Life is good.
Two
The Imprisoned Bride
I have put off writing about what comes next for a very long time.
Reluctantly I take out my old tattered diary with the brown plastic cover and look at what I wrote when I was twenty. More than half a century later, the writing embarrasses me. The contents are also heartbreaking. I am afraid that reading my diary, and writing about the events it briefly records, will force me to remember what I have spent years trying to forget. It happened, it’s over, I survived, let’s move on.
The psychotherapist in me knows that I am resisting. I do not want to be overwhelmed again by a clash of cultures, one that was unanticipated and for which I was totally unprepared. If only Abdul-Kareem had prepared me or acknowledged that the task before me would be difficult and frightening. He did not do so.
In 1920, when Saira Elizabeth Luiza MacKenzie Shah, aka Morag Murray Abdullah, and her Afghan husband, Sirdar Iqbal Ali Shah, were about to cross the border into the tribal no-man’s land between India and Afghanistan, she wrote:
I looked back at the last outpost of my own people and knew there would be no possibility of my return if the odds went against me. My husband I think sensed my feelings. “Welcome,” he said, “to the land of my fathers.”
It broke the spell. It reassured me. “Syed [Sirdar],” I said, “I trust you. You realize I am friendless here and have only you.”
Syed promised to protect her with his life. But then, as they “passed finally out of sight of the last British post,” Syed said, “There is still time to go back if you regret your decision. Time for us to go back.”
Abdul-Kareem made no such chivalrous proclamation. We never even discussed what my life might be like in Kabul, even on a temporary basis. I still had a semester of college to complete. I believed that the two of us would embark on adventures, like the explorers of a bygone era. Abdul-Kareem had allowed me to believe this.
But I had ignored each and every warning sign to the contrary: His distracted restlessness in Europe, his suddenly reduced budget, his obvious joy at being embraced by his family, his utter dependence upon his father and the government for money.
I expected to meet his family, but I also believed that we would travel across the entire country: forging rivers, crossing deserts, perhaps summiting mountains, memorizing Persian poetry beside campfires. Instead my time in Afghanistan was characterized by a lack of adventure and only a minimal exposure to the country.
This is how most Afghan women experience life—they don’t. Few rural women venture beyond their own village or garden plot or courtyard. The same is true for most city women—except if they are allowed to accompany their fathers abroad when they are young. Their subsequent adjustment to purdah and life beneath the burqa is also traumatic.
It’s not just what happened—or what didn’t happen—that matters. It is that Abdul-Kareem treated living in the tenth century as completely normal, in fact as somehow superior to life in America. His refusal to discuss my situation was maddening. But how could he? A discussion would force him to acknowledge that his country, where he hoped to make his mark, was medieval and that our lives—my life in particular—would be very different from what they would have been in America.
The excitement of our arrival took at least three days to wear off. More relatives kept coming in a steady stream. Essentially we sat around as if it were a wake. I found this was the Afghan way of socializing: to sit silently, attentively, unselfconsciously, happily, for two or three hours, rising every time someone new comes in, at which time one repeats the standard greetings.
The warm and friendly family faces, the inescapable mountains, the hovering heavens filled with brightly polished stars, the unexpected luxury of my surroundings, even the food, all confirmed that my grand adventure had begun.
On my first morning (it would never happen again), Bebegul and Fawziya, Hassan’s sweet and lovely wife, join me for breakfast. The immediate family has two, possibly three Fawziyas and multiple Mohammeds, much as an Italian family has many Johns.
In addition to the usual fare, the cook has prepared some eggs for me that Bebegul insists I eat. Fingering her prayer beads, she stares at me as I chew. She will often stare at me. It is disquieting. The eggs are a bow to the West. In Kabul women do not have eggs for breakfast. It is considered a European custom.
For two days I happily eat the leftovers from our feast. On the third day the household meals return to their normal fare. For me this is a disaster. The cook, like every Afghan cook, uses ghee, an evil-smelling, rancid clarified animal-fat butter that is left unrefrigerated. It is their cooking oil.
