Zahra
STANDING ON TOP of a table, she was an animal on display. There was cheering and loud laughter. Her body was frozen, and she could not move. When tears rolled down her cheeks she did not lift her hands to wipe them off. That she cried engaged them even more. “Look, look.” And she was looked at some more. Some clapped their hands with excitement. Finally, she buried her face in her hands, screaming, to block out the sound.
It would become one of her first very illuminated memories, and she would later describe it: “I made the world dark. I thought that when I could not see the world, the world could not see me.”
Arriving at kindergarten in Peshawar in the standard uniform for boys had been a mistake. Her mother had brought it to her, and Zahra had managed for a few days before the other children figured her out. The older ones began to taunt her: She was not a real boy, so why would she want to look like one? One of them ran for the teacher, who was not pleased to hear about the charade. Zahra’s parents were called over and quietly sat through a lecture about the importance of discipline and obedience in children from a young age. That was both the kindergarten’s and the school’s mission, and it was not to be made fun of. The parents would need to get a proper girl’s uniform for their daughter before she would be allowed to return.
At home, Zahra cried and tried to wriggle out of the blue skirt and white blouse. It was when she returned to school that she was put on a table, to serve as an example before the others.
“This is a girl,” the teacher announced. “Look at her. This is what a girl looks like. Do you see? She was never a boy. You will all remember this now.”
ALMOST TEN YEARS later, standing in the doorway of her family’s apartment in Kabul, Zahra has chosen her own outfit: a boxy black jacket, a buttoned-up shirt, and dark pants. She has the look of an elegant young man, walking a fine line on gender, with her round face, full lips, long eyelashes, and a shiny black Tom Cruise hairstyle with a neat side parting. She does not greet us with a smile. Nor does she lower her gaze, an impulse ingrained in most Afghan girls. She is unafraid, looking me straight in the eyes, resting one hand on her hip. And why would she not? Her exterior is of the ruling gender; mine is not.
Through another chain of rumors and introductions, I have found fifteen-year-old Zahra and her family. They are from Andkhoy in the northern Faryab province. There, according to several carpet dealers in Kabul, girls are commonly dressed like boys in order to help out as weavers in carpet production. But Zahra was never a bacha posh who did hard labor. Instead, her parents say their daughter just always wanted to be a boy. They had nothing to do with it. And just as with many stories of bacha posh I have encountered by now, that will turn out to be not entirely true.
Zahra is coming of a dangerous age.
An Afghan girl who is no longer a child but on her way to becoming a woman should immediately be shielded and protected to ensure her virginity and reputation for a future marriage. No matter how athletic, boyish, and buoyant the spirit of a bacha posh may have been, puberty—or, according to Dr. Fareiba, ideally sometime before—is the time when the curtain necessarily comes down for most girls. It is when they must be undone, otherwise a bacha posh can become “a little strange in the head,” in Dr. Fareiba’s words, if she presents as something else going into puberty, when gender segregation goes into full effect. For this reason, by remaining in male disguise at fifteen, Zahra is slowly treading into far more complicated territory than a younger bacha posh. By her age, girls are commonly taught to focus on becoming proper, shy, and very quiet young women.
But Zahra lacks most traditional feminine traits and speaks for herself right away. She has lived as a boy for as long as she can remember and has no intention of changing. She does not ever want to become an Afghan woman. They are second-class citizens, she explains to me, always beholden to and ruled by men. So why would she want to join them?
“People use bad words for girls; they scream at them on the streets,” she says. “When I see that, I don’t want to be a girl. When I am a boy, they don’t speak to me like that.”
Zahra would rather work, support herself, and make her own decisions, without being under the guardianship of a husband, following that of her father, as Afghan culture dictates for women. Other teenage Kabul girls will say similar things as a joking fantasy, as defying one’s parents is rarely an option in Afghan culture. But Zahra is serious, and she speaks of the usual path for Afghan women as unthinkable to her. She does not want a family, nor does she desire children of her own. “For always, I want to be a boy and a boy and a boy,” she says.
