Kabul Beauty School

by Deborah Rodriguez

  Sam and I had been having a tough time off and on ever since the beginning of October as my sense of dread about his other wife’s pregnancy grew. I couldn’t enjoy our anniversary because I was thinking about her staggering through her ninth month. I couldn’t enjoy my birthday because I was afraid the baby would be born on that day and I’d be reminded of this painful barrier between me and Sam every time I got another year older. I relaxed a little after these two dates passed and waited for Sam to let me know what had happened. He said nothing. I finally asked him about the baby around Thanksgiving. He told me his other wife had delivered a few weeks before. It was a boy.

  I knew how important boy children are to Afghans, and I was devastated. My Kabul friends kept telling me that this was the best thing that could have happened: Sam’s parents would now be kinder to the first wife and stop pressuring Sam to have sex with her. My friends reminded me that I was still the favored wife, the one he wanted to live with. But in my darkest moments, I wondered how long this would last. Although Sam had not told his parents about our marriage, his mother had found out about it from a Kabul relative. She called Sam in a rage and told him that she heard he had married an old American woman. He lied and told her I was only thirty-two. She asked if we had had any children yet. He told her no—he said that, like all Americans, I had an operation when I was thirty so that I couldn’t have any more children. I knew his mother would have been even more angered by the truth, especially the part about my being ten years older than he. Still, I wished Sam had been able to acknowledge me just as I was.

  Now I was sobbing because he had been gone for hours—he always seemed to be gone for hours—and I was pining for closeness more than ever. It was my first Christmas season in Afghanistan, and I’d never been so homesick and depressed. Zach had gone back to Michigan, and I missed him more than ever. Sam knew how much this day meant to me, but he seemed to have forgotten all about it. So far, Christmas Eve day was cold, dusty, and noisy with the sound of generators banging up and down the street. Just like any other winter day in Kabul.

  Someone must have called Sam to tell him how miserable I was. I looked up to see him hurrying in the door. He patted me on the head, a rare sign of affection from him in front of other people. “Of course, we will have Christmas here in this Muslim country,” he said. “We will have best Muslim Christmas ever.”

  He rounded up the staff and told them we would have a party. He explained that Americans always eat turkey for Christmas dinner, so Achmed Zia obligingly called around for a turkey. Soon an old man arrived at the compound gate with six live turkeys tied at the feet and draped around his neck. I was supposed to pick two of them. The old man untied their feet and let them run around the compound, but I felt so terrible about their upcoming sacrifice that I put out piles of food for them. When it was time to slaughter the turkeys the next morning, Maryam the cook realized we didn’t have a knife that was sharp enough. All the butcher shops were closed that day, so she tucked the turkeys under her arm, took them to the police station, and asked the police to cut their heads off. When she got ready to cook the turkeys, the power went off, and we weren’t able to find a generator to keep the stove going. So Maryam prepared them in a big pressure cooker that rattled and shook on top of a fire Shaz built out in the yard. It looked more like Maryam was making a bomb than Christmas dinner.

  On Christmas Day, Zilgai and his brother the florist came to decorate the house for me. They put plastic olive branches around all the doors. They made small forests in the living room out of plastic orange trees. I guess they thought the little oranges looked like Christmas ornaments. Then the party got started. All the women—the beauticians, the female staff, the wives, mothers, and sisters of the male staff—filed up the stairs into our living room, and all the men stayed down in the salon. In each room, someone popped in a CD of Afghan music. The dancing began.

  I was watching Maryam and her sister twirl around each other when they suddenly stopped and shrank into the crowd. Sam was at my elbow with a bouquet of flowers and a huge box. “This for you!” he said. All the women clapped as I opened the present, then crowded around to look. They gasped as I pulled tissue paper away from a blinding red object. It was a traditional Afghan dress decorated with thousands of tiny mirrors and beads and sequins. “Wow,” I said as I tried to lift it from the box and was almost pulled forward by the sheer weight of all those embellishments. “This is some dress!”

  “Go put on.” Sam waved me toward our bedroom.

