The Dressmaker of Khair Khana

by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

  Hurrying to help him onto a pillow in the living room, the younger girls brought him a cup of tea and immediately began a barrage of questions. How is Mother? What is going on in Parwan? How much fighting is there? How long will you stay? Did you see all the dresses hanging in the living room?

  "Girls," he interrupted, smiling, "I'm very glad to see all of you. And yes, of course I see that you have quite a workshop here!"

  He stopped a moment, looking at each of them, and turned serious.

  "I know things are very difficult for you all. You miss your classes and your friends and you've had to put all your plans for the future on hold. But you are doing such great work for the family and also for this community. It makes me very proud. One day, Inshallah, we will have peace. Schools will be open and we'll all be together again. But for now, you must continue to sew and listen to your sisters and learn as best you can. I know that you will."

  "Yes, we will, Father," said Laila; she was the only one who spoke.

  "And now," he said, his narrow face widening into a playful grin, "we are all going to have a nice dinner, and then I am going to speak with Kamila Jan for a while."

  Following a meal of rice, naan, and potatoes, with a bit of meat to celebrate the special occasion of his visit, Kamila and her father sat by themselves in a corner of the living room. He barely recognized it, what with all the hanging fabric and the machines that took up every last bit of space. It was late and the electricity was long gone, so Kamila lit a gas lamp.

  "Kamila Jan," he began, "tomorrow I am going to Iran to stay with Najeeb. The fighting is getting too close and it's just too dangerous for me to stay. The Taliban are looking for anyone who they think has supported Massoud, and they've started asking all of our neighbors about me. It's better for all of us if I'm out of the country."

  Knowing how much her father loved Afghanistan, Kamila couldn't imagine how difficult it was for him to finally decide to leave. He had never had to flee his own land before, no matter how bad things had gotten. "There's just no role for me here anymore; I can't work and the fighting is destroying everything in the north." Ever the soldier, he betrayed little of the emotion Kamila was certain he must be feeling. "I want you to know I'm proud of you. I never for one moment doubted that you would be able to take care of our family and that you could do anything you set your mind to. You must stay at it, and you must try as hard as you can to help others. This is our country and we must stay and see it through whatever comes. That is our obligation and our privilege. If you need anything at all while I am away, send me a message and I will be there. Okay?"

  Kamila promised her father she would. She had no right to feel sorry for herself, she thought. At least her family had managed to stay safe so far, and their business was earning enough to keep everyone fed and cared for. Her job was to get on with her work. Her father's words reminded her of that. Still, it would be difficult to know that he was so far away. And she knew how dangerous a journey he still faced.

  Early the next morning he set off for Iran. Kamila sent with him an envelope that contained a letter for Najeeb and as much money as she could afford to give them.

  Only a few weeks after he left, Mrs. Sidiqi arrived. Before he had departed from Khair Khana, Mr. Sidiqi had instructed Rahim to return to Parwan and bring his mother back to the capital, where she could live with her children rather than remain alone in the north.

  Kamila was struck by how tired she looked. The trip to Kabul was hard enough to exhaust a teenager, let alone a woman in her late forties who had suffered from heart problems since the birth of her eleventh child. And she must have worried for weeks about her husband's safety. Her gray braids hung loosely from their tight rows and her breath came in short, labored intervals. While the younger girls raced to roll out a mattress for her to rest on, Malika and Kamila served tea and warm bread. Kamila recounted how Malika had arrived several months earlier and helped get the business started, teaching the sisters everything that their mother had taught her back in high school.

  When Kamila awoke the next morning, she found her mother already out of bed and hard at work making breakfast. How she had managed to get up before any of them, Kamila could not imagine, since it was barely seven. After washing and saying her prayers, Kamila entered the kitchen to find water already boiling on the small gas stove and toasted naan sitting on the counter. It had been a long time since she and her siblings had had their parents with them.

  As they shared their tea, the girls told her the story of a wedding they had just attended in Kabul for their cousin Reyhanna. Any such celebration was a marketing opportunity for their business now, and the girls had designed four stunning new dresses for the occasion. Unlike the traditional clothes they made for the stores at Lycee Myriam or Mandawi Bazaar, the gowns they wore to the wedding dinner were both modern and stylish, designed with Kabul girls in mind--as much as the new rules would allow, anyway. Malika's had been light blue with a navy and gold beaded waistline and full sleeves that reached to the wrist, while Kamila's had been red with small and finely embroidered flowers ringing the sleeves and the neckline. After the wedding, their teenage cousins and a handful of the bride's friends had flocked to place orders for similar gowns. Laila told her mother that they were planning to make a new round of dresses in preparation for Eid al-Adha, the holiday commemorating the prophet Abraham's devotion to Allah. Though they themselves were on their own in the capital and had few visits to make, the girls' students and their parents now came to offer their respects during the holiday. The sisters in Khair Khana had become as much their family as any relative still living in Kabul.