It is loved and considered to be a healthy local delicacy. No one would dream of using Crisco, which the specially hired chef had used for our first meal. Most foreigners, who have not grown up with ghee, abhor the taste of it, partly because ghee wreaks considerable havoc on soft foreign stomachs. The smell makes some foreigners nauseous; others throw up after a few mouthfuls. I literally could not eat anything cooked in ghee.
The daily routine is as follows: In the morning Abdul-Kareem and the men disappear and are gone all day. The women mainly stay at home. The servants clean and cook. Bebegul stays in her own quarters and sews and hums to herself. She orders her servants about, checks on their work, sits in the garden.
Every day I have lunch with Hassan’s wife, Fawziya, and her children in their family quarters. Sometimes, but only rarely, Bebegul joins us. The meals never vary. They consist of a rice-based dish with a spicy tomato-based sauce studded with chunks of lamb or chicken. I drink cup after cup of tea and devour the flat bread (nan). I live on nuts, dried fruits, and yoghurt.
If I can remain on such a wholesome diet, I might easily live to a ripe old age, just like the Hunzas nearby, in Shangri-La.
Abdul-Kareem’s older sister, also named Fawziya, is staying on for a while. She is fearfully elegant with a beehive hairdo and an aristocratically Semitic nose. She smokes cigarettes with an elaborate holder but “never in front of my father,” she assures me.
Bebegul’s daughter Fawziya can speak broken English and German. Hassan’s wife, Fawziya, and I speak in French and a little bit in English. She has been appointed to keep me company.
Every day I pace the garden, back and forth, forth and back; I visit every tree: the apricot tree, plum tree, apple tree, cherry tree. I visit the flowers. I ask everyone—the servants, the children, the wives—to tell me the name of each tree and flower in Dari. “Chee-as?” (What is this?)
Next I visit Bebegul and watch her sew.
Then I sit outside on the second-story terrace and read and read and read.
Finally on the fourth day I tell Hassan’s wife, Fawziya, that I have to go out.
And I get up to leave.
I am a young American girl used to getting out and doing things on my own. I have been taking public transportation by myself in New York City since I was ten years old. I am not used to having a driver. I am not used to staying at home. I am not used to being in the company of only women. But most of all I am not used to being without my constant companion and soul mate, who has become something of a husband missing in action.
“I must see the city, the people, the bazaar,” I explain in French.
She replies happily, “Oh, then we must go to the tailor and have some clothes made for you.”
She claps her hands, a servant appears—but no driver is available at the moment. Fawziya tells me that Abdul-Kareem will arrange everything for tomorrow.
“Why can’t I just take a walk? Why don’t you come with me? We’ll go together.”
Hassan’s Fawziya, a mild and gentle soul, looks confused and then a bit terrified. Finally she says, “Why not talk to your husband? Ask him to take you on a tour of the city.”
Thus I discover that upp
er-class Afghan women do not simply go out. Here “going out” means that a woman first dresses up and puts on a soft chiffon headscarf and a long but fashionable coat—she might even don gloves. Usually she does not spend time browsing in the bazaar the way foreign (ferengi) women do.
No matter how hot it is, she does not appear in public with her arms or legs bare. She makes a specific appointment, keeps it, the male driver waits for her, and then he returns her safely home. My female relatives never, ever do their own food shopping.
That is a job for male servants. Only poor and servantless women face shame and danger by having to wait in line amid rowdy and sexually aggressive male servants. As women they are often repeatedly kicked to the back of the line as new male servants arrive. To avoid prying male eyes and leering attention, these women often prefer to wear burqas.
An Afghan woman who walks or shops alone is seen as proclaiming either her sexual availability or her husband’s and father’s poverty. A male servant and a female relative are the minimum requirements for any proper Afghan woman who shops in the bazaar.
