had lost the hearing on that side when a bomb went off. She still wasn’t the greatest of cleaners, but I had hopes for her. She worked hard whenever I pointed her at something. She also came running after me with keys, important papers, even money that I left in the wrong place. I felt that she was always looking after my back, and it was a nice feeling. I was happy to let Hama help her feel a little bit girlie.

  Then one day Hama was trying some powder on Shaz’s rough cheeks when a cell phone with a tone I hadn’t heard before rang. Hama dropped the powder on the floor. She ran to her purse, pulled out a phone, and huddled at the back of the room to talk.

  “Is that a different cell phone?” I asked her when she was finished. She just ducked her head and went back to work on Shaz, but I was suspicious. Clearly, Topekai and Baseera were suspicious, too: they whispered together and spoke sharply to Hama. She finally admitted that Ali had given her another phone.

  “Why are you talking to him?” I felt like slapping her. “Why are you taking his gifts?”

  After that I started to catch sight of Hama in the Peacock Manor, usually at times when she thought I was either outside or still in bed. Once she was in Ali’s room early in the morning, putting on her makeup. Another time I saw her come in with him late at night, wearing a sparkly dress with high heels. I also saw her in his room with a bunch of men, smoking a cigarette and laughing in an odd way that didn’t sound like her. She’d try to hide when she saw me. When she’d come into work at the salon the next day, I’d tell her over and over to stay away from Ali. She’d nod, but she wouldn’t look me in the eye.

  It got so much worse. One day I heard her voice inside Ali’s room and opened the door. There were Hama and her twelve-year-old brother with some of their clothes off, cowering against the wall. Hama’s hand was under her brother’s tunic, and she quickly snatched it away and hid it behind her back, shaking so violently that I could see it across the room. Ali was stretched out across his toushak watching them. “Leave them alone,” I screamed at him; then I pulled Hama and her brother out of the room and called a taxi for them.

  Hama started coming into the salon every day bent over in pain. I’d make her lie down and fix her some tea and try to talk her into seeing a doctor—I figured either Ali was beating her or she was pregnant. Finally, I got Roshanna in to translate so that I could figure what was going on. “Is he making you have sex with him?” I asked, but Hama just covered her face. “Hama, is he putting his kar [penis] in your kos [vagina]?”

  “Nai, Debbie, nai,” she said sadly. She reached her hand around and touched her bottom. I started to cry. She was so tiny—there was hardly anything to her—that this had to be terribly painful. Her bottom wasn’t much bigger than one of the cantaloupes they sold in the market, and Ali was a big man.

  “This is very bad,” Roshanna whispered. “Ali is not taking her virginity for himself. He must be planning to sell it to someone else.”

  “You can still get away from him, Hama,” I said. “Karen is getting ready to make a good home for you in America.”

  But Hama didn’t brighten this time when I went over our plan. She was falling away from me even then. I still don’t know why. I don’t know if she was afraid of Ali or if she already believed that being with him had taken away the possibility of any other kind of life. Maybe she loved him in some way that I couldn’t understand, the way children who are beaten and ridiculed by parents can still suffer some sort of love for them. Ali’s hunger for Hama had already crippled her. She called him all day from the salon when she thought I couldn’t hear. I kept catching glimpses of her with Ali and sometimes with his friends near the Peacock Manor. She stopped hiding from me, and I stopped torturing her with my anger.

  Hama still dragged herself to the salon every day. I was glad to see her—to me, her presence there was a sign of hope—but Topekai and Baseera were becoming increasingly hostile. One day Baseera just stopped coming in to work. I finally went to her home with Roshanna to try to find out what the problem is. Baseera invited us in, seated us in the women’s part of the house, and brought in tea and biscuits, as if there was nothing wrong. But when I asked her why she wasn’t working, she started to cry and spoke in a torrent to Roshanna.

  “She wants to work, but she is afraid the salon is not a safe place for her,” Roshanna explained. “Her husband also doesn’t want her to come to work anymore. It is because of Hama.”

  I realized then that Hama’s presence put everyone in the salon—and the beauty school itself—at risk. Moral extremists could decide to storm the salon and throw acid in everyone’s face; the government could decide to shut us down forever if we had a known prostitute working there. If we were lucky, neither of these things would happen. Still, many people believed that beauty salons were fronts for prostitutes. To be honest, a few of them were. I couldn’t allow Hama’s presence to taint Topekai, Baseera, Nahida, and all the other women in Afghanistan who were trying to make a living as beauticians. I fretted about this for weeks. Then one day I read a story online about villagers not far from Kabul who had recently stoned and killed a prostitute.

