For Mr. Sidiqi, the longtime patriot and loyal public servant, the situation was especially distressing. As a young man, he had worked in a state-of-the-art $25 million Swiss textile mill in his hometown of Gulbahar. He had watched the European women working alongside their husbands and Afghan colleagues. All that separated these women who had jobs and an income from those in his own family was education, a reality he would never forget. Through all the war and upheaval he witnessed during his long army career, Mr. Sidiqi was determined that all of his children--the nine girls as well as the two boys--enjoy the privilege of school. He would not distinguish between his sons and daughters when it came to the duties of the classroom. As he often told the eleven of them, "I look on all of you with one eye." To him it was his highest obligation and a duty of his faith to educate his children so that they could share their knowledge and serve their communities. Now he watched with a sinking heart as the Taliban closed girls' schools and forced women inside.
Gathered around the radio, the Sidiqi family sat together listening to the Taliban's statements on Radio Afghanistan--recently renamed Radio Sharia by the city's new governors--and grew ever more despondent. Each night new rules came through the machine. We don't have much of anything left to take away, Kamila thought to herself one night before abandoning all her worries to the comfort of sleep. How many more rules can there be?
None of the girls had left the house since the Taliban took Kabul, and they were convinced they couldn't bear much more confinement. For seven days straight the young women had roamed from room to room reading their favorite, and then their less-favorite, books, tuning in to the news quietly, so no one outside could hear, telling stories to one another and listening to their parents discuss the family's next move. Never before had any of the girls lived for this long within the confines of their courtyard. They knew that many conservative families in the country's rural regions, particularly its south, practiced purdah, the isolation of women from all men except their nearest relatives, but such rules were totally foreign to them. Mr. Sidiqi and his wife had encouraged each of their nine daughters to become a professional, and so far the three oldest had become teachers. The younger girls, who ranged in age from six to seventeen, were still studying and preparing for university. "The pen is stronger than the sword," Mr. Sidiqi would remind his children while they pored over their books in the evenings. "Keep studying!"
And now, day after dreary day, these energetic, educated girls sat around in their bare feet on pillows in the living room listening to events unfold over the BBC, wondering how long life could continue like this. All of their plans for the future had simply disappeared in what felt like a heartbeat.
Kamila tried to be optimistic. "I'm sure it won't be more than a few months," she'd say to her sisters when they grew restless and began to snap at each other. But privately she was sick at heart. She ached for her old life, which had been filled with school and friends. And she found it painful to imagine the world outside going on uninterrupted without her or any of Kabul's women. Surely this could not last forever. Yes, she would wear the chadri, but she could not stay indoors with nothing but empty time for much longer; there had to be a way to study or to work, even if the university remained off-limits. There were five girls at home in Khair Khana, and Kamila knew that her father and brother couldn't support them all forever. If this went on much longer, she would have to find a way to help.
But the reports of life on Kabul's streets remained grim. Kamila's brother Najeeb described to his sisters in detail a city that had been transformed. It was true, most stores had reopened, and more food could be found in the markets now that the Taliban blockade had at last been lifted. Prices had even fallen a little since the roads into Kabul had reopened. You could sense the relief in the air now that the fighting had finally subsided and rockets no longer fell on the city each day. Security had instantly improved. But the capital was eerily quiet. Traffic no longer jammed the city's roads. And almost no women could be found on the streets. The two that Najeeb did see one afternoon walked quickly beneath full chadri and kept their heads down.
And something else was new on Kabul's streets: the patrols of the Amr bil-Maroof wa Nahi al Munkir, the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Suppression of Vice, which had been styled after a similar ministry in Saudi Arabia, one of the few countries that supported the Taliban. Fanning out across the city, the Amr bil-Maroof assumed the role of "chief enforcers of moral purity." Just the name Amr bil-Maroof was now enough to frighten men and women alike. These passionate foot soldiers energetically enforced the Taliban's unique interpretation of Pashtunwali-influenced sharia, or Islamic law. They performed their tasks with a zeal and a severity that even their leaders in Kandahar sometimes found dreadful.
Many of them were barely old enough to grow a beard and wore no uniform, just white or black turbans and shabby shalwar kameez, a baggy knee-length shirt and loose-fitting pants, sometimes covered by a vest. They carried shaloqs, the wooden batons that had so terrified Malika that day in front of the doctor's office, as well as metal antennas and leather whips. At the time of prayer the Amr bil-Maroof's men put their whips to work corralling shopkeepers and yelled at their brothers to "close their stores and come to the mosque." They patrolled the streets day and night looking for rule-breakers, especially women. If a woman dared to pull back her chadri to steal a look at something she wanted to buy at the market, or if a wrist accidentally slipped out while she crossed an intersection, a member of the Amr bil-Maroof would appear from nowhere to apply swift and brutal "justice," right there for all to see. Rarely did a man come to the rescue of a woman who was being beaten; everyone knew he would be next if he tried to help. The Talibs hauled their worst offenders, including women accused of infidelity, off to prison, a black hole from which only time and sometimes, for lesser crimes, family money could--occasionally--free them.