Although Afghan women were emancipated from their ghostly, full-length burqas in 1958–59 (and, before that, in 1929), social custom still demands that they wear headscarves and coats at all times. Those who eschew these garments are yelled at and followed.
Some women who go out alone also wear the burqa as a way of shielding themselves from the dust and dirt—although their shoes still take the brunt of it. I suppose that some women enter this airless, claustrophobic, moveable prison (or sensory deprivation chamber) for what they believe are religious reasons or simply out of habit.
In 1960, only a year before I arrived, the British mountaineers Joyce Dunsheath and Eleanor Baillie wrote, “In the cities [in Afghanistan], strangely enough, the veiled woman is still the rule rather than the exception; only the young girl is usually in modern dress. The Afghan chaudris . . . are in soft colourings, blues, greens, rust, wine, grey, for instance, usually of silk. . . . Less than six months before our expedition started little girls had been killed in Kandahar in riots over the [chaudri] question, we heard.”
I heard that the government had to kill mullahs who were rioting over this issue in 1958–59. One hears things that cannot easily be substantiated.
To my Afghan relatives, so used to this way of life, I seem like an impatient, demanding, nervous, immoral, and potentially dangerous young woman. Why am I not content or at least resigned? From their point of view the women in their family are leading utterly enviable lives. They are never, ever hungry. In fact they are well nourished. They are not
servants—they have servants. They do not have to labor in the fields or at the loom. They do not have to take care of farm animals from dawn to dusk. They can retain something of their youth for a longer period of time.
They have access to doctors—if absolutely necessary, even doctors and private clinics out of the country. They have the best midwifery and obstetrical care the country can provide. True, they do not have advanced educations or independent careers. True, as I quickly discover, their marriages have been arranged, and they married when they were still quite young. This in no way seems to offend them.
Why should it? None of Ismail Mohammed’s daughters have been forced to marry illiterate or impoverished men. All their husbands are relatively well-to-do. No one’s husband is a polygamist. Ismail Mohammed’s sons have not taken second wives. My female relatives cannot imagine life without a husband and children. That would not be a life; that would be a living death.
One of Abdul-Kareem’s sisters has no children, but her husband will not divorce her, nor will he take a second wife. The family is a bit scandalized by this. Clearly they must love each other. It is considered unseemly.
My female relatives are enviable ladies of leisure who lead prestigious and busy social lives. They visit other female relatives and receive visits from them all the time. They drink tea, spit out the shells of nuts, eat little squares of ghee-soaked cakes.
I keep to myself, spend time alone in my room, look unhappy, and want something that women cannot have in Afghanistan. I want my freedom. I want to do things on my own, alone, or at least with my husband.
Five days into my “sentence,” I start visiting Bebegul regularly, twice a day. At least that’s a short walk from the main house. Oddly I have never seen her talk to her husband. Whenever he visits our house, which isn’t often, she keeps a reverent distance from him. Instead she embraces his third wife, Meena, and croons over Meena’s infant son, clapping every five minutes for a servant. Bebegul has nothing else to say to her husband. For his part he never even looks at her.
It will be a while before I start hearing versions of what happened between my mother-in-law and her husband. Sometimes when we are alone, Bebegul points quite suddenly to Meena’s house—which is some distance away. Dropping her prayer beads, Bebegul chants her husband’s name over and over again: “Agha Jan, Agha Jan, Agha Jan.” (Dear Father, Dear Father, Dear Father.)
I have no idea what she is trying to convey to me. Have her shame and humiliation driven her mad? Is she telling me that her husband is with another woman and that she absolutely cannot accept this? Is she laughing at him? Is she worshipping him?
I start trying to learn the language. I ask for a tutor. Until one arrives, Bebegul and Hassan’s wife, Fawziya, teach me Dari phrases and names for things. We walk around the house, and I point to something, and they tell me the name for it in Dari. I make a list of all these words in phonetic English. I still have that list. A face is a roose. Eyes are cheesm. A chin is zanak. A cow is a jow. A village is a kor. “It’s hot” is “hawa garm ast.” We live in or on Hojamullah, and the bazaar is in Jadai Maiwand.