There are no other bacha posh in her school, but she has come to this conclusion on her own, through observations of her neighborhood, and her own family. There, eleven people share three rooms, and Zahra sleeps with her sisters. As in many other Afghan households, moments of privacy extend, at most, to the bathroom. One of her eight siblings is always banging on the door to get in, or just banging on the door as they run by.
WITH THE PERMISSION of Zahra’s parents, my female translator Setareh and I begin to stroll around Zahra’s Kabul neighborhood with her on some afternoons after she has finished school. She has an exaggerated and clunky way of walking, as if there were something between her legs. With high, tense shoulders, and hands hanging by the thumbs in her pockets, she strides forward in broad, duck-footed steps, in her preferred outfit of an oversize hooded plaid shirt, jeans, and flip-flops. She keeps her head low, face close to her chest, and looks up only if someone directly calls her name. She knows her power is in the exterior, and her walk successfully signals that she is a typical teenage boy with some attitude.
Through this small masquerade, Zahra constitutes a provocation and a challenge to the order of her entire society.
Fashion has always been a way to communicate class, gender, and power. In Afghanistan, gender and power are one and the same. A pair of pants, a haircut, the right walk, and a teenage girl can reach for all kinds of things she is not supposed to have. Just as the Taliban strictly controlled how both men and women looked during their reign—when women could appear in public only when covered from head to toe—specific rules on clothing have been used throughout history by those who want to make sure the patriarchal order stays in place.
King James I of England denounced women dressing like men during his reign in the 1600s to ensure women did not see any undue advantages. France implemented a law in 1800 that said women could not wear pants; it was not formally removed until 2013. The Taliban explicitly forbade women wearing men’s clothing, and also for girls to dress as boys, which may indicate that there were enough transgressions of Zahra’s kind, and enough bacha posh, for them to see a need to ban the practice. Today, there is no official decree that makes any mention of dressing girls as boys.
The Taliban’s dress police is also gone, but dress codes for women from puberty onward are still subjected to a strict social control, with many freelance enforcers. A woman must clearly signal her gender through her dress, but there are fluid limits to how much of a woman she is allowed to be.
One day just outside Zahra’s house, a teenager rides by us on his bike, smacking his lips, uttering something in Dari. Setareh’s face twitches in an impulse to yell back, but instead she pulls back, lowering her gaze like a good girl. But Zahra’s reaction is swift: First, she hurls some profanities after the biker. Then she turns to Setareh and apologizes profusely on the cyclist’s behalf. Both of them refuse to translate the original insult, but soon it creeps out that the offensive line was “I can see the shape of your body,” followed by speculation about what kind of woman Setareh might be. No feminine shape should be noticeable when she moves, and her dark green, loose Punjabi-style pants, tunic, and scarf cover everything but her face and her hands. But her tunic is cut with the slightest hint of a waist in the middle, and the ensemble, which is not unusual for a current-day Kabul woman in her twenties, is less conservative than an all-black cloak. Adding to that, in the eyes of the cyclist, she is a lone woman in the company of a foreigner and a young boy—in other words, both suspect and possibly inappropriate company.
I look down at my wide black pants and knee-length black trench coat. “So what am I? Not another woman?”
Zahra and Setareh both look at me. “You,” they agree, “are just a foreigner. Nobody cares about you. It is Afghan women they harass. Even the small boys are like the religious police, trained in telling women what they should wear.”
AS A FOREIGN, non-Muslim female, I am by definition a different species. Therefore, I am in some ways a neuter, which may be just as well under these circumstances. But what I wear still matters, and I am expertly styled to draw a minimum of attention to myself. A few days before the street incident, Setareh had given me a loving makeover. After observing me on our various excursions throughout Kabul, she finally decided to offer some commentary. My clothes were simply not loose enough, or wide enough, or dark enough. The sleeves were a little too short, showing a hint of wrist, and the delicate fabric of my tunic tended to cling to my thighs when I walked. Plus, bare feet in sandals? Everybody was looking at my white feet.
