AS SHE APPROACHED her tenth birthday, Mehran became a student, along with her older sisters, at an all-girls school in Kabul. She wears the uniform for girls. In the afternoons, she is allowed to switch into boys’ clothing at home and when she is out in the neighborhood. She keeps her hair short and is still considered to be the wildest member of the family.
AZITA NEVER REENTERED parliament. In late 2011, along with dozens of other candidates, her victory was acknowledged as valid by a court appointed to resolve the political impasse from the fraught elections of the year before. But Afghanistan’s president Hamid Karzai ultimately agreed only to reinstate ten parliamentarians in the lower house, with the blessing of the United Nations. Azita was not among them. Instead, she helped form a new political party in opposition to the government and eventually got a job with a European aid organization. Her modest salary allowed her to keep the family in Kabul and her daughters in school. The family of eight moved to a smaller apartment and now shares three rooms. In the summer of 2013, she sought medical treatment due to blunt strokes to her neck and chest, which were photographed and copies were forwarded to me. In an interview in Kabul, her husband confirmed that their marriage had again come to include violence. In early 2014 Azita was let go from her job, as the funding for her organization was to expire.
AT SEVENTEEN, ZAHRA adopted a new hairstyle that she says is an attempt to replicate Justin Bieber’s. She still wears male clothing. She has dropped out of school; she could no longer bear exhortations by her Pashto teacher to dress like a woman. Her mother still insists she should get married. Her father says he will never force her. Zahra refuses to go to weddings, fearing she may be spotted by a future mother-in-law. She holds on to a dream of immigrating to another country, where there are more of her kind.
SHUKRIA LIVES WITH her three children in Kabul. She continues to work full-time as a nurse and is studying to become a doctor.
NADER STILL DRIVES her car around Kabul and teaches tae kwon do in a basement.
IN A FAILED attempt to flee Afghanistan through Tajikistan, Shahed had all her savings stolen by a smuggler.
FINALLY, A NOTE on Setareh: She is the only character in the book who in reality is a construct of several people. I worked with several translators who, for an extra layer of protection and according to their wishes, I have called by a single name. For each character interviewed, and for different occasions, my translator needed to possess different skills and knowledge of different ethnicities, neighborhoods, and cities. So “Setareh” is Pashtun and she is Tajik and she is Hazara. She speaks several dialects of Dari, as well as Pashto, Urdu, and English. She has a degree in literature, in law, and in political science, and she is a very clever street kid. She is a poet, a teacher, an aspiring lawyer, and a budding businesswoman. She is upper class and middle class and she is a refugee. She is a student. She wears a full hijab and a sloppy head scarf; she prays five times a day and not at all. And within each young woman who took the role of Setareh for me, there are many more who are constantly shape-shifting and adapting to whatever circumstances they are thrown into. The way Afghans always do.
New York, February 2014