by SAIMA WAHAB
I picked up a dusty bottle of hot pink shampoo and asked the price. The shopkeeper blinked at me from beneath his gray turban.
“I think ten dollars,” he said.
“Ten dollars? That can’t be right.” The inborn bargainer in me was waking up. In the States, I had missed being able to bargain for shampoo.
“But it’s rose shampoo,” he said.
“Sure, it’s pink, but that doesn’t mean it’s rose. It could be bubble gum. Or it could just be pink, because I can’t smell any rose or bubble gum.”
“But you are a rich American. You are supposed to help Afghans. Just do your part, daughter, and buy the shampoo.”
A tall, thin boy stepped forward from the crowd. He wore a long, dusty green shirt and the traditional loose pants. He placed his hand on my arm.
“What are you doing?” I asked in Pashtu.
“Where did you learn Pashtu?”
“Where did you learn Pashtu?” I countered.
“I learned it from my mother,” he said.
“That’s funny; I learned it from my mother, too!” I said.
The boy groaned and rolled his eyes, unimpressed. Another boy asked whether I’d taken a class, and if so, could he take a class and speak English, too? I felt so relaxed and at home with these kids. They were too young to judge me on how many Pashtun gender customs I was breaking, too young to try to ascertain exactly why I was there. Their eyes were bright with curiosity. They were beautiful and silly. I felt a bit sad knowing how different they would be in just a few years, as sullen, angry Afghan teenagers, old enough to know how impossible and miserable their lives were.
The soldiers providing security weren’t too comfortable standing around in the middle of the bazaar. They seemed to grow anxious if we stayed in one place for too long. I could tell by the way they scanned the hardpan dirt street that fronted the shops. They suggested we get going. As our Humvees rolled back to the PRT, I felt good about the day. I was in Afghanistan, connecting with real Afghans; no one gazed at me with murder in his eyes. And I had done my expected American duty by buying the expensive shampoo (even at the agreed-upon $3), and helping the local shopkeeper.
The next morning as I headed to the chow hall for breakfast, Major Carrillo caught up with me. He’d spoken to the governor about me, and it had been decided that I would be the perfect person to represent Farah PRT at the upcoming celebration in honor of International Women’s Day.
“It’s a party?” I asked. I had never heard of International Women’s Day.
“Yes, a party,” he said. “But first you’ll give a little speech.”
“I don’t think I can do that. How about you give the speech and I’ll interpret?”
It turned out I didn’t have much say in the matter. I wasn’t army, so they couldn’t order me to stand up and tell them what it was like to be an Afghan American woman, but they did impress upon me how thrilled and honored they were to be able to send to the celebration a genuine Pashtun, and a female, a native speaker who could address the local people in their own language.
Major Carrillo assured me it would be a small gathering of local women and that I would only have to say a few words. I thought that if I could just imagine I was chatting to Mamai and a few cousins, it wouldn’t be so bad. It might even be fun. I could talk about how I had learned English by watching Peter Jennings on the nightly news, and what it had been like to go to college. And how many women could they get together for this party, anyway? Couldn’t be more than a dozen, I assumed.
The next day I went to the center for the Department of Women’s Affairs at the appointed time. The weather had turned cold, even though the sun shone, and the celebration was held in the courtyard outside. There was a small wooden podium in front of a row of plastic chairs, where I was told to sit once the event started, beside the director of the department. Mrs. Sadiqqi was a kind Farsiban woman who’d just returned from Iran, where she had been a refugee for many years. Several principals and teachers from the local schools sat nearby.
Directly in front of the podium were a few rows of chairs for the token women. It was, after all, International Women’s Day. They wore big black burqas that made them look like birds of prey. On either side of the women were rows and rows of men, sitting there looking dull-eyed and resentful beneath their turbans. I had not seen this coming; the men would also be listening to my speech. I asked the member of Civil Affairs who’d accompanied me what the men were doing there, and she said she thought they were guests of the governor.
I laughed. Of course. In the same way I was pressed to be here against my will, these men were forced to be there by the governor, who wanted to show the Americans, who had paid for the party, that he was interested in promoting gender equality.
Here was my fear, realized. Now I would be put on display to be judged and despised by my father’s people. I could see their judgments in their eyes. “The most heinous thing that could ever happen to a Pashtun woman has happened, and there it is in front of us.” I was a living nightmare. I was corrupt, a Pashtun woman gone bad, and here I was about to speak to their women in public. If a woman from a respected family even speaks to a woman of loose morals, she will bring shame to her family. In a few minutes, I would be talking to all these respected women from respected families, and I knew that the men were not happy about it. I felt in danger and was glad that the soldiers were there in case any of the men took it upon themselves to perform an honor killing. It was a strange feeling, to be afraid of the Afghan men but comforted by the presence of the American men. I felt so conflicted. I was wearing a tunic and jeans but no scarf. I hoped they would see a new kind of Afghan woman, one who could be modest and respect tradition without having to wear a scarf, one who could also speak English without causing dishonor.