Ten minutes later, after we had dived into my sparse closet, all that was deemed sexual had been removed, and I had been fully turned into a black blob. I had to look almost Afghan? I wondered. Not exactly, Setareh scoffed: “You will never look Afghan.”
Even though the new look is much better, it is still decidedly foreign, she explained. The fabrics I wear look too expensive: Afghans wear shiny polyester, imported from Pakistan. My black coat is okay, but the cut is too modern, and not boxy enough. The pants are the worst—made from a high-tech breathable fabric, they look sporty. Since when does a proper Afghan woman practice sports? That is a men’s thing.
Even if I hid under a burka, my body language would give me away as all but an Afghan woman, Setareh warned. “You wave your hands around when you speak. You sound aggressive. Like you demand something. You put your hands on your hips, like you want to challenge people. It looks very rude for a woman to do that. You walk fast, and you don’t look down. You look into people’s faces as it pleases you.”
She smiled again—as what came next was almost too obvious—the black backpack I sometimes carry my camera in is just as bad as my khaki shoulder bag. They are both such Western giveaways—like I am about to go mountain climbing. No, Setareh explained: A modern Kabul woman strives to look cosmopolitan, like those in advertisements from Dubai, Pakistan, or Iran. She puts on makeup and carries a decent, feminine handbag, and wears heels—not so high that she could get stuck on rainy days when Kabul’s dust instantly turns to mud or be unable to jump over sewers, but still delicate enough to be feminine. Practicality in dress is for uncivilized people. And for men.
But the point is not to look good, or for me to resemble an Afghan. In order to work efficiently, we need to blend in and just be as close to nothings—but still women—as possible. Show respect. Afghans make a sport of spotting foreign men in trimmed beards and traditional village garb who ride around together in groups of two or three in regular taxis as they give the native look their best shot. Their expensive sunglasses and hiking boots always give them away. Trying too hard is the ultimate embarrassment, in Setareh’s view.
Her friends all spend much time tweaking and trying to expand upon the female dress code, in which they must look like women, but at the same time, not to the point that they seem to be inviting any attention from men.
The hidden body is all about sex—which does not officially exist, other than in marriage for the purpose of procreation. It is why the smallest slip of a fabric can send a provocative signal. When most of the body is hidden, what follows is also that much more becomes sexualized. In an environment where sex is never discussed, where men and women are strictly separated, sex is, ironically and perhaps unfortunately, on everybody’s mind all the time. Body parts, fabric, gestures that elsewhere would never seem sexual become loaded. This frustrating contradiction means everyone must be hyperaware.
As a woman, you must shrink both your physical body and any energy that surrounds it, in speech, movement, and gaze. Touching someone of the opposite sex in public, by mistake or as a friendly gesture, must always be avoided. A Swedish diplomat had thoroughly rejected my attempt to grab his arm the week before: Such frivolous affection between foreigners of the opposite sex would be misinterpreted, and send the wrong signals. Afghan male friends, however, are frequently spotted holding hands in Kabul, often while holding the strap to a gun in the other hand.
The responsibility for men’s behavior, indeed for civilization itself, rests entirely with women here, and in how they dress and behave. Men’s animalistic impulses are presumed to be overwhelming and uncontrollable. And as men are brutal, brainless savages, women must hide their bodies to avoid being assaulted. In most societies, a respectable woman, to varying degrees, is expected to cover up. If she doesn’t, she is inviting assault. Any woman who gets into “trouble” by drawing too much attention from men will have only herself to blame.
In essence, it is the tired old attempt to dismiss a rape victim—did she wear something provocative? If so, she is responsible, at least in part, for being attacked. The idea that men are savages who can never control themselves was always a great insult to men, as it implies that men have no functioning minds that at any time could overrule very aggressive impulses.
