A Burqa and a Hard Place

by Sally Cooper

  Later that evening, my radio began its mantra: break, break, break. A man with a pocket full of explosives had walked into an internet cafe two blocks from where I lived and blown himself up, taking with him a handful of people, including Hashem’s nephew.

  The security screws got tighter. As each day passed, I noticed the UN was strictly enforcing the two-car rule among its international staff. There was no way I was going to be able to stay under the wire for much longer. Taking my cue from Afghan culture, I decided that UN security was all about what you were seen to be doing. The advisory said nothing about me needing two UN cars, so Ismail called an old friend. Hamid was a professional driver. Like Ismail, Hamid was Hazara and we had called on him and his Toonis to help out in the past.

  The Kunar lads looked a little perplexed when we piled into two cars for the ride home that evening. Ismail and I with Mahmood in the green car, the trainees, Mirwais and Faheem with Hamid in the Toonis. The frenzy of news surrounding the attempted kidnappings hadn’t made it beyond The Bubble. Given the increasing distrust of foreigners, with its accompany image of expensive white Land Cruisers, I worried the trainees might think it was a form of foreigner apartheid.

  A new day, a new rule. Now there would be no need for two-car convoys between the hours of 6 and 8 am, or 4 and 6 pm. I wondered if the kidnappers were on a roster system. The official word was there were enough police on duty in the city during peak hour, but rumour had it that there weren’t enough UN cars to go around. The previous day I’d seen a UN car turn into the driveway of the Karwan Sara with its escort vehicle – a taxi.

  With the upping of the security alarm, some security officers were encouraging staff to inform them of anyone caught disobeying the rules. My heart sank. It was like Jonestown meets The Crucible. At this rate, it was only a matter of time before the UNOCA cappuccino machine started dispensing Kool-Aid. Just as I had adapted to the increasingly impossible rules, another was slapped on top, like a game of Snakes and Ladders. One false move and I would slide down the python’s throat and end up in a UN gulag.

  Hamid became my night driver, but I couldn’t be seen in the Toonis. I needed a disguise.

  ‘Ismail, I need a favour,’ I said to him as we stepped out of the office.

  ‘Of course, what is it?’

  I had known Ismail for more than a year. He was a good man and I could safely say I trusted him with my life.

  ‘I need you to buy me a burqa.’

  ‘Really?’ His eyes widened with surprise.

  ‘Yes. How much are they?’

  ‘I don’t know. My wife doesn’t wear one. I won’t let her.’ I smiled. Mrs Ismail’s lack of burqa was her husband’s badge of modernity and he wore it with pride. ‘I think they are about one thousand Afghanis, but let me find out.’

  ‘Take this,’ I said, handing him a crisp orange bill. ‘Perhaps you can buy one when you go to town.’

  He took the money and we returned to the office in conspiratorial silence.

  Most burqas in the Ghan are bought by men, often as a gift for their wives. On Eid-e-Fitr, which marks the end of Ramazan, gifts were exchanged and many a crisp blue burqa was seen in the streets in the following weeks. Ismail buying my burqa would attract far less attention than if I did it myself.

  A few days later, he returned from the bazaar and discreetly handed me a red plastic shopping bag and a handful of change.

  My brand-new burqa had its test run that night when I went to a dinner party at the house of a friend. Hamid was waiting for me in the laneway outside my guesthouse. The Karwan Sara staff had seen me do many strange things but, as I was already a little concerned with the image I seemed to have created at my guesthouse, I decided I’d rather they didn’t see me in a burqa. I tucked it into my bag, waved into the guardhouse and walked through the gate. I could see Hamid’s smiling face through the darkened windscreen of his grey Toonis.

  ‘Salaam aleikum.’

  ‘Waleikum a-salaam, Miss Sally,’ he said. He slid the door open and I climbed into the back.

  ‘Wait,’ I told him. I unrolled my burqa and slipped it over my head. ‘Okay,’ I said from underneath, my voice muffled. With a grin, Hamid shut the door and climbed back into the driver’s seat.