  It took me a while to get the dress on. I felt like one of those medieval queens who needed two or three attendants to get dressed, except that no one was around to help me. I finally got everything zipped and buttoned, arranged the matching scarf over my head, and staggered back into the living room. Sam was waiting for me wearing a Santa hat. Even though the CD player was still belting out Afghan music, he tried to get me to waltz. I could hardly move. My big-time-bling dress made me feel as if I were on Jupiter or some other planet where the force of gravity is stronger than ours. My muscles were starting to ache. But still, I cried happy tears because Sam had given me a Christmas present. “He loves you so much!” one of the women said as I lurched past in my husband’s arms.

  THE DOOR TO THE SCHOOL SLAMMED, but Mina didn’t sing out her usual morning greeting. She slunk to the back of the house with her head ducked low. Soon I heard muffled sobbing. I was with a group of students, watching our three new teachers explain color concepts. Laila the translator and I exchanged puzzled looks, and then I tugged her into the hallway so we could find out what was wrong with Mina. She was hiding in the beautiful turquoise manicure-pedicure room. When she raised her head, we could see that she had been crying for hours. She hadn’t even bothered to put on makeup that morning. This made her almost unrecognizable, because Mina always accented her beautiful almond-shaped eyes with about a quarter inch of liner. She and Laila spoke for a few minutes, then Laila turned to me. “She needs a place for her little boy.”

  “I thought she was taking him to her mother’s house every day.”

  “She can’t take him there now.”

  “Because…?”

  “Because they have disowned her. She must either find another place to take him or stay at home.”

  “Why did they disown her?”

  “There is a fight with the husband about the dowry.”

  Sam had first brought Mina to the Oasis after we got busy when the foreigners returned from their Christmas vacations. She was a beautiful young girl with black hair and black eyes and the biggest smile in Afghanistan.

  “My cousin Mina,” he said. “You find a job here for her.”

  “I can’t afford to hire anyone else.” I tried to convey my condolences to the girl with a rueful smile, but she looked as thrilled as if I had just promised her a job as assistant to the president.

  “You need extra cleaner. Shaz too old and expired.”

  Shaz was younger than I and was turning out to be a power-house of a worker besides. “She doesn’t need any help, Sam.”

  “You don’t have to pay Mina. She just do this and that.”

  “I can’t not pay her.”

  “You take her, Debbie! She sit at home all day with baby and no electricity or heat.”

  So I took Mina. She left her child with her mother every morning, and gradually, she made herself indispensable.

  Now that we had the bigger salon and school, a lot more work needed to be done to support them. I finally bought a washing machine and dryer because we were always running out of towels. But as it turned out, the new appliances didn’t lessen the workload as much as I’d hoped. The washer didn’t fill with water by itself. We had to get buckets of hot and cold water and pour them in to get the desired temperature. Then we’d turn it on and the washer would move the clothes around a little bit. To drain it, we’d take the hose from the back of the washer and let the water run out. We’d have to change into rubber shower shoes and roll up our pants legs to
do this, since it always soaked the entire floor. It took two or three of us—Shaz, Mina, and I—to wash the towels. On most days, there wasn’t enough power to run the dryer, either—if we turned it on, the blow dryers, the facial machine, and every other electrical appliance in the salon would just stop. So we usually dried the towels by hanging them over every available surface. The last thing we’d do every night was drape towels over the salon chairs and furniture, leaving the place looking sort of spooky and deserted.

  Sam was happy at first that I’d given Mina a job, since his mother had given him strict orders to look out for her. But he wasn’t happy when he noticed what she was doing. One day I was trying to explain to her that the bathrooms needed to be more thoroughly cleaned before the salon opened in the morning. I wanted my customers to feel as if they had escaped the Kabul dust completely for a few hours. Sam frowned as he listened to this, then said, “Mina must not clean bathrooms.”

  “Why not?”

  “Not proper. No one from my family does jobs like this. Never hard cleaning, only light.”