The Koran, just as the Bible, has passages where modesty in clothing is advised for both men and women. But what exactly constitutes a modest, pious, and pure woman is nowhere explicitly prescribed in the Koran, and varies with its many interpreters. Veiling predates Islam and was originally a privilege for noble women only, to symbolize their sexual exclusivity to one man. Setareh, like most women here, covers her head, but when she crosses the border to visit relatives in Pakistan, it is more important that the scarf also obscures her chest. Up north, women sweep big sheets of fabric, the chadori, around themselves, sometimes even as an additional layer under a burka. Around Kabul, young women let the scarf slip, and each time we are alone, Setareh shakes out her long, shiny hair and runs her fingers through it to make it come alive, in a gesture of relief and pleasure. Zahra, on the other hand, would have shaved her head, had her mother not forbidden her from doing it.
AS WE PASS a small vegetable stall on our walk around Zahra’s neighborhood, where dusty oranges, carrots, and apples are for sale, she proudly mentions that it was the scene of a fight last year, in which she took center stage. She had been walking with one of her younger sisters when they heard a hissing sound behind them; somebody was trying to snare the attention of the younger sister. “Shht-shht-shht.… Shht-shht-shht.…” The sister bowed her head and tried to walk faster, but Zahra would not let the insult pass quietly. She flipped around and yelled at the young man.
“Shame on you—shame, I say—you almost have a beard, and you are flirting with a child.”
At first, the teenager seemed surprised and took a few steps back. But then he picked up a stone and threw it at Zahra. She ducked, and the stone hit a car behind her. Infuriated, Zahra went on the attack. She kicked him in the stomach and tried to punch his face. The boy fell to the ground but managed to throw another stone. That one hit the side mirror of the parked car. When two policemen from the park came running, Zahra explained the situation. Her eyes were angry and her heart was on fire when she spoke: The older boy had been inappropriate with her sister, who was only twelve.
The police agreed and shared Zahra’s indignation after taking a quick look at Zahra’s younger sister—she was properly dressed in black, with a head scarf tightly pinned over her hair. She could not be suspected of having provoked the young man’s behavior. Concluding that, they began to beat the young boy. A local shopkeeper also joined in. After a few kicks and punches, they dragged the boy away, in the direction of the police station. He would spend the night in jail.
I look to Setareh for guidance, who fills in the blanks as Zahra finishes the story: “It’s the role of the bigger brother to protect the honor of younger sisters. A brother should challenge those who are rude to them.”
The older brother would be Zahra, in this case. Young girls, in Zahra’s opinion, should have no contact with boys before they get engaged or married. A brother’s greatest fear can be that his sister will fall in love with some boy of her own choosing. Such a crush would be disastrous for the family. The sister could be tainted and unmarriageable later on.
Young men are not to be trusted, Zahra says. They can make promises to young girls, only to later withdraw them when the girl is already shamed and tarnished from speaking to a boy and thus suspected of no longer having a pure mind.
I ask Zahra, to make sure I understand: “So girls should not be friends with boys before they get married?”
She shakes her head no. Absolutely not.
“But you hang out with boys?”
“Only my neighbors.”
Even though Zahra plays the overprotective male with her sisters, she shares no loyalty with other boys. She is not one of them; she despises the way they treat girls.
There is an apparent duality in how she sees herself, and in how she sorts her different personas by tasks and traits: “When I am lifting a heavy carpet, my neighbors say I am strong. Then I feel like a boy. When I clean the house, I feel like a girl. Because I know that’s what girls do.”
Zahra is the one who moves around the most in her family. She runs all the errands, to the tailor and to the bazaar. She fills the heavy gas canisters and carries them home. Her male side is physical: “Boys are stronger than girls. They can do anything and they are free. When I was a child, everyone was beating me and I cried. But now, if anyone tries to beat me, I hit back. And when I am playing football, and do something wrong, they yell at me. Then, I yell back.”
