A Burqa and a Hard Place

by Sally Cooper

  Despite setting off early, the IRIN car managed to become engulfed in a wave of taxis, Land Cruisers and Toonises, and ground to a halt two blocks from the office. Qasim, our driver, would have any number of Afghan solutions to our current problem, but being behind the wheel of an official vehicle was like being in school uniform and prevented him from trying any of them. I stared out the window, trying to think of more pleasant things, but my mind ticked over and inevitably back to the overcrowded taxi and its five male passengers three inches from my door. They stared at me without flinching. In the back seat, Mirwais, Faheem and Ismail prattled on endlessly in a mixture of Dari and English. Occasionally Qasim joined in the banter. They weren’t worried; they were Afghan.

  Finally the traffic began to move and Qasim shifted gears. Just as we moved through the intersection past the Iranian embassy, I felt a small bump and everyone lurched forward. Qasim hit the brake. We swivelled in our seats, necks craning to see where the jolt had come from. Behind us, the yellow taxi with its audience of turbaned men had nestled its nose against our tail.

  This wasn’t something you wanted to have happen to you at any time in the Ghan and certainly not on days like this. Any conversation with the other driver would inevitably attract a crowd of onlookers. They would stare at me and calculate the price of ‘compensation’ based on the mathematical elements of a UN car and a foreign woman in its passenger seat. The arguments would be long and circular, each new round attracting more onlookers until the car was overrun, like a disabled snail overwhelmed by ants.

  I heard the click of seatbelts unfastening in the back seat and, from the corner of my eye, saw Ismail’s hand reach for the door handle. I made an executive decision. This wasn’t about to happen – not now, not today, not to me.

  ‘No problem, just go,’ I told Qasim, but he seemed stunned and confused. His gaze shifted back and forth between me and the rear-view mirror. His hands remained firmly on the steering wheel but his foot was steadfastly on the brake. No-one uttered a word.

  ‘Go, Qasim, go now,’ I urged, almost pleading, until he decided, seemingly of his own volition, that driving on was better than getting out and checking the damage. Qasim’s English was rudimentary. We were sending him to English lessons but it would seem that his vocabulary had yet to extend to words like ‘go’ and ‘now’. As a driver, Qasim was responsible for the condition of the car and, as an Afghan, this was a matter of great personal honour. I was the boss but I was also a foreigner and a woman. Being foreign gave me some authority but, in times of crisis, my gender invariably worked against me.

  The next day I asked the security office if they had courses or even briefings for drivers that might make such situations less fraught. They frowned at the apparent strangeness of my question and politely shook their heads.

  The suicide bomber remained elusive but things came to a head that evening. I had just completed my radio check. I was now quite good at being the voice of Uniform November 43. At eight o’clock each night, my two-way radio came alive. Uniform November Base was in command and Allah help anyone who tried to squeeze in before eight o’clock.

  ‘Radio check is at twenty-hundred, repeat twenty-hundred,’ the Afghan radio controller snapped at anyone whose watch wasn’t on Uniform November Base time.

  Each Uniform November sign radioed in with the same script.

  ‘Uniform November Base, this is Uniform November Four-Three. Radio check. Do you copy?’

  ‘Uniform November Four-Three, this is Uniform November Base, you are copied.’

  ‘Uniform November Four-Three, out.’

  Everyone stayed on the page. Uniform November X-ray, also known as Bing, was listening in and would interrupt to give you a good talking to at the smallest sign of deviation. Wishing Uniform November Base a good evening was a definite no-no as was signing off with ‘over and out’. ‘Over and out’, we were told, was only used in movies.

  Hamid Karzai was out of Uniform November Base’s range that evening. The president was on one of his regular trips to Washington for talks with President Bush. It had been a long and tiring day and I was looking for something mindless and entertaining as I flicked on the television in my room. I caught the tail end of the White House press conference, broadcast live on CNN and the BBC. Festivities in the Rose Garden were reaching their finale with both leaders exalting the continued success of Afghanistan’s reconstruction and its fight in the War on Terror. It seemed that neither Bush nor Karzai had read the security alert. There were congratulatory back slaps all round. Bush put his arm around Karzai and they headed inside the building as the camera panned out. The moment was frozen as, almost on cue, before we returned to the talking heads in the studio, a loud boom reverberated across Kabul.

