The Dressmaker of Khair Khana

by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

  Kamila had agreed on the spot, unable to refuse a neighbor's entreaty. She knew the girl to be a lovely child, respectful and well behaved, and she felt for her mother, who was clearly carrying a heavy burden. But there was another benefit to having her around: she could serve as a mahram who could go out in the street and see what was happening when Rahim was at class or away from home. Young girls needed no chadri and often functioned as boys, moving freely in public without being bothered so long as they dressed modestly and looked well below the age at which they must be veiled, which now seemed to fall somewhere around twelve or thirteen, though no one knew for certain.

  In only a short time Neelab had proven herself to be an able and hardworking apprentice; she arrived early each morning with a bright smile to help Laila prepare the family's breakfast. Then she turned to the household work and anything else that needed doing, including running out to the store nearby for stray items Rahim might have forgotten or accompanying Kamila on short trips to Lycee Myriam. Neelab was grateful to be there, with girls who enjoyed having her around and appreciated her help. Already she was calling Kamila and Malika her "aunties," a term of respect and endearment for an older woman who, though unrelated by blood, was nonetheless family.

  For their part, Neelab's aunties understood only too well the risks involved with growing their venture. Malika and Kamila had discussed them many times, and Kamila had kept her promise to stay well within the boundaries of the Taliban's edicts. Before accepting any of the girls to their program, Kamila and her sisters made sure the students knew the school's rules, and each young woman received a lecture from Sara the day she arrived that laid them out.

  "The rules are here to be followed," Sara would tell the girls in a firm voice. "No exceptions. If you have come here to work, you are welcome. If you have come here to goof off or eat a nice lunch or just to have fun, this is not the place for you."

  Then she would recite the house regulations.

  "First, you must wear a chadri and you must keep it on until you are safely inside the house. A large veil is not enough. We know that chadri are expensive, so if you have a problem paying for it, we can help you. As for your clothing, please stick to simple attire--baggy pants, long-sleeved tops, and no white shoes; that is the color of the Taliban flag and they have forbidden it. And no nail polish. The Taliban can see your hands from underneath the chadri and they always watch out for that.

  "Second, no talking loudly or laughing in the streets on your way to this house. Our neighbors support our business because we support the community, and we don't want any problems for them or for us. If the Taliban comes here to crack down on our work, that would be bad news for the girls here but also for all of the families around us.

  "Third, never, ever talk to men other than your mahram on the way here. If you see other girls who are working here doing so you must tell me immediately. Anyone caught speaking to a man of any age will be asked to leave. At once.

  "We have these rules to protect Kamila and her sisters as well as yourself and all the other girls in this house and we don't make any exceptions."

  Once she had finished, Sara would soften just a bit. "So please, for everyone's sake, don't do anything that would jeopardize our work. But while you are here we want you to learn and to have fun."

  Three weeks on, the school was growing fast, and so was the number of orders that were coming in from Lycee Myriam. They had started in the spring of 1997 with four girls and were now at thirty-four and climbing; in the past few days three more young women had come to the house inquiring about the workshop. The operation was thriving, and now Kamila had to face the issue that both Malika and Rahim had raised at the beginning: how to manage the number of young women who were streaming to the house each day. On any given morning as many as a dozen girls from around Khair Khana would arrive for classes, and in the afternoon another group came for the second session, just as Kamila had envisioned. In addition there were the women who came by to pick up thread and fabric for dresses they would sew in their own homes and bring back a few days later. The girls worried that their house, which was becoming a real hub for women all around the neighborhood, would attract unwanted attention. They wanted more than anything to work invisibly, but this was becoming increasingly difficult.

  We need some kind of a system, Kamila thought. Otherwise, one day there will be too many girls here at once and who knows what will happen.

  Her own sister's experience served as a somber reminder of what could go wrong. While still living in Karteh Parwan, Malika had run classes from her living room each morning, teaching young girls the Holy Q'uran. The lessons matched the girls' education: courses for those who knew how to read and write would focus on studying and reciting the Holy Book; girls who had not yet been in school long enough to become literate would learn reading and writing as the foundation for their study.

  One day not long before moving to Khair Khana, Malika had been called away from her students to attend to a visitor, a former colleague who had arrived unexpectedly. In their teacher's absence, the girls had forgotten her oft-repeated warning to leave one by one rather than as a group, and they had poured out into the street all at once only to collide with a Taliban patrol at the end of the lane. At the neighborhood mosque that night the mullah had railed against the threat posed by Malika's school. "We know that girls are being taught in violation of our law, and this must stop at once," he had warned. Malika's husband and his cousin had insisted to the Talibs who patrolled the mosque--local men whom they had known for years--that Malika was simply teaching the Holy Q'uran. Surely the soldiers could have no objection to that, they said, since education is the duty of all Muslims. The answer they received was telling: They had no problem with her work, the soldiers insisted, and knew Malika to be a good and religious woman. They would be happy for her to continue teaching, and would even send their own daughters to her school if they could. Their bosses, however, would never allow it. She must stop her classes right away, they warned, or there would be problems for everyone. Their blunt message left no room for negotiating. Malika closed her school within a week.