  I had become oblivious to the stares of Afghans when I sat scarfless in the Big Green Car. I could feel their eyes on me but I had long since stopped thinking about it. Now I was completely invisible, no-one looked and no-one stared. I could see little. The blue grid of the burqa’s eye slots sat tightly over my eyes and there was no peripheral vision. To see anything to my side, I had to turn my head completely, as I’d seen burqas do so often when their meshed gaze followed me down the street. The headpiece was tight around my scalp but Ismail had been adamant that one size fitted all. Like all burqas, it was made of the shiny nylon that ignites at the barest hint of a flame. My burqa had the smell of new clothes but I’d hate to have been inside it on a hot summer day.

  We arrived at my friend’s house in Wazir Akbar Khan. The blue nylon piled down to my feet as I carefully stepped out of the Toonis and shuffled towards the front gate under the quizzical eye of a bemused guard. He knew I wasn’t Afghan by the unease with which I moved and by the shoes on my feet. Afghan women wear dainty court shoes or chunky platforms – they don’t wear Blundstone boots. The front of my shroud, like all burqas, finished at the top of my legs while the back fell all the way to the ground. Afghan women grabbed the sides and wrapped them around their fronts but I was standing in a pair of blue Levis for all to see.

  No burqa of manners and propriety was ever seen out after nine at night so, like Cinderella, my burqa and I had to leave the ball early. Before it turned into a pumpkin, Hamid’s Toonis drove me safely home, where I carefully hung my burqa on the coat stand in the corner of my room in readiness for its next excursion.

  34

  It Ain’t What You Do, It’s the

  Way that You Do It

  Through the dark and the silence, I heard a muffled voice in the distance. As I roused myself from my slumber, I realised that the voice was standing just outside my bedroom window. It was on the phone. It spoke with urgency.

  ‘When?’ it asked in a clipped English accent.

  ‘How many? A woman. One?’

  ‘Okay, let me know if you hear anything.’

  It spoke again. ‘An Italian woman, works for CARE.’

  ‘Did he know anything else?’ asked a second English accent.

  ‘No, that’s all he has. He said it happened about forty-five minutes ago.’

  My eyes shot open. I lunged out of bed and turned on my UN radio. ‘Say something,’ I whispered, but it stubbornly refused to talk. I looked at the time; it was 9.25 pm. The excitement of the previous week and my 6 am starts had taken their toll and I’d gone to bed early. Now I was wide awake.

  ‘Uniform November Base, Uniform November Base. This is Uniform November Two-One. I am safely returned to my guesthouse.’ My radio sputtered to life.

  If Uniform November 21 was telling base his movements then Something Had Happened. I fumbled for the remote and turned on my television. The Ghan is one of the few countries in the world whose time zone is on the half-hour so I had to wait until nine thirty for the news bulletin to begin. I sat on the edge of my bed and watched the ticker roll underneath while the newsreader chirpily related the usual jumble of stock market figures and football results until Italian woman kidnapped in Kabul passed before my eyes.

  Not again. No, not again. They were right. We had been warned. How could it happen twice? Wasn’t once enough? The news bulletin began just as Uniform November Base announced we were in lockdown.

  Clementina Cantoni, a thirty-two-year-old Italian woman working for Care International, was returning from Kabul’s weekly yoga class when she was taken from her car at gunpoint. UN security churned out so many advisories I had almost become immune. This time, they had been right.

  I switched off the news, climbed back into bed and sta
red at the ceiling. I had so often complained about being in the UN Bubble but had managed to construct another bubble entirely of my own making – one in which there were no kidnappers, no bombers, no baddies – one in which UN security was always wrong. When I first came to the Ghan in 2003, Kabul was a safe city. There were a few incidents here and there but I remembered that summer as being one of freedom and fun and a great belief in a possible peace for this country. Had so much changed or had I been naive? A thousand thoughts shunted through my head as I drifted off to sleep. Maybe it wouldn’t be true in the morning …

  But it was.

  Lockdown remained in place and UN staff were confined to barracks. I called Ismail and asked him to tell the lads they had the day off. I didn’t have to explain why. By now, the kidnapping was all over the news.