“Why do you think you feel like both?”
“My mother always tells me that I am a girl. But my neighbors call me a boy. I feel like both. People see me as both. I feel happy I am both. If my mother had not told anybody, nobody would know. I say I am Naweed to those who don’t know.”
It is a name that means “good news.”
“What do you want us to call you?”
She shrugs. It would be impolite to ask anything of visitors.
Zahra has a very clear idea of what sets boys and girls apart. More than anything, she explains, it is in how they live their lives: “Girls dress up. They wear makeup. Boys are more simple. I like that. I hate the long hair that girls have. I wouldn’t have the patience to brush it, to clean it.… And girls talk too much. They gossip, you know? Men talk, but not as much as women. Women are always sitting between four walls and talk. Talk, talk. That is what they do. Because they have no freedom. They can’t go outside and do things. So they just keep talking.”
After a pause, she adds, “I hate the scarf. I hate to put it on. And the long shirts. And the bra. I refuse to wear it.” Her cheeks blush a little again, and the hair falls into her eyes as she turns her head away.
“Girls like to have beautiful houses, to color them inside and outside,” she continues. “The boys don’t care about houses or discussing how to decorate them. Men leave the home anyway, and go for work. There are things that women like to do: to cook, to clean, to make themselves beautiful. To go to weddings. Fashion. Men are not interested in any of that.”
Men, on the other hand, like to race cars, hang out with their friends, and fight. Zahra describes the ultimate man as Kabul’s current favorite character on television: Jack Bauer on 24. To her and the other boys in the neighborhood, the American action hero symbolizes a real Afghan. A true warrior. The payoff is in every episode: When the hero is beaten half to death, he will rise again and protect his honor. Just like an Afghan, in Zahra’s view, he never fears death. And he never stops fighting.
I try something cheap: “So are boys better than girls?”
Zahra shakes her head. Absolutely not.
“Girls are more intelligent than boys, because they work more in the house and they can do more things. Men are suited for different kinds of work. They are intelligent, too, but they can do fewer things. All the work that boys can do, women can do, too. I know it, because I do it. The work that women do, men cannot do.”
The conservative older brother turned somewhat progressive teenage girl has a self-perfected logic: “You know, women can be men, too. Like me.”
Hard to argue with that.
WE APPROACH A sand pit where some young men have gathered around a three-wheeled motorbike for rent. Zahra wants to go for a ride. She strolls over to the man in charge and presses some coins into his palm. On the bike, she begins to loop around us at high speed. She breaks out in a large smile when she feels the wind on her face. As she passes us, her hair sprayed in every direction, she stands up on the bike, for effect. When I take her picture, a neighborhood boy yells at Setareh: “Tell her not to think she’s a boy. She’s a girl.”
Climbing off the bike, Zahra says that the boy is her friend and we need not worry. He knows her secret, but he treats her like a fellow boy. “If someone beats me, he protects me.”
“Have you been attacked?”
“It happens.”
In reality, Zahra’s freedom of movement has become more limited in the past few years. She is feeling increasingly isolated. Girls have begun to shy away from her, and young boys like to challenge her. She is not entirely safe in her own neighborhood anymore, where more people seem to have an issue with how she looks. What used to be freedom in disguise is now a slight provocation to those who know. And lately, more seem to know. Zahra suspects her mother has a part in that—the family used to protect her secret, but in the last few years, her mother has tried a variety of urging, begging, and demanding that Zahra look more feminine. It is time, her mother argues, for Zahra to become a girl and develop into the woman inside of her. But Zahra still resists. Her small freedoms have become curtailed but in her mind it still beats being a woman. The idea that she would go on to repeat the life of her mother, with a husband and a long line of children, seems absurd and horrifying to her.