  My Motorola lit up. Everyone knew it was a rocket but there was great speculation as to its ‘loc’, security-speak for location. It soon became clear: the rocket had hit somewhere near the ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) compound, two blocks from the Arg (the presidential palace), half a block from our office and on the same street as the US embassy, the most ‘target-rich’ precinct of a ‘target-rich’ city. In the absence of anything else to do, I brushed my teeth and fell into bed.

  Helicopters hovered overhead all night and into the following days. The Chinooks and the Apaches flew in pairs, so low you could see the pilot and his gunmen. The sound was thunderous. Windows rattled and Kabul’s flimsy buildings shook. The constant thud of the rotors made me edgy in ways I had never felt before. It was going to be a long, hot summer.

  13

  The Beauty Salon

  ‘Halloooooo?’

  The voice was loud enough to distort the speaker on my phone.

  ‘Is this Debbie?’ I asked plaintively.

  ‘Yeeees?’

  According to the Kabul grapevine, an American woman had recently set up a hairdressing school and, even better, she’d opened a salon. Her name was Debbie Rodriguez. I didn’t know her but I knew instinctively that she would understand my needs.

  ‘I’m having a hair crisis,’ I bleated. The arrival of another Kabul summer had brought with it the inevitable dust, sweat and, on a really bad hair day, thoughts of tears. It was time to act.

  ‘Ooohhhhh,’ she sympathised in a Midwestern drawl, like a mother soothing a child’s grazed knee. ‘When would you like to come in?’

  It was the most normal conversation I’d had in a long time. It didn’t involve security, it wasn’t posing any threats to me, it wasn’t challenging where I ate or lived, and, best of all, it required no paperwork. Given the urgency of the situation, we agreed on a time later that day. A string of confusing street directions followed that eventually led to the garage of a guesthouse in a backstreet of downtown Kabul. Though I could tell he was confused about where I might be going, Qasim let me out of the car and I told him I would walk the few blocks home when I was finished. Men lingered on the street corner, eyeing me with suspicion. I wasn’t the first heavily scarfed foreign woman to be landing on this corner.

  A large, colourfully dressed American woman with short, strawberry blonde hair opened the door.

  ‘Oh, hiiiiiiiiiii,’ she greeted me as if I were a long lost friend. ‘How are you? I sooooo know how you feel today.’ She gave me a broad welcoming smile. ‘Come on in.’

  I felt like I was walking through the looking glass, one in which the harsh realities of Kabul were left at the door.

  Inside, the garage had been transformed into a small, fully operational beauty salon complete with hairdryers and dog-eared copies of Vogue and Vanity Fair. All of the equipment had been imported, slowly and arduously, from the United States and paid for by a handful of donors.

  Debbie rummaged through drawers and cupboards, muttering, ‘They always hide my scissors. Why do they do that?’

  The salon doubled as the Kabul Beauty School. Posters of Western women sporting glamorous hairdos lined the walls, American hair-care products lined the counters. Mannequin heads dotted th
e landscape, peering at me from benches and atop cupboards, their hair looking more Miss Havisham than Gisele Bündchen.

  The search for scissors yielded no results and Debbie moved on to other recognisable tools of her trade, shuffling between swivel stools and trolleys laden with hair rollers. As she wrapped me in a towel and cape and worked some dye into my hair, she told me more about the school where she trained a handful of young Afghan women in everything from hair-styling to pedicures.

  ‘Men aren’t allowed in beauty parlours here, so being a hairdresser is one of the few ways Afghan women can earn their own income.’ She disappeared out the side door, shouting instructions in broken Dari to the guard to start the generator.

  Debbie wandered back inside, inspected the dye on my head and sat down. She lit a cigarette, inhaling as she continued. ‘You know, I came here last year with a medical relief organisation and there was nowhere, nowhere, foreign women could go to get a decent haircut. I mean, you’ve been here for a while, where did you go before now?’