  I sighed. It seemed I had run afoul of his family’s honor again. “So what is she allowed to do? Can she sweep the floors?”

  “No sweep floors.”

  “Dust?”

  “Dusting okay. Serving tea okay. No toilets.”

  Mina didn’t seem to care what kind of work she did, but—to settle Sam’s caste feathers—I gave full responsibility for the toilets back to Shaz. Mina dusted all the shelves of beauty products and cleaned the mirrors every morning. This was actually a big help, as I had never been able to convince the beauticians that it wasn’t beneath their dignity to keep our workplace clean. Mina would also help Maryam prepare meals for the staff, beauticians, teachers, and students. I’d often hear the two of them singing sweetly in the kitchen as they peeled eggplants or kneaded the dough for aushak, a kind of Afghan ravioli stuffed with leeks and scallions. Every time a customer would come into the salon, Mina would glide in right away with a big smile, two carafes of tea, and a handful of English words. “You wanna tea? You wanna black tea? You wanna green? You wanna sugar?”

  Mina added a sort of madcap dash of fun to the place that was as indispensable as her light housecleaning. Because she was Sam’s cousin—not much more than a twelfth or fourteenth cousin, but still—she took more liberties around the compound than the other girls. One day she and Shaz were in front of the house shaking out the rugs and washing the patio down with a hose. Next thing I knew, the two of them were having a water fight. Water was splattering against the salon window, arching over to the side of the yard where some old styling stations were stored. Mina finally splattered Zilgai as he came trotting in the gate on his way to the kitchen. I had customers, but I couldn’t help myself—I ran outside, grabbed the hose, and sprayed down Mina. As she stood there screaming and sputtering, I noticed how tiny she was now that her big, gauzy clothes were wet down. She dove for the hose and wrangled it back as the other beauticians and our customers stuck their heads outside and shouted encouragement. She sprayed me; then she turned and saw Sam coming in the gate in his suit and tie with his briefcase under his arm. He looked at us sternly, his dark glasses firmly in place—and then Mina aimed the hose at him. She soaked him top to bottom as he tried to divert the flow with his briefcase. He was one angry mujahideen after she finally stopped. He picked up his briefcase and stomped past us with little beads of water quivering in his mustache. Even I would never have had the nerve to do that.

  But today, all the sparkle had gone out of Mina’s face. Trouble had been brewing for months—no, for years—and she couldn’t hide it anymore with her dazzling smiles.

  Mina’s family came from the northeast, up near Tajikistan. Her family had six girls and two boys, one of whom was older than Mina. Their father was a teacher, but his real distinction in their village was as a drunk. When he’d get paid, he’d immediately drink up the money and then sing in happy-drunk fashion until he got mad about something. Then he’d spend the balance of his inebriation fighting. Her mother somehow figured out how to get ahold of his money, and she’d hide it. He thought this was acceptable when he was sober, but when he started drinking, he’d fight with her to give him the rest of the money. He’d fight with his older son when he drank, too. Mina said he drank so much because he was sad that they were poor and that he owed so many people money.

  During the war against the Russians, Mina’s father had moved the family to Kabul. But when the mujahideen war had started, it wasn’t safe for children to go to school and he couldn’t keep his job. So he moved the family back near the Tajikistan border, into a room in his brother’s house. Mina’s uncle was wealthy, but he was grudging about taking in his brother’s family and he treated them poorly. Her father couldn’t find a job. Her family would have lean periods—sometimes days—when they had no food to eat. The uncle and his family would gather in the next room and eat by themselves. Mina told me once that she and her older brother used to stand outside the uncle’s windows and watch them eat, clutching at the hunger in their own stomachs. Their aunt would come outside and chase them away, calling them beggars.

  Finally, her brother got a job as a teacher in Kabul, and the family had enough money to move into their own rented house there. The brother got married, and he and his wife lived in an upstairs room. Mina would have been in eighth grade then, but her family was afraid to let her go outside for fear that the Taliban would snatch her up. Then one day a man came to the house and said he wanted to marry Mina. He wasn’t Taliban, but her parents refused him anyway. She was only fourteen, and he was in his forties. Besides, the whole family thought he was too ugly for the beautiful Mina.