  I pulled Hama aside when she came into the salon. I told her that she had to make a choice between Ali and me. I told her that I had found a new house and was getting ready to move there. I was going to fix up a room just for her. I would tell my chowkidor to shoot Ali if he tried to come inside.

  When I moved into the new house, I bought pretty curtains and painted the walls a nice shade of peach in the room meant for her. I put in a television and stuffed animals on the bed. I waited for her to come, because she’d said she would and her eyes had shone briefly when we talked about it. But she continued to be Ali’s little girl at the Peacock Manor. I’ve seen her just once since then, at a party, dressed in flashy clothes that left her arms and neck bare. She was pouring drinks and smoking and letting the men touch her in a familiar way. I couldn’t bear to stay.

  Everyone else was out of our new house, and
I was looking forward to a long, hot bath with lots of candles. The door to the bathroom was closed, but that didn’t necessarily mean anyone was inside. We always kept the door closed to seal in the heat. I knocked anyway, just in case Sam had come back without my noticing. No one answered, but when I opened the door I saw a strange man stripped to the waist and bent over the sink. He turned around to peer at me, dirty bubbles streaming from a beard that reached his belly.

  “Get out!” I said. “This is not your house.”

  “Salaam aleichem.” He quickly pulled his tunic back on and said something placating in Dari, but I wasn’t having any of it.

  “Take your bar of soap with you!” I noticed that he had used some of my toothpaste. I was glad to see he had his own toothbrush clutched in his hand. He reached for his unfurled turban, which was hanging on the shower rod, and wrapped it around his head. Then he rolled his toothbrush and soap into a dirty towel and slunk downstairs. I watched him from the upstairs window. He looked back at the house to see if I was following him, then opened the door to one of the outbuildings and darted inside. I figured Sam would have to flush him out later.

  As I bolted the bathroom door, I decided I shouldn’t be too mad at the guy. After all, he was the reason that our rent was so low.

  Sam and I had both been eager to get away from the Peacock Manor. I wanted to find another big house in a compound, but this time I didn’t want to turn it into a guesthouse. I wanted to put the school and salon on the first and second floors, saving two rooms upstairs for our private use. I figured that I could have a bigger salon this way, one that would generate enough income to sustain the school. But Sam kept telling me that I didn’t have enough money to rent a new building, and he was right. Rents in Kabul were skyrocketing as local landowners figured out that foreign NGOs were desperate for space. I hadn’t been able to save nearly enough for the move. What was worse, I had convinced my friend Chris to come to Afghanistan for ten days to help me paint the new salon and school that I didn’t yet have. She was eager to do something to help Afghan women, so she had already bought a ticket for early December.

  Three days before she was supposed to arrive, I was weeping all night at this new mess I had created. Chris would come to Kabul, and there would be nothing for her to do but hang out in the Peacock Manor and watch me work and fret about Hama. I had done everything I could think of to get enough money. I’d been praying for much of the last few weeks, but by now I figured that God thought I was an idiot. I needed exactly nine thousand dollars for rent and renovation but had just over one thousand saved. But when I checked my e-mail later that day, a nice big miracle awaited me. There was a message from Mary MacMakin saying that Clairol and Vogue had just sent donations for the beauty school. The total came to nine thousand dollars.

  So I had the money when Chris arrived but no house. Sam still hadn’t found anything suitable in my price range. On the second day of Chris’s visit, I was in meltdown. Sam and I were in our room at the Peacock Manor, and the power was ebbing so low that the lamps were all like flickering candles. It made a very dramatic setting for a hysterical beautician. “Find something in the next thirty minutes!” I yelled. “She came halfway around the world to paint this school.”

  He returned quickly with a new possibility. It was a big, white house with sturdy compound walls and a nice front yard that was cheap by Kabul standards. The owner lived in Herat and was desperate to find paying tenants. An old Talib squatter—the guy who startled me in the bathroom—had moved in, hooked up the electricity, and was running up huge bills that the owner had to pay. I told Sam to get the contract, and we started moving in the next day.

  In addition to the squatter, who still made an occasional appearance, the new house seemed to come with a smiling plumber named Zilgai. I left him and Chris there to find workers and start painting while I dealt with an onslaught of Westerners needing highlights, cuts, facials, manicures, pedicures, and bikini waxes before they left for Christmas break. I was so busy it was as if someone had written my name and phone number in smoke in the sky, like in The Wizard of Oz. I could stop by the new house only a few times a day. Every time I did, it seemed that Chris was surrounded by a crew of eight men who couldn’t believe that a woman could paint the ceiling without standing on a chair. I don’t think they’d ever seen a woman this tall. They called her the “two-meter woman.” In fact, it was Chris who finally scared the squatter away. She found a pile of his things tucked into a corner of the house, put them in a bucket, and handed them to him. He gaped up at her, bolted, and we never saw him again.