  Was I becoming complacent or maybe I was tired? A few nights earlier, I’d managed to sleep through a rocket landing in the compound three doors from the Karwan Sara.

  Others were not so sanguine. Following the death of his nephew in the bombing of the internet cafe a week earlier, Hashem beefed up the Karwan Sara’s security. He hired a handful of armed guards who stood vigil at the Karwan Sara’s front gate while Mujeeb and his mates continued to stand vigil over the guardhouse television. But with the security clampdown of recent weeks, there was talk of rounding us all up into UN guesthouses. While I could see why they would want to do that, I preferred to stay at the Karwan Sara – and not just for the sanctuary of its rose garden. When riots started, it was always UN compounds that got trashed. Their white paint and blue signage made them easy to spot, and they were widely known to be one of the few places a looter could be guaranteed of picking up a new refrigerator. The Karwan Sara, with its discreet entrance and its long driveway, was a much safer bet.

  While the rest of Kabul went about its business following the kidnapping of Clementina, the UN’s security remained tight into the following days, now more annoying than reassuring. It was if no-one knew quite what to do. Callous though it may seem to an outsider, each security incident was noted and adapted to accordingly, and life went on.

  I was going on leave in a week and I needed a haircut. I picked up the phone and dialled the now familiar number.

  ‘How early can you cut my hair?’

  ‘Early? What do you define as early?’ asked Debbie who, in the ten months I had known her, had never struck me as being a morning person.

  ‘Eight’

  ‘Eight! That is kind of early.’

  ‘Yes, but I’m less likely to be kidnapped then.’

  ‘How do you figure that?’

  ‘These things happen at night.’

  ‘Not last year.’

  ‘I’ll wear my burqa. No-one’s going to kidnap a burqa.’

  Debbie knew a humanitarian crisis when she saw one.

  ‘Okay, I’ll see you at eight.’

  The following morning, I threw my burqa over my head and sat next to a man with an AK47 across his knee – a guard from the Karwan Sara that Hashem had ordered into the Toonis for good measure. I was nervous as Hamid drove through the early morning streets. I’d like to be able to say I was more worried about explaining what I’d been doing if I did get kidnapped than actually being kidnapped, but that wouldn’t be true. Such thoughts were just a distraction, something to stop me thinking of ‘the worst’.

  We pulled up outside the salon. I slid the Toonis door open and carefully stepped out, walking slowly in what I hoped was the direction of the gate. Debbie’s chowkidor emerged and thankfully saved me from having to negotiate the buzzer on my own. Wearing a burqa was a great idea but it had its limitations.

  Debbie was as good as her word and, with the aid of two pots of strong black coffee and a packet of cigarettes, she cut my hair while slowly applying her morning make-up. To be inside the salon was as soothing a tonic as I could get in Kabul. It was a world I understood, and it was a long way from the reality just beyond its walls.

  Despite the adrenaline, the last few weeks had been exhausting. My batteries were quickly running down and, almost as if to save what was left, I went into automatic, going through the motions of work but allowing little else to penetrate my tired mind, walking through each day one foot at a time. As I counted down the days to my R and R, I wondered what would happen next. Last summer had been tense, but I had attributed that to the forthcoming presidential election. Now it was only May and already the shit seemed to be streaming in the general direction of a well-oiled fan.

  35

  Farewell Karwan Sara

  The mood ‘going in’ to Kabul had always been that of a bunch of excited schoolkids returning at the end of the holidays. Colleagues and friends reunited at Dubai’s Terminal 2 and compared notes on exotic activities like hot baths, running around ‘naked’ in shorts and dresses, and the joy of engaging in activities many on the ‘outside’ would consider mundane. My own sorties outside were generally spent sleeping, eating from those food groups generally not available in the Ghan (namely fresh fruit and real dairy), and stocking up on essential items like underwear and toiletries. Coming back this time, the usual buzz of excitement was missing. No-one seemed happy to be there.

  The escalation in violence and tension in the weeks leading up to my departure had taken its toll on everyone. Within minutes of the wheels lifting off the runway in Kabul that late May morning, almost everyone onboard the UN DC9 fell asleep, the sense of relief palpable.