Kamila's neighbors began to leave Kabul as the crackdown grew more severe. But it was not just politics driving them out: it was the quickly collapsing economy. Money dried up and families found themselves forced to live on nearly nothing. The government now paid its tens of thousands of civil servants only occasionally, if at all, and families with working wives, sisters, and daughters had all lost at least one income. Long before the Taliban arrived many in Khair Khana had fled the indiscriminate killing and violence of the civil war. Those who stayed behind had sold almost everything they owned to survive the fighting, including the doors and windows of their houses, which could be turned into firewood. Now most of the dwindling middle class that still lived in Khair Khana and had the means to leave had decided to pack up and make the risky journey to Pakistan or Iran.
So it was no surprise when Najeeb arrived home from the market one evening to announce that his cousins and their family were leaving town. A tall boy with a handsome face and a young man's confidence, Najeeb spoke in a tone of barely concealed urgency.
"I've just been to see Uncle Shahid and he says they can't stay here any longer. The girls can't study and they're worried about what will happen to the boys." Kamila had never seen her even-tempered brother so upset. Her cousins were also teenage boys who, like Najeeb, faced increasing danger on the streets of Kabul simply because they were Tajiks from the north. With each week the risks they faced got worse, not better, as their families had hoped at the beginning.
In different times Kamila's relatives would have come to tell her father their plans in person, over several glasses of home-brewed chai and a silver tray filled with almonds, pistachios, and toot, the dried berry snack. But today families were leaving the city quietly and quickly, while they could. They had no time to tell anyone, even those they loved and trusted most.
Kamila had overheard her parents discussing their options several days before, and she knew it was unlikely that Mr. Sidiqi would join her mother's family in Pakistan or Iran. It was simply too dangerous to risk the journey with five young girls in tow. To get to Pakistan they would have to
travel from Kabul through Jalalabad to the Torkham border, then, if the crossing gate were closed, hire a man to smuggle them over the mountains. After that they would need to find a taxi or bus to take them into one of the cities, most likely Peshawar, where tens of thousands of Afghans had already settled, many in refugee camps. Bandits lined the narrow passes along the rugged terrain, and rumors abounded of girls being abducted along the way. Besides, who knew what would happen to the Khair Khana home Mr. Sidiqi had worked so hard to build if they abandoned it? Everyone knew it was impossible to get property back once you had left it. Within weeks some family that was desperate for shelter would move in and take both the house and the land, and when the family returned to Kabul Mr. Sidiqi would be stuck in court for years trying to get his home back. If he had to leave, that would be one thing, but whatever you could say about the Taliban, they had made the city safer. For the first time in years Kabulis could sleep with their doors open if they wished. As long as his five girls at home followed the rules of the new regime, they would be fine. And they would be in their own country.
But for the men in Kamila's family, the danger grew hard to ignore. It was no use insisting that Mr. Sidiqi was no longer in the military or was apolitical, or that he was clearly too old to be fighting for the opposition. The Taliban had begun combing neighborhoods house by house trying to uncover pockets of resistance that remained in the restive and now largely subdued capital. The young soldiers were searching for fighting-age men, a term broad enough to include any male who could potentially present a threat to the Taliban regime, beginning with teenagers. The Taliban accused men belonging to the Uzbek, Hazara, and Tajik ethnic minorities of backing their opposition, including Massoud, whose forces had now regrouped in the Panjshir Valley in hopes of drawing the Taliban northward to continue their fight on more favorable terrain. At seventeen, Najeeb and his cousins had become prey for mass detentions. Once they were picked up, the Taliban could press-gang them into service and ship them off to fight. Neighbors' sons had been questioned on the street by Talibs and forced to show their identification cards. If the young men hailed from the north they faced the threat of immediate detention in the Taliban jails that had sprung up all across Kabul.
Each time Najeeb left the house, Kamila's mother feared he wouldn't return. Every day now he came home with a story about some friend or neighbor who was heading abroad to find work, amid promises to send money home to the family as soon as he could. As able-bodied men poured out of Kabul it became more and more a city of women and children who had been left behind with no one to support them and no way to support themselves.
It was only a matter of time before security fears forced the Sidiqi men to follow their friends and neighbors out of Kabul. They halfheartedly made plans for Eid ul-Fitr, the festival that celebrated the end of the holy month of Ramadan, but by the end of the sixth week of Taliban rule, the decision could no longer be delayed: the family would have to separate. Otherwise, the men could end up in prison or on the front lines.