I kept my distance from the men. They likely thought that since my head was uncovered, they could approach me. As I stood around trying to mingle before the speeches, some of the younger men started coming my way, so I turned away and walked toward the other women, not wanting the men to think they could approach me just because I wasn’t covered head to toe. Many of the women glared at me. They were hostile, embarrassed both for themselves and for me. But I was determined. I wanted to show that just because my head was bare, that didn’t mean I was a woman without morals. I wanted to convey to them that in my adopted culture modesty was communicated by how we behaved, and by how we allowed others to treat us, not just by the thickness of the fabric of our hijabs, head coverings.
When it was my turn to speak, I stood up, legs shaking. As a young girl in Afghanistan and then Pakistan, I used to stutter when I was in front of people I didn’t know. My stammer eventually disappeared, but I still fear it will suddenly return when I am about to address a large group. It doesn’t help that my mother still reminds me of how I used to be tongue-tied, except she says it in a wishful way, like she wishes I would stop arguing with her. On that occasion I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to say what everyone was waiting to hear. I have no idea what came out—I just remember thinking, What am I doing up here? I’m just an interpreter. I didn’t stutter. At the end I was given a bouquet of gaudy plastic flowers, sprinkled with glitter and scented with sickly sweet perfume, and a scarf.
I joked about the scarf. I said, “I guess you’re trying to tell me something.”
“No, no, it’s just our tradition,” said Mrs. Sadiqqi. “Women get scarves and men get turbans.”
“I know about our traditions, but I would have liked a turban better.”
Later, when I visited the governor, he gave me a beautiful turban, gray raw silk woven with gold threads.
FOURTEEN
When I first arrived at Farah PRT, I avoided the chow hall as much as possible. It seemed as if everything contained some form of pork. Hot dogs, pepperoni pizza, chicken Cordon Bleu, bacon and eggs. As a Muslim I don’t eat pork, so I would ask one of the local CAT I interpreters to buy me some chicken kebabs and doughdi (flat br
ead) from outside the wire, which they were happy to do because I would make sure I paid them more than the food cost, to thank them for their trouble. Or I made do with vegetables, cereal, and bread. I loved salads, but, like all food items, the lettuce was flown by the U.S. Army from Europe to BAF, then loaded into a refrigerated CONEX to be trucked all over Afghanistan. It always happened that the refrigerator would break down somewhere on the slow roads, and by the time the lettuce reached us, it would be beyond wilted.
I planned to tackle the issue of what to eat at the PRT at some point, but initially, I wanted to take some time to observe how the soldiers interacted on this small (compared with BAF) FOB and find myself a niche. In my time at BAF, waiting to be sent here, and then working at the hospital, I had naïvely romanticized my coming back to Afghanistan, imagining that I’d instantly connect with the people and be welcomed without any hardships. I should have realized that if leaving Afghanistan at the age of six had been such a trauma, coming back nearly twenty-five years later was going to be just as traumatizing, if not more so.
The soldiers in the unit had been there long enough to develop routines that seemed second nature at this point. There was a set time for every daily activity, down to calling their families back home. Most of the time was spent on responsibilities to do with their army chores, and so there was very little time left for me to interact with them. However, there was one thing we all did three times a day: eat at the chow hall. So I resolved that, no matter how horrifying and culturally insensitive I found the food to be, I would be there, eating dry cereal at every meal if I had to, just so I could be sitting with the U.S. soldiers, speaking with them about Afghanistan, America, family, or whatever they wanted to talk about.
THE HUB OF our base was a U-shaped structure that housed the medics’ office, the laundry rooms, bathrooms, and barracks for both male and female soldiers. The chow hall, the Civil-Military Operations Center (CMOC), and the Tactical Operations Center (TOC) were housed in separate buildings on one side of the U; a small gym was on the other.
At the bend in the U was a huge porch with a view of the mountains where the soldiers liked to congregate. Every evening after the soldiers had completed their chores, one of them would sit on the porch and play his guitar; several others would surround him, smoking or chewing tobacco, most with their eyes closed, leaning against the building. Every morning Arif, a local who worked as an administrator at the CMOC, would bring me homemade milk tea—made with cardamom pods, milk, and black tea boiled together in a pan. I had told him I liked drinking chai in the morning, and he decided to make it every day. Yes, I realized, he wasn’t doing that just to be a nice guy, but I didn’t know how to tell him not to bother. In those early days, I was so afraid of offending the local Afghans that I thought it was better to just drink the tea and hope that he would stop on his own. No way was I going to willingly make my childhood nightmare come true by marrying anyone from my culture, even if he was sweet enough to make me chai every morning.
One morning, almost three weeks after I arrived at the PRT, on my way to the CMOC, which was my workplace while I waited for the PRT commander to get back from his R & R, I glimpsed a soldier I hadn’t seen before. He stood with his back to me talking to Major Carrillo on the porch. It was already hot. He wore his desert camouflage pants and a beige T-shirt. Had he been wearing his regular army shirt, which advertised his rank and name, I might have acted differently. Maybe.
As I passed him he called out, “You must be the new interpreter they’ve finally sent me.”