  Kamila thought about this story often, now that she was in the same position her sister had been in. And if it could happen to Malika--known in her neighborhood as among the most responsible and devout members of her community--it could surely happen to her.

  She called Sara and the girls together to discuss the issue and come up with a solution over breakfast at seven o'clock one morning, well before their students arrived.

  "Kamila, I think we need to set up a strict schedule that everyone has to stick to from now on," Laila volunteered. "We can distribute sewing supply kits to each woman on a set day every week, so that we know who is coming by when. And Saaman and I can organize the students so we don't have more than fifteen or twenty here at any one time. That's a lot, but I think we can manage it, and it's enough people to let us plow through a bunch of orders every day."

  Kamila had to disguise her surprise as she listened to her sister. She was barely sixteen and she had assumed such responsibility in the past six months! "Yes, I agree; that's a good idea," she replied. "If you and Saaman will put a schedule together for the girls, we can post it near the front door at the beginning of every week so everyone knows when they should be here."

  "And we'll make it clear that no one can change her days without telling us, and that their dresses absolutely must be turned in on time," Sara added. "That will help avoid the problem we had last week when two girls brought their work later than we expected and Kamila Jan had to go back to the market with Neelab instead of Rahim. It's just too dangerous right now for us to risk that kind of thing if we can avoid it."

  "While we're sitting here, I think we need to talk about space," Saaman said. "I mean the fact that we are running out of it."

  Already their work had expanded from the living room into the dining room, and it was threatening to spread farther still into the last remaining family r
oom. Dresses now hung from all sorts of unusual spaces, from doorframes and table corners to the backs of chairs. The front rooms of the family home had been transformed into a workshop that regularly ran fifteen hours a day at full capacity. Chairs forming a U filled the living room so that classes could be taught in the center and the girls could see their classmates' work, though some young women still preferred to sew sitting cross-legged on the floor. Hurricane lamps lit the rectangular room from each corner, since sunlight faded out of the sitting area in the late morning. When dusk arrived, the girls moved the lamps nearer to them, their narrow flames forming mobile orbs of light around the small sewing stations. Two zigzag machines, Kamila's first big investment in the business, sat together in a corner toward the entrance to the kitchen. They could be used only a few hours each day, when power was available. If it came on at all.

  Kamila looked around and nodded in agreement. "I know," she said. "But I'm not sure how much we can do about that. I've been thinking about buying a generator from Lycee Myriam. It would be really expensive, but if we had power, we could get our work done a lot faster. All that sewing by hand takes so much time. Right now we're busy seven days a week and we're still struggling to get all our orders finished on time. Thank goodness for the students, and the fact that they are working as hard as we are!"

  Most of the students were young women who lived nearby in Khair Khana and had known the Sidiqis for years. Some had attended a small class years earlier to study the Holy Q'uran, which Kamila taught while she was still in high school. That was how a number of families in the neighborhood first got to know the young teacher.

  Other students, like Nasia, had come to live in Kabul after the fighting in the Shomali Plains just north of the city destroyed their families' homes and forced them to live as refugees in the capital. As soon as she heard about the school just four houses down from her uncle's home, where she and her seven siblings now lived, Nasia had pleaded with her mother to let her go. She, like many of Kamila's students, now had two jobs: during the day she sewed with the girls down the street and at night she helped her widowed mother to make chadri for shopkeepers at Lycee Myriam. Each evening the women hoped for a few hours of electricity when they would use the electric iron to press and starch the veil's blue circle of handmade, mini-accordion pleats.

  And there was Mahnaz, a girl for whom Kamila's house provided a lifeline as much as a living.

  She was seventeen, but her plain face and solemn manner cast a much older first impression. Her thick hands were broad and strong, which made their grace all the more surprising. Mahnaz possessed a unique gift for the delicate art of beading, but, like most of the girls who worked in the Sidiqi house, being a seamstress was not her life's aim. She had dreamed of being a professor since the age of seven.

  Following the Taliban's arrival, she had stayed at home for nearly half a year, reading old school lessons and Iranian police novels, occasionally setting aside her books to join her older brothers in watching contraband Jean-Claude Van Damme movies on the family's small television. She had wanted to enroll herself in an English course that was being taught near her house, but her family worried it was too risky and forbade it.

  When Mahnaz heard through a cousin's friend about Kamila and the girls her age who were sewing together just a block away, she had jumped at the opportunity to join them. Two of her sisters, one of whom was determined to become a doctor when school was allowed again, quickly decided to come along once they heard how much Mahnaz was enjoying herself. "It's not even like being in Kabul City," she told her siblings after her first day at Kamila's house. "It feels like a place where there's no Taliban at all, and no fighting. There are just all these women working together and talking and sharing stories. It's wonderful."