  Afghan women wear their hair long and, for them, a haircut is usually nothing more than the trimming of bothersome split ends. Last year, given that I needed more than just a trim, and it was unlikely that an Afghan salon could do the job, I did what all good aid workers do and adapted to the conditions around me – I paid a visit to the local men’s barber.

  Afghan men were renowned for their manes of hair and there were plenty of barbers in Kabul. It was a rare young man who could walk past a shop window without spending a few minutes tending to a loose lock or two, real or imagined, and a great deal of time was spent on making sure one’s Leonardo DiCaprio hairdo fell across one’s forehead in exactly the right manner. Some would call it a reaction to the bad old days of the Taliban with its ban on depictions of the human image, others might simply call it vanity.

  Afghan barbers also did a lucrative business in facial hair. Under the Taliban, each man was required to maintain a beard of a certain length, generally enough to grab in a fist with a small tuft poking out at the bottom for good measure. The edict was strictly enforced by the religious police, the envoys from the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. Following the fall of the Taliban, the country’s barbers dusted off their razors and were inundated with customers seeking an end to a much-hated symbol of oppression.

  In order to get as close to the haircut I wanted, I took along an Afghan colleague to act as chaperone and interpreter. I doubted the barber had ever cut a woman’s hair before, but if he found it shocking, he was far too polite to let it show. I saw an ancient copy of Hello! magazine lying on the top of his counter, but suspected it was kept on hand more for its ‘racy’ pictures than for its selection of women’s hairstyles. Despite my colleague’s best translation, neither he nor the barber had any idea what I was talking about and I left the barbershop bearing an alarming resemblance to GI Jane. I paid one dollar for the privilege, certain that my hair would grow and that it still looked better than it had when I walked in.

  Debbie’s jaw dropped.

  ‘Oh my gaad. Don’t worry, I don’t think you’ll have to do that again,’ as if I had joined a satanic cult for the sake of a haircut.

  I sat back and relaxed, relieved that my days at the mercy of Kabul’s barbers were over. After restoring my mouse-brown hair with its streaks of Kabul-induced grey to its rightful if unnatural blonde, Debbie eventually found her scissors and cut my hair in the most fashionable style it had seen in years.

  But, as was so often the case in Kabul, my fleeting grasp of normality had to come to an end. After wrestling with my headscarf, I opened the door and Debbie launched me back into the Ghan.

  ‘You know, we work so hard in here to make everyone beautiful but then they have to put on a scarf and hide it till they get home.’

  I stepped outside into the dusty street. The same group of men loitered on the corner, hovering over the water pump and staring in my direction. Perhaps in Kabul’s notable absence of things to do, there was great entertainment to be had by speculating what really went on behind the mysterious American woman’s door.

  When my new hair and I walked into the office the next day, none of my colleagues said a word. At first I assumed they were just being male and didn’t notice the difference. I was partly right – at least about their being male. For Afghan men, acknowledging a woman’s appearance would be most impolite. But my new hair made a great difference to me, and that was what mattered. Freshly shorn, I was ready to take on new adventures.

  I was to start with somewhere familiar.

  14

  Return to Bamyan

  After being tied to my desk in Kabul for what seemed like an eternity, my first mission to the provinces was, fittingly, a return to Bamyan. In order go on any adventure beyond Kabul, I had to get a clearance from UN security, which was duly added to Ismail’s now bulging files. The security clearance outlined where I was going, when I would leave, when I planned to return, where I would stay and why I was going. I wasn’t sure where Bing would prefer I stayed. Optimistically, I wrote Hotel Zuhak, my home the previous year, though with no perimeter walls, few locks and a lot of Afghans, it didn’t really fit the criteria generally used when determining what establishments belonged on The List.

  It was largely as a result of my experience in Bamyan in 2003 that I had jumped at the chance to return to the Ghan. Now, I was finally on my way back, this time to assess the further training needs of Radio Bamyan. While the drive to Hazarajat may take all day, the twice-weekly UN flight took just forty minutes. In addition to operating flights to Islamabad and Dubai, the UN also flew a number of small aircraft to provincial centres in the Ghan’s far-flung provinces.