I turned and gave him a withering look. He had dark hair cut close to his scalp in the army way, big, dark eyes, and lines in his forehead that revealed that he wasn’t a kid. He smiled a lot, I would soon find out. He could easily have been an Afghan man, which didn’t endear him to me. He struck me as being full of himself.
I’d been told that Lieutenant Colonel Eric Peerman, the PRT commander, was going to be my boss. Who was this guy?
“Last time I checked I wasn’t anyone’s anything,” I said, “but I’d be happy to work with you if you need an interpreter.”
“You really know how to make a first impression,” he said.
“No more than you,” I said. “You act as if you own the PRT and everyone in it.”
“Well, as a matter of fact, as the commander of the PRT I do own everything here.”
I suddenly realized I’d been talking to Lieutenant Colonel Peerman. I still didn’t like the possessive way he was talking to me, and as a civilian I knew I didn’t have to take it. “Well, not me.” Men who are too strong and cocky have always made me uncomfortable; my response is to want to get as far away as I can, as fast as I can.
I turned around and walked away from the two of them on the porch, hastily making my way to the CMOC. I’m not going to lie; I was a little nervous about how I had behaved. My curse in life was my attitude, it seemed, and I really did not want him to send me back for having too much of it.
Half an hour later Lieutenant Colonel Peerman found me at CMOC. “I think we got off on the wrong foot,” he offered. He asked me if I would take a walk with him. We strolled around the base. He wanted to show me the sights, even though I protested that I’d been there for nearly a month and knew where everything was. He was annoyed that no one had given me a proper tour. “When I’m not here no one can do anything,” he huffed. “Have you seen the shop and met Muhammad?”
“I’ve been sitting on the bench near his shop since I got here,” I said. “It’s my favorite place on the base.”
“You’ve already met Major Carrillo, then?”
“Sure. The only one I had not met was you.”
So he took me on a tour of the whole PRT. I could hear the pride in his voice as he talked about everything he and his soldiers had built from scratch. Watching him interact with those under his command, I could see that he loved them. I forgave and forgot his earlier arrogance.
LIFE AT THE Farah PRT was surreal, like life always is on a military installation, especially for the civilians, and even more so for the female civilians. It didn’t take me long to notice that I was one of just five women on a base of more than a hundred male soldiers and the only female civilian. This female-to-male ratio was about the same on every base I would work at over the next five years. The soldiers used terms such as “deployment nine” or “deployment queen” to talk about the female soldiers on the base or ones they knew in Iraq. Once they explained what these terms meant, I would get mad at them for using them, so at least in front of me they refrained from using them. When I arrived at Farah, some of the soldiers had been there for almost eight months. Being a single Pashtun female, that elusive creature they had all heard about but had hardly seen, apparently made me harder to resist. Soldiers would declare their love to me within days of meeting me, without knowing what they were saying. I was not a psychologist, but it was clear to me what they were going through. Not knowing whether or not they would make it out of Afghanistan alive they wanted one last chance at love, happiness, and most coveted of all, companionship.
As soon as a soldier would say that he loved me and was always thinking about me, I would try to talk sense into him by explaining why he was feeling that way. My purpose was not to embarrass him or make light of his feelings. I have always been very protective of our young soldiers in uniform, deployed to a land few of them barely knew existed until just a few years earlier.
It was a thorny role I had to adjust to. I didn’t want to stop talking to the soldiers, because I wanted them to come to me when they had questions about anything Afghan. I just didn’t want to mislead them. The constant adrenaline rush that comes from living with the stress of daily combat intensifies all emotions, and love was no exception. That attention could easily have gone to my head had I not been very comfortable in my own skin. I remember sending an e-mail to Najiba from Farah, jokingly saying, “I had no idea I was so hot! All these guys love me!” And, my sister being the wiser one, and maybe being a
little worried, said, “Just remember those feelings might only be good in Afghanistan, and most likely will expire once you leave the country.” That Greg and I were having real issues around this time might have made me susceptible to the soldiers’ romantic overtures, but there were underlying issues for me that did not allow the male attention to go beyond flattery. My fear of being controlled by men made it hard for me to relax around most of them because they threatened my sense of independence. I had been accused by several casual dates, who were trying to take our relationship further, that I built walls around my heart. One of them who was familiar with Afghan architecture said that those walls resembled the tall, huge walls called char dewal (Farsi for “four walls”) you see around qalats. How accurate he was! It had taken a long time for me to lower my guard around Greg. He was my first real relationship and the man who I could see myself potentially growing old with, if he wasn’t so stuck on the idea of marriage in the traditional sense.
The soldiers’ casual use of those three precious words—I love you—scared me to the point where I started having doubts about Greg’s use of the same words at the end of every phone conversation. Perhaps his feelings weren’t genuine either. Did he have any more clue than they did about who I was? This doubt only widened the chasm between Greg and me. I couldn’t handle the distance or the disconnect. Greg and I broke up, and even though I was devastated to lose that unconditional love and support, I knew that in the long run he would be better off with a nice girl who didn’t bear my childhood scars, and who wasn’t cursed with a past like mine.