At night I try my Dari words out on Abdul-Kareem. This makes him laugh. It is clear that I need more formal instruction. He says that it will “all be arranged if only I am patient.”
This waiting is hard for me. Words mean everything to me. I love to talk and to be understood. I love to understand what people are saying. Such exchanges are my lifeline. Here I am never alone—yet I feel like I am in isolation as well as under house arrest.
My situation: More than a week has passed, and I am still in purdah. My belly is bloated with tea, my tongue is shriveled from the delicious salted pistachio nuts.
I’ve watched the servants cook and clean, beat clothes and wash them in the garden stream, and make what will become the most wonderful yoghurt: They put the processed milky cheese into a pouch and hang it outside on a tree branch. It is delicious when eaten with pilau or chilau. Even now I usually ask for yoghurt to accompany the rice dishes in Turkish, Persian, Indian, and Afghan restaurants in America.
I’ve sat through hours of conversation among the women that I don’t quite understand. I’ve listened to radio programs from India and China. One night I enjoyed a concert of classical Indian music—live—from New Delhi. I’ve already mastered the art of sitting politely for hours without understanding what people are saying. I’ve learned how to sit and not move. I am learning some Eastern-style patience, something that requires the practitioner to enter into a state of relaxed passivity and receptivity.
My true and only joy, reading, is seen as an act of despair or as a traitorous activity. Whenever I close my door and settle down with a book, I am invariably interrupted.
“Sister-in-law, are you unhappy? Do you want to play cards?” asks Rafi, one of my teenaged brothers-in-law, who is always home early from school.
Hassan’s Fawziya gently trails into my bedroom suite with her two small children in tow, sits down on the carpet, and starts her routine of smiling and conversation in French.
I am trying to read War and Peace and do not wish to be disturbed. I explain that I am perfectly happy—“Choob, choob,” “Je suis joyeux, cette est très jolie por moi”—that everyone in college reads books all the time, that Abdu
l-Kareem and I used to sit side by side and do all our reading together, that even in high school—actually, since I was small—I have been reading books.
It is my delight and my salvation.
But here everything is done together: There is no such thing as privacy. This means that no one—absolutely no one—is shut out. Children and old people are all included in everything. But private activities—reading, wanting to spend time alone with one’s husband—are seen as strange and suspicious acts. If someone chooses to stay alone, she must either be unhappy or untrustworthy. Who knows what she might be thinking or even plotting?
Night after night, sitting at the table (well, cross-legged on the floor), my nerves are worn thin with boredom and hunger. I say so. I say out loud for all to hear:
“I am really very hungry.”
A few members of the family express sympathy for my plight, but no one does anything.
Two weeks into my captivity and I have gone out only twice. Both times it was with a small entourage that accompanied me to the tailor, who considered my choice of Afghan materials an insult to his European training. He carpets his shop for me with yards of British, German, and French fabrics.
I want sari-like materials for some long stay-at-home dresses, and I want a long soft tunic and Turkish “bo-peep” pants, but, other than Bebegul, the women in my family do not dress like that. The sari silks, which would probably fetch exorbitant prices in Bergdorf’s or Bloomingdale’s, are never worn. My female relatives wear only the most expensive English and German wool, French chiffon, lace, and satin, and the finest American mixed fibers. And, if I am to accompany Abdul-Kareem to embassy dinners, or to dinners at the palace, then I must be properly attired.
I am bored. I am so bored. I am puzzled. I do not understand why Abdul-Kareem does not take me along with him into the city. When I ask him to do so, he accuses me of wanting to ruin it for him; his position is perilous, and one false move from me can ruin it for him forever. As it turns out, he was right—but at the time I experienced being shut out as an insult and a rejection.
An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir Page 4