  But now I was back. Clementina had been released and Kabul had been quiet in my absence, as if taking stock of all that had happened. The immigration authorities had streamlined arrival procedures and the queue in front of me was moving fast. As I rifled through my bag looking for my passport, sandwiched somewhere between the Bombay Sapphire and an enormous box of tampons, my phone rang. It was Nick, a British friend who worked for one of the many media NGOs in the Ghan.

  ‘Welcome back. If you need somewhere to stay, let me know.’

  It turned out that somewhere between Nairobi, Dubai and Kabul, I had missed an email. The Karwan Sara had been closed.

  ‘There’d been some kind of armed uprising, I think,’ Nick explained. ‘Apparently the rent hadn’t been paid for a while and the owner of the compound decided to take his place back. It only happened on Saturday. I think your stuff is still there but they’ve kicked everyone out.’

  Whenever I went on leave, I packed up all my worldly goods and locked them away in the green metal trunk I kept underneath my bed at the Karwan Sara, taking anything of value with me. It was highly unlikely that anything would be stolen, but the chances of a rocket landing in the wrong place always weighed heavily on my mind. Now I stood in the arrivals line wondering if my room had been looted and my ‘worldly goods’ scattered among person or persons unknown.

  ‘Let me get through here and I’ll call you back.’

  I hung up just as my turn came at the arrivals desk. The sign above me said Welcome to Kabul, though I felt anything but. My three weeks ‘out’ had recharged my batteries but in the space of a short phone call, I was back to zero. The Karwan Sara, my home for fourteen months, had closed and now I had to find somewhere else to live.

  I stood with the throng at the baggage carousel, oblivious to the swarm of porters buzzing in my ear, and barely noticing the chaos around me. Grabbing my bag, I joined the bottleneck at the exit. I slowly pushed my way through the crowd, waving my UN passport and smiling at the neatly uniformed customs man, thus ensuring I didn’t have to endure the ignominy of a Kabul airport baggage search.

  Outside, the sun shone brilliantly. The car park was the usual congestion of Land Cruisers and luggage. Like a blotch of misplaced paint, the Big Green Car was parked at the edge, the trusty Mahmood beaming at me as he stood by its door.

  ‘Welcome back, chief,’ he said, shaking my hand.

  ‘Mahmood, it’s great to see you. I have a problem and I need you to help me.’

  It was too much to throw at him to be considere
d polite, but Mahmood took it in his stride, showing just the slightest of frowns while he carefully placed my backpack in the rear of the car before climbing in to the driver’s seat. With the start of the engine, the Big Green Car headed into town, and I explained that there had been a problem at the Karwan Sara and that I needed him to help me move all my things.

  ‘Now,’ he said, his eyes widening.

  ‘Now,’ I nodded.

  To my relief, my room was just as I had left it three weeks earlier. We had just squeezed my possessions into the back of the car, and I was about to do a final check of the room, when a man in a suit and tie appeared. He was tall and dark and looked Afghan, though probably – given his attire – one who had spent more time out of the country than in it. He introduced himself as the owner of the compound and apologised to me for the ‘trouble’. An understatement, I thought, as he went on to inquire when I would be paying the last of my rent.

  ‘I just got back,’ I snapped. ‘I’ll pay you by the end of the week.’

  I knew it wasn’t his fault, but being homeless was the last thing I had wanted when my plane touched down in Kabul.

  ‘Thank you,’ he replied, ignoring my ill humour and handing me his card. ‘This is my phone number. We hope to renovate the building and open again in a few months. Perhaps you would like to come back then.’

  Throughout the winter and into the spring, the Karwan Sara had been dying a slow and undignified death. The generator rarely worked, the water pipe had siezed up, the restaurant menu had shrunk even further and the once verdant garden had become a nightly haven for an ever-expanding family of roving dogs. Landlord euthanasia had finally put an end to the misery. This was an opportunity to find somewhere new and start afresh, and it was unlikely that I would return. I climbed into the Big Green Car and drove out the Karwan Sara gates for the last time.