  One day when I stopped at the house, Chris said she wanted a feather duster to do some special-effects painting. I couldn’t recall ever seeing a feather duster in Kabul, but I described one to Zilgai and the painters using my Dari-English dictionary. Chris stood there flapping her arms like a chicken to try to help them understand. One of the painters finally nodded his head and said that he’d get it for me. He told me it would cost two hundred afghani, which I thought was sort of expensive, but I handed him the money. He came back an hour and a half later with a live chicken. Chris sighed and then pretended to stab herself in the heart to show them that she hadn’t meant for him to bring a live chicken. No problem: the painter butchered it in the front yard and brought it back to her. She plucked out a few of its feathers and held them up to a stick. Then he got the idea; he finished plucking the chicken, bound the feathers to the stick with twine, then presented his improvised feather duster as proudly as if he were handing her a bouquet of long-stemmed roses. When I saw her using this thing later, I looked at the handle and asked her what wall she had painted red. “That’s blood,” she said. She and the painters had eaten the chicken for lunch.

  Poor Chris! She was there at the absolute worst time of the year. The only good thing was that it wasn’t what we call “terrorist season”—the terrorists tend to head back to Pakistan when the temperature drops—but it’s a tough time in all other ways. It’s cold and no one has central heating. It takes a long time to get the hang of the bokaris, too. Before you go to bed, you have to get them burning vigorously—not so hot that you can’t sleep, but the fire has to be big enough to burn through the night. You don’t want a dead bokari and a room so cold that you can see your breath when the mullah wakes you at four-thirty. Chris wasn’t there long enough to master her bokari, so she was freezing the whole time.

  Despite her miserable stay, Chris’s handiwork resulted in a school-salon complex that was as soothing to the eye as anything in the States. She painted the main room in an Egyptian theme, with figures framing each big mirror that look like Cleopatra and her handmaidens—all equipped with mirrors, hairbrushes, cups of tea, and so on. The pedicure-manicure room was nothing short of splendid. She built a platform with sunken sinks for pedicures and covered the rest of the platform with Afghan carpets, then draped the ceiling with fabric so that, if you glance up, you feel as if you’re in a beautiful tent. Then she painted the rest of the room so that it looks like an airy pavilion with light reflected from the sea—turquoise walls with faux pillars and trellises between them and intricate purple-and-white medallions on the trellises. Several months after Chris left, I had a group of NGO people whose street had been bombed come into the salon. They had woken up in the middle of the night to find themselves covered with shattered glass from their windows and came in for a day of much-needed pampering. I thanked Chris all over again when I saw these women stop trembling little by little in her beautiful turquoise room.

  We moved everything over to the new compound by Christmas and gave the salon a new name—the Oasis. Since I knew we’d be able to do more business in this bigger, nicer space, I offered Topekai, Baseera, and Bahar full-time jobs in the salon if they’d help me train a new group of teachers for the next class. So I ran the salon four days a week and conducted school on the other three days.

  We also hired more staff for the new compound: a sweet young cook named Maryam, a fierce little gingersn
ap of an Afghan girl named Laila as a translator, and a cheerful guy named Achmed Zia as our chowkidor. Soon Achmed Zia and the guys had wired the chowkidor hut with electricity, installed a television and a tinkling glass chandelier, and hung pictures of Bollywood stars all over the walls. The guys would hang around there together until well after sunset. In fact, I’d sometimes call Sam at dinnertime and ask why he wasn’t home yet. He’d tell me he’d already been home for an hour and was in the chowkidor hut watching soccer. Sometimes they’d have eight men crammed into this space barely big enough for two.

  “DON’T TALK TO HIM until he talks to you,” Laila said. “You must show him that you are the strong one!”

  Topekai watched me with dark, serious eyes and put her arms around my neck. “You are my sister,” she said. “What can I do?”

  Baseera folded her arms and pursed her lips dismissively. “No man worth the crying, Debbie. No more crying today.”

  I only howled louder. It was a good thing that school hadn’t started up again and that all my customers had left the country. My face was red and blotchy and swollen. At that moment, I was not a living testimonial to the beauty industry.