Sitting in the pale hurricane lamp light of the living room, Mr. Sidiqi shared his plan with his seven children. He would leave immediately for Gulbahar, his hometown forty-five miles north in Parwan. Growing up, the older children had regularly made the two-hour trip to see relatives and enjoy family picnics near the Panjshir River, whose cool waters ran just behind the Sidiqis' house on fertile land that Kamila's grandfather had farmed. They had passed many summer Fridays playing by the water and running about in the sprawling outdoors that was greener and more vast than anything they ever knew in Kabul. These idyllic family outings ended with the arrival of the Russians in Afghanistan and the war of resistance that took hold in the north. In eight successive offensives the Soviet tanks had destroyed much of the region's farmland and its way of life, but they would never make lasting gains here in Massoud's stronghold. Massoud's forces were far more determined to protect their homeland than the Russians ever were to conquer it, and his fighters used guerrilla tactics and Parwan's treacherous terrain to maintain their advantage. Once the Soviets withdrew and the Mujahideen took power in 1992, the younger Sidiqi children got to know Gulbahar's mud huts, clear streams, and lush fields. Though much had been destroyed in the fighting, all the children had come to love their village's leafy quiet and its stunning views of the distant Hindu Kush mountains. Now, with yet another war under way, Kamila wondered how much more Gulbahar would have to endure.
Even though the fighting had moved north from Kabul into Parwan province, Mr. Sidiqi believed he would be safer there than in the capital. He would send for Kamila's mother once he had settled in and assessed the situation. Meanwhile Najeeb would look after the women until the family could decide on the young man's next move. Kamila and her sisters didn't have to ask why they couldn't accompany their father to the north, for they already knew why he would refuse: it was too dangerous to travel with five young women through Taliban and then Northern Alliance territory. But Mr. Sidiqi had another, unspoken, reason: he worried that in the north his girls would be besieged by wedding proposals, which would be awkward to continually rebuff. Kamila's father didn't intend to be inhospitable to would-be suitors, and he was by no means against marriage for his daughters, but he wanted them first to have the chance to complete their studies and then work if they chose to. For this they were much better off in Kabul. The girls must now find a way to read and learn as much as they could, and be ready to return to school once the Taliban eased their rules.
The night before he left, the girls worked with their mother to prepare food for his journey, stuffing plastic shopping bags with thick piles of naan bread and dried fruit. When they had finished, and the younger girls had settled down to read by lamplight, Kamila sat with her father in a corner of the living room. His lean figure towered over her, as he commanded her, quietly, solemnly, to be strong and to help her mother. "They all need you, the girls especially, and I am counting on you to guide them, and to be their example." Kamila held back her tears. "I don't think this will be over soon; it may even take years. But I am sure you will be a good leader for your sisters. And I know you will make me proud, just as you always have."
All night long Kamila thought of his words. He was counting on her. And so were her sisters. She had to find a way to take care of her family.
Kamila did not weep as she bid her father good-bye the next morning. Neither did her mother, who had been up most of the night readying his things. The family had already seen so much fighting and war in the past decade; even the little ones knew better than to wish things were otherwise. The Taliban were settling into the city for the long run, establishing a government, holding press conferences, and demanding permission to take the country's seat at the United Nations. All Kamila and her sisters could do now was learn to make their way under the new order.
3
Stitching the Future Back Together
"What are you reading?" Kamila asked, looking over her shoulder at her sister Saaman, who had stretched out across the deep red woven carpet on the living room floor. Khair Khana had had no power for several days, and shadows from the hurricane lamp fluttered against the room's bare walls.
Saaman was lost in thought. Her book of poems lay open in front of her, but she had long ago abandoned it; she was far too distracted to concentrate. The sound of Kamila's voice jolted her back to the quiet evening. A pretty teenager with fine features and a perfectly symmetrical face, Saaman was more serious and more reserved than her gregarious older sister. She possessed a quiet grace that manifested itself as shyness when she met someone for the first time.
"Some of your Maulana Jalalludin," replied Saaman. After a moment she sighed: "Again."
She rolled onto the other side of her pillow, adjusted her ponytail, and tried to focus on her poetry once more.
Only months before, Saaman had passed the competitive college entrance exams, known in Afghanistan by their French name, concours, and had won a coveted seat at Kabul University. Her parents had
been immensely proud of their sixth-born daughter, who would be the first in the family to enter the country's oldest and most respected university. She had just begun her first semester of study in the science department and was reveling in university life. Then the Taliban took Kabul. Saaman was trying to bear the abrupt end to her education with composure, but she found it difficult to accept being forced to trade her classroom for a living room filled with half a dozen restless girls.
She was hardly the only young woman in Kabul trying to fill her days. Across the capital, women of all ages and backgrounds were learning to make do in a city run by men who wanted them to disappear. The Taliban had dug in for the winter and perhaps much longer; no one dared to guess. Meanwhile, fighting ground on between the new regime and Massoud's forces, and the United Nations pecked away at a peace process that lacked even the energy to stall.
Months had passed since the Taliban's arrival, and the girls in Kamila's house no longer spoke of a swift end to their home detention. Instead they watched helplessly as the nine men of the Taliban High Court issued edicts that strengthened the rules of their banishment and regulated ever smaller details of their everyday lives. Walking in the middle of the street was now prohibited, as was wearing high-heeled shoes. Clothing must be baggy and loose-fitting "to prevent the seditious limbs from being noticed," and chadri could not be made from any lightweight material through which arms or legs might be seen. Mixing with strangers and going out without a mahram, or male relative, had been outlawed.
The Dressmaker of Khair Khana Page 4