  After everyone had eaten and Rahim had put on his turban and headed off to school, Kamila and her sisters gave their mother a full tour of the workspace. Laila showed her the schedule she had created and described how Saaman would cut the long bolts of fabric for the seamstresses and get the material ready for the sewing, stenciling, beading, and embroidery that followed. With particular pride Kamila told her mother how Rahim had become an expert tailor and how Laila was helping manage not just the operations of the business but also the menu, since she helped prepare the girls' lunch each day.

  As the morning wore on, the students soon began to arrive, one by one. Mrs. Sidiqi made sure to greet each of them. As she expected, she knew many of the young women's families; she asked after their parents and attentively listened to the stories of their hardships, silently shaking her head in sympathy and concern. Several of the girls seemed grateful to have someone they could trust outside their own family to discuss their problems with. One young woman explained that her mother, a widow, received the green ration cards from the United Nations' World Food Program to buy subsidized bread from the bakery nearby, but the help was hardly enough to feed a family of eight. That is why she needed the money she earned from her sewing, plus whatever her little brother earned selling candy on the street.

  Mrs. Sidiqi listened to each of the young women and comforted them as best she could, reminding them how much they had already survived and assuring them that things would get better eventually. "Don't forget your school lessons," she urged them; "you don't want to fall far behind when classes begin again." In the meantime, she encouraged the girls to consider her home as their own and to help one another to get through the difficult times.

  Saaman and Laila taught the morning's sewing classes while Mrs. Sidiqi sat toward the back of her living room looking on. She told Kamila later that she was deeply impressed to see how much the girls had grown up while she and their father had been away. Kamila, she said, must work with Malika to keep the family going now that her father was abroad. No matter what happened, she said, they must stay together and remain in their home. God would keep them safe if it was his will.

  A few weeks later she returned to Parwan amid promises to return again soon.

  Again the girls were on their own, and the fighting around them intensified. It was 1998, and the end of summer saw the northern city o
f Mazar-e-Sharif fall to the Taliban once more, handing the new government a significant victory amid allegations of brutality on all sides that went beyond the usual wartime bloodshed to which they were all so accustomed. In Kabul, rocket attacks came at unexpected intervals, and the noose continued to tighten around the lives of families all over the city, particularly for the women. The Taliban decreed that women must be treated at female-only hospitals, but most of these had closed due to either a lack of supplies or of doctors. The one that remained open struggled to find beds for its patients, whom it cared for without the benefits of clean water, IV fluids, or functioning X-ray machines. With autumn came a frigid cold that threatened the desperate city with starvation, along with a cholera epidemic. Relief programs funded by the UN and other organizations tried to get wheat, oil, and bread to those who were worst off, but the need swamped anything that a single agency was capable of providing. Drinkable water was in short supply, and few families had much of anything left to sell.

  Kamila and Rahim visited markets around the city at least twice a week, regularly returning to the Shar-e-Naw neighborhood to meet new shopkeepers whom people they trusted had told them about or introduced them to. When the siblings took the bus, Kamila noticed that the talk among the women in the back was all about who was making what handicraft at home, which store owners were buying which goods, and how much a shopkeeper would pay for this or that item. "Everyone seems to have become an entrepreneur," Kamila observed, astonished by how much had changed. Before the Taliban, women had spent their bus rides discussing work or school or the latest government intrigue. Now they seemed to speak only of marketing and business.

  Arriving home from the old city's Mandawi Bazaar with Rahim one gray and chilly afternoon, Kamila was surprised to find two women sitting in her living room warming up near the wooden heater. The ladies had stopped by the day before at the urging of Kamila's cousin Rukhsana, who had told them about Kamila's small business and suggested they see her work for themselves. They worked with Rukhsana at UN Habitat, formally known as the UN Centre for Human Settlements, and they were in Kabul recruiting women for a project that was just now expanding. The pair had spent their first afternoon at Kamila's asking all about the girls' operation: how many women were working with the sisters, how they found markets for their goods, and how their apprentice program worked.

  Kamila wondered why her esteemed guests had decided to stop in again so soon. She had great respect for the work of the two ladies, Mahbooba, a sturdy woman with thin eyebrows and a no-nonsense demeanor, and Hafiza, a quite handsome woman with curly dark hair that fell around her shoulders. Hafiza had mentioned to Kamila that she was a scientist by training, and it showed; she had a cerebral seriousness that commanded Kamila's attention. Surrounding the important visitors and dangling from every available perch in the sitting room/workshop were dozens of wedding dresses for a large order Saaman was in the middle of completing. The gowns were to go to Mazar in the morning with Hassan, another of Ali's older brothers, who would sell them to shopkeepers in the northern city eager for bridal inventory.

  Kamila bounded into the room and warmly embraced both her visitors, asking about their families and welcoming them to her home. Laila brought a snack of sweets and special butter cookies that the girls enjoyed only on special occasions, and finally Mahbooba began to speak. She described to her young host the work she did with UN Habitat, which was why she was here today. Kamila had first heard about Habitat during the civil war when the agency stepped in to repair some of Kabul's ruined water systems. Several years later, her cousin Rahela, Rukhsana's older sister, had joined the organization at the urging of its energetic new leader in Mazar-e-Sharif, Samantha Reynolds.