  With so many girls learning to sew, mistakes were inevitable. Sara was now on her feet nearly all day, bustling around the room from station to station and reviewing each dress before it went out the door. "This is off, start again," she would say sternly to the girls when a dress did not measure up to her standards.

  "You remind me of my father, Sara!" Kamila often joked. "I think you would have been excellent in the army!" But it was not just at work that Sara saw her role growing in importance: her small income was now contributing to her brother-in-law's kitchen and paying for the books and pencils her sons needed for school. One afternoon over lunch Sara told Kamila about her husband's oldest brother, Munir, the airplane engineer who supported their family of fifteen at home. "He was always good to us," she said as she broke off a chunk of naan from the round loaf sitting on the vinyl floor cloth in front of them, "but I knew my children and I were a problem that he had to shoulder once my husband died; it was difficult for him. Now things are much better. Two nights ago when my sister-in-law and I got up to clear the dishes after dinner he told me, 'Sara Jan, I really respect your work. Your help means a lot right now.' Kamila, this was so shocking--I mean, Munir has never been a man to talk a great deal, let alone to say such things. I couldn't even answer him properly; I just nodded and muttered, 'Thank you.' " She certainly wasn't mumbling now, Kamila thought, smiling at her friend, whose doelike brown eyes lit up as she told her story. Kamila had trouble picturing the timid and frightened woman who had shown up at her doorstep looking for work so many months earlier. I wouldn't even recognize her, she thought to herself. And I bet Sara Jan wouldn't, either.

  The tailoring business was expanding rapidly, and Kamila now depended on Rahim to go to Lycee Myriam nearly every day. For marketing they always went together, but if Kamila needed only a few sewing supplies from the bazaar, Rahim would pick them up on his own after school.

  For that reason Kamila didn't think anything of it when Saaman asked her one evening if she knew where their brother was.

  "It's awfully late," she said, pacing slowly around the workspace. All the students had left hours earlier, and now the girls were alone at home, working as usual.

  "What time is it?" Kamila asked. "He's probably just leaving the bazaar, or maybe he ran into some friends. I'm sure he's fine."

  An hour passed, and at seven she felt far less certain. He was now hours later than usual. Her stomach was churning, and she couldn't sit still.

  "Did he take his bike today?" she asked the girls.

  Saaman nodded yes.

  Kamila dropped her work onto the floor and moved toward the door, walking up and down the small length of the foyer. Knowing that she couldn't go out and look for her brother without causing more problems made her feel even more powerless.

  By now all the girls had gathered in the living room. No one spoke, no one worked. Kamila felt her eyes tearing up as she imagined how awful it would be for Rahim if her worst fears proved true. She prayed that God in his infinite mercy would keep her brother safe. He is all I have right now, Kamila thought, he and the girls. Please, please, don't take them from me. She believed it would be her fault if anything happened to Rahim since it was she who sent him to Lycee Myriam.

  Finally, the gate clanged shut.

  Kamila ran to her brother. He was pale and disheveled but looked unharmed.

  "Oh, my goodness, what happened?" cried Laila. "Are you all right?"

  "Please, please, I am fine," Rahim insisted. He hung his coat as usual, but Kamila could see something was very wrong. She sat him down at the table.

  "Just tell us what happened," Kamila said, a bit more insistently than she intended. She reminded herself of Malika, the maternal enforcer who never asked but instead demanded the truth. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "We were all just so worried."

  Laila hurried in with a glass of green tea, and Rahim's hands shook ever so slightly as he gratefully reached for the glass's clear handle.

  "I forgot I had an extra lesson this afternoon; you know, the test preparation class?" Rahim began reluctantly. "Well, anyway, I was on my way there when I heard a noise behind me. I looked and saw there were three Talibs. I kept pedaling my bike, hoping that they would move on to someon
e else. I hadn't done anything wrong. But I heard their footsteps right behind me and they began yelling at me to stop. I was afraid they would catch up if I didn't, and then things would be a lot worse. So I hit my brakes.

  " 'We told you to stop,' they said. 'What is your problem?' I told them I was trying to get to class, that I am a student at Khair Khana and just wanted to be at my course on time. Then they asked me how old I was, and where I was from. They wanted to see my ID card. One of them took out his shaloq and I kept trying to find my card, but I just couldn't remember where I had put it."

  Tears were now falling down Kamila's cheeks, but she said nothing.

  "Finally I found the card, but I think that just made things worse. They asked me where my father was, and if he was fighting against the Taliban. I kept telling them that Father is retired, and my family has nothing to do with politics. That we don't want any trouble. But they didn't believe me. They asked again about Father and if I had any brothers, and where were they? And then they threatened to take me to jail. I have no idea if they really were serious about it but they brought out the shaloqs to try to scare me. Finally another Talib came along and said there was a family that was playing a video in their house. So they got distracted and finally let me go."

  The girls sat motionless, in total silence.

  "Don't worry, please," he pleaded, seeing the distress on their faces. "You see I am okay. Nothing happened. It's fine."

  But it was not fine; none of it was fine, Kamila thought. Next time it could be much worse.