  As the greatest security threat in Bamyan was the possibility of being salaamed (hello-ed) to death, I could only think it was boredom that sent us corkscrewing towards the airstrip. Corkscrewing is when a plane descends by spiralling, usually to evade heat-seeking missiles. I’d never had this dubious pleasure before. Along with the absence of in-flight entertainment was a lack of an onboard public address system, and the sudden nosedive took the six passengers by surprise. I wasn’t sure whether I was about to lose my breakfast, my life or both when I fell forward into the back of the seat in front of me as we plummeted downwards.

  After a few minutes the plane straightened, only to suddenly shoot upwards, engines thrusting. I watched the runway speed by a few metres below us. The source of the emergency was running in panicked circles across the dusty airstrip: a stray goat being chased by two small boys. We did another circuit of the valley, long enough for me to wipe the sweat from the palms of my hands, before landing without incident.

  As the door of the plane opened, Bamyan valley stretched out in front of me. It was wonderful to be back. Mr Ibrahimi, the station manager, was there to meet me, my arrival being announced in advance by that most wondrous of technological breakthroughs, the mobile phone. The network now extended well beyond Kabul, making satellite phones redundant and bringing remote areas, like Bamyan, that much closer. It was a thrill to be back.

  ‘Miss Sally, how are you?’ Mr Ibrahimi greeted me in English with a firm shake of my hand.

  ‘Mr Ibrahimi. It is great to see you. I am very fine. And you?’

  ‘Very good, very goooood,’ he replied.

  ‘How is Radio Bamyan?’

  ‘Very good. Very goooood.’ He paused. ‘How long you come Bamyan?’

  I stopped in my tracks. Mr Ibrahimi, like many Afghans, had mastered the standard English greetings but now he was adding more.

  ‘Mr Ibrahimi, have you been studying?’

  ‘Yes.’ He smiled shyly. ‘I even have teacher.’ Behind his thick spectacles, his eyes opened wide.

  Mr Ibrahimi was an extremely well-educated man. Like many Hazara, he had lived in Iran, a Shia country, during the war. There he had worked as a journalist and studied Persian history. His wife and two children still lived in Mashad, a large Iranian city with 24-hour
electricity, paved roads and minimal dust that was proving difficult to leave in favour of a small town in Hazarajat. My own appalling lack of Dari seemed even more embarrassing in light of Mr Ibrahimi’s newfound English.

  ‘That is great news. Congratulations.’

  ‘Yes. The PRT – from New Zealand. They also teach me.’ The ever-obliging Kiwis often stayed behind after their weekly radio program for some extra conversational practice with the Radio Bamyan staff.

  We climbed into a grey Toonis that Mr Ibrahimi had hired for the occasion. He dropped me at the Zuhak and we arranged to meet later that afternoon. The hotel’s lace curtains, blue paint, green carpet and plastic chairs were just as I had left them, with only the smallest hint of last night’s kebabs in the air. I walked into the dining room to find the same picture of Mecca alongside the same picture of the Swiss Alpine scene on the rear wall. Seated below was Hassan the soccer star.

  ‘Ahhh … Miss Sally. It is good to see you.’ Hassan rose to shake my hand.

  ‘Hassan. It is good to see you. How is your soccer team?’

  ‘It’s very good. I’m the captain. How are you? How is your health? How is your family? How is Mark East? How is Australia?’

  ‘All very well.’ A blanket reply seemed so much more straightforward. ‘I am here to visit the radio station.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Hassan, his eyes falling to the floor. ‘I don’t work there anymore.’

  ‘Really? Why is that?’ I had a fair idea why Hassan’s skills may have no longer been required.

  ‘I don’t think I’m a good journalist,’ he confessed.

  I thought it more likely that Mr Ibrahimi didn’t think him a good journalist, but pride and honour are important in the Ghan so I kept my mouth shut. ‘What are you doing now?’

  ‘I am the manager of the Zuhak Hotel,’ he said proudly, sticking his chest out for good measure.

  ‘Ah, that’s great,’ I said, wondering if the Zuhak’s Alpine scenes were about to be replaced by posters of David Beckham, though such pictures were few and far between in the Ghan. ‘Do you have a room for me?’