  A tenacious Englishwoman who was not yet thirty, Samantha had succeeded in engaging women for the first time in the process of identifying and solving the city's vast infrastructure problems. Prior to her arrival at the UN, women had been routinely ignored during community consultations, remaining inside while their husbands, fathers, and sons went to the mosque to meet with international donors and tell them which water, sewage, and waste removal projects mattered most to the neighborhood.

  Samantha recruited Rahela to join her in changing that equation, with backing from the city's mullahs. Together they helped communities tackle their own local sanitation and infrastructure problems and start neighborhood schools and health clinics for women and girls. The last Kamila had heard, Rahela had enlisted Rukhsana to grow what were now known as the Women's Community Forums where people--where women--gathered to take part in jobs and social programs they designed, supported, and supervised. Most of the profits the women earned from their work were plowed back into the forums to fund more grassroots projects. Mahbooba explained that she had only recently returned to Kabul from Mazar, where she had found safety after leaving her Kabul University teaching position during the civil war. For the last few years she had helped Samantha and Rahela establish Women's Forums in the north, and now they had gotten funding to expand the program.

  "Kamila," she said, pointing at the dresses and machines around the room, "Rukhsana told us about your business, but even she didn't know it had grown so much. We were looking around yesterday and today before you came home, and we saw all the bustle and all the girls sewing here. Your sisters Saaman and Laila told us a little bit about the contracts you have and how the classes work. It's very impressive that you've managed to do so much--and without running into problems with the Taliban."

  Kamila blushed in gratitude, and explained that she wanted to keep growing the business, even though it was getting harder to find new shopkeepers who would place orders. "I'm starting to realize that we're just never going to have enough work for all of the women who come here looking for jobs."

  "That is why we're here," Mahbooba replied. "You know about the Community Forums from Rahela Jan and Rukhsana's work, I believe. Well, we opened the first few forums here in Kabul about a year ago, and now we're in the process of starting several more around the city. District Ten will open soon and we want you to come and be part of it. We need girls like you with real experience in business."

  Kamila sat perfectly still, her nearly full glass of green tea now cold. A rush of questions flooded her mind.

  "May I ask: How are you even opening forums here now?" she began. "I thought it was illegal to work with foreigners or foreign organizations. How is the UN still hiring women? I heard that all their female employees had either gone to Pakistan or been sent home."

  It was Hafiza, the scientist, who answered. "Anne, the Frenchwoman who manages the Community Forums here in Kabul, meets frequently with the Ministry of Social Affairs and has kept good relations with them, so we've been able to get permission to expand our forums. And Rahela has been negotiating with the local Taliban ministries nonstop to keep the centers in Mazar open. We have great support from the community, which is the biggest reason that we've been able to continue our work. Otherwise we would have had to stop a long time ago. At the moment the forums here in Kabul are more or less permitted since only women meet there and they're offering small income-generation programs. And with the help of a neighborhood mullah we even received Taliban approval for girls to attend classes at one of the men's forums, so you see that some local commanders can be convinced of the value of our work. In any event, the forums officially belong to the Community Fora Development Organization, which is an Afghan organization, not a foreign one, so the restrictions don't exactly apply. Of course the rules change nearly every day, so some weeks require far more cleverness than others to keep things going. But, as you know, there's always a way when the need is so great."

  Kamila nodded. There was indeed.

  "But what exactly can you still do here in Kabul?" she asked the two women. "And where are you holding your programs? Surely you're not permitted to have offices?"

  "Oh, no, that's impossible now," Hafiza confirmed. "The forums usually operate out of people's homes or houses that neighborho
od women rent specifically for the program. That makes it easier for the forum to be a part of the community and also enables them to move locations quickly if problems arise."

  Mahbooba picked up her colleague's thread: "As for the specific programs we're running here, they usually fall into three categories--but you will learn more about this during your training, of course."

  Kamila let out a small laugh. She loved meeting women who were as dogged as she.

  "First, there is education. Right now a few hundred students, mostly girls, but boys as well, are learning in our schools, where we teach in two sessions each day. We study the Holy Q'uran, which gives us some protection in the event the Taliban come to see us, as well as Dari and mathematics. For older women, we hold literacy courses.

  "Then we offer services. Some of the forums run small clinics that offer basic medical care to women and teach things like health and hygiene. We also have a kitchen garden program that teaches women how to grow tomatoes and lettuce so they can provide food and better nutrition for their families.

  "And then there's the production section, where we think your experience will be most helpful. The forums provide sewing, carpet weaving, and knitting supplies, and women receive money for the clothing, blankets, and carpets they make. It's not very much, but it's something, and almost as important, it gives the women work to do for the income we give them. They're very reluctant to take our help otherwise, you know, since they don't want handouts. We're also setting up a shop at the UN guesthouse to sell the women's goods to the foreigners who stay there. And of course we'd love to have your ideas as well."

  Kamila's mind was racing with new business ideas for the forums. Surely she could help market the crafts and clothes the women were making, even if they were too simple for the shops at Lycee Myriam. The work sounded important--and exciting. Kamila was beginning to see what the next step might be for her, after the sewing school and the tailoring business: something even larger, where she could help many more women.