  For three years this man kept asking for Mina’s hand. She had stopped worrying about him, because she was sure her father would always say no. She had several boy cousins who were young and dashing. She hoped that when their families decided it was time for them to marry, one of the boys would convince his parents to consider Mina. Afghan girls and boys can’t date, socialize, or even flirt openly. Still, a pretty Afghan girl can mesmerize a man from across the room by the way she tosses her scarf. Mina was hoping some of these cousins had been watching. She didn’t want a forty-seven-year-old husband. Given the short span of life in Afghanistan, that would be almost like marrying someone who was ninety.

  Then her brother borrowed money from the old, ugly suitor for an investment that went sour. When the brother couldn’t pay back the loan, the suitor demanded Mina as payment. Her father reluctantly agreed and handed over his beautiful daughter in order to protect the family’s honor. Mina begged her parents not to make her marry him. By this time many young men had asked for her hand. Her father said no; she must marry the first suitor.

  But after her wedding, resentment simmered among the men of the family and then boiled over. Mina’s father and her brother began to fight because the brother had taken the very un-Afghan-like step of moving out of the family home. The brother was shockingly smitten with his wife, who convinced him to get their own house. Mina’s father was offended. He got angry all over again at the son for defaulting on his loan; he had counted on getting a nice fat dowry for Mina but instead had gotten nothing. The father was angry at Mina’s husband, too, because he had managed to obtain her for a relatively paltry sum. The husband was angry because he had lost his job after the wedding and now wished he’d never given Mina’s brother a loan in the first place; he wished he still had that money to invest in a new business himself. All this anger was directed at the one person who was the least to blame and had no power to do anything about it: Mina.

  As Mina continued to sob, Laila told me that Mina’s father and brother were fighting again. The father had torn into the brother at dinner, telling him it was his fault that the father had gotten no dowry for Mina. The brother replied that he didn’t care about the family’s financial problems anymore. Besides, the dowry had nothing to do with him; he had defaulted on a business-related loan with Mi
na’s husband. If the father wanted a dowry, he should take it up with the husband. So the father went to see the husband and demanded a dowry, which the husband couldn’t pay. The upshot of all this was that the father said he would disown Mina until he got the dowry. He told Mina’s mother that she was to have nothing to do with Mina or her son until he got his money. Mina and her mother were both in anguish over this.

  “Where is the child?” I half expected him to be hidden under Mina’s big black scarf.

  “At a neighbor’s house, but just for today,” Laila said.

  Later I explained the whole mess to Sam. He groaned at the burden of inserting himself into this situation, but since Mina was a relative—though a distant one—he told me he’d try. The next day Mina arrived at work with her little boy in tow. He was an adorably somber little boy with unruly red hair and kohl-rimmed eyes. “To fight off the evil eye,” Laila explained to me.

  How could I not let her bring the child to work? I didn’t want him hanging around the building, though—there were too many sharp scissors and harsh chemicals. My chowkidor, plumber, and driver lined up to take care of him. I hardly ever saw the little guy during work hours throughout the dowry crisis. But one day a customer came in who worked for an NGO that was mighty insistent its employees stay away from locations that weren’t heavily secured. “Pretty young chowkidor out there,” she said drily.

  I frowned. “He’s at least thirty.”

  “More like eighteen months!”

  I went outside to see what was going on and saw that Achmed Zia had locked Mina’s son in the chowkidor hut while he went off to run an errand. The little boy was sitting on the floor watching television. I called Zilgai on my cell phone and made him stay with the child until Achmed Zia got back. After we finished work that day, the boy came into the salon with a little broom Zilgai had made for him and helped sweep up the hair.

  Sam managed to settle the crisis for a while. I think he may have told all three of Mina’s men—father, brother, and husband—that he was going to call in his ex-mujahideen friends and kick some ass if they didn’t stop tormenting her. At least that’s what he told me. I actually think he just paid the dowry himself.