AS WE SIT down under a tree in a park, Zahra suddenly goes quiet when her Pashto teacher walks by and gives her a long stare. The female teachers in Zahra’s school have never commented on her appearance. They have seen her putting on a head scarf that is a required part of her uniform as she walks up the steps, only to rip it off the minute she walks out of class. But recently her Pashto teacher told her that what she is doing is wrong, and that it is shameful for her not to look like a girl and cover her head at all times.
As with many social issues and rules on how people should live their lives, mullahs in Afghanistan take different views on whether God has anything at all to say about bacha posh. It’s not a crime to dress as the other gender, but it could possibly be viewed as a sin. According to one Islamic hadith, the prophet Muhammad “damned those men who look like women and those women who look like men and stated ‘expel them from homes.’ ”
Moses reportedly said something similar in Deuteronomy 22:5. “A woman must not wear men’s clothing, nor a man wear women’s clothing, for the Lord your God detests anyone who does this.” Still, the interpretation of both of these passages, which could be condemnations of cross-dressing, are not agreed upon by religious scholars. God and the prophets may, in fact, have had no real problem at all with cross-dressers of either sex. It is important to note as well that these writings speak of “men” and “women”—not boys and girls.
But in Afghanistan, references to Islam can be made by anyone, at any time, for any purpose. No matter the issue, a person may cite an appropriately vague hadith, said to represent the thousands of (often contradictory) opinions and life events of the prophet Muhammad, or a recollection of what a mullah has once said. Such determinations—and they are usually exclaimed with absolute certainty—of what is Islamic or not are liberally distributed by Afghans both young and old, by those who hold university degrees and by those who use only their thumbprints to sign documents. The constant references to religion lead many Afghans to believe that any new rule imposed on them is indeed mandatory for being “a good Muslim.”
The crippling catch-22 in Afghanistan is that as soon as someone refers to God, the prophet Muhammad, the Koran, or anything Islamic at all, anyone who questions that statement is also potentially questioning God. And in that, he or she could be suspected or accused of blasphemy. To avoid that potential danger, most contradictory and at times confusing interpretations of Islam remain unchallenged in Afghanistan. The Koran can be read in many ways, even by those who can read, and there are thousands of hadiths used to express different rules. So the scope for interpreting Islamic law and putting it into context is immense, according to scholars.
As there is no strictly organized clergy, the very title of mullah is open to anyone who is viewed as having some religious credentials. The mullah can be an illiterate farmer who doubles as a religious leader for the village. Considering that a mullah can be the one to declare a newborn girl a son in order to help out a son-less family, some religious leaders not only condone bacha posh but also encourage and accept it when deemed necessary.
Zahra is not aware of any specific Islamic rules on the issue of what to wear; nor does she know of one interpretation or another of them. But she is an observant Muslim who prays, and she told her Pashto teacher what made sense to her: “It is my body and you should leave me alone.”
As the teacher muttered and walked away, several girls at school were astonished that Zahra had spoken back to a male teacher on a religious issue. Some were told by their parents to stay away from her after that.
Still, Zahra has gained some popularity for one reason: She is the closest many of the students in the all-girls school will come to conversing with a boy of the same age. At times, they let Zahra stand in for their movie-star fantasy, pinching her cheeks, joking to one another that she is “such a cute boy.” Sometimes, a giggly girl will want to take the play further, asking Zahra to hold her hand and declare that they are engaged.
Zahra doesn’t really like any of those games, but she plays along, so as not to alienate anyone further.
WHEN WE CLIMB out of the car on another day, Zahra greets us on her bicycle. Smiling and waving, she runs up to the car and opens the door on my side. When she leans in, I instinctively do the same and kiss her three times on the cheeks, in a classic Afghan greeting, before I realize my mistake. It’s used mostly as a greeting for people of the same gender. Three boys are standing behind another car looking at us. I apologize to Zahra, who is very polite: It’s not a problem. I had completely forgotten the routine we had almost perfected last time: a firm handshake, followed by the American high five that Zahra always seems to execute more smoothly than I do.
At the house, Zahra’s mother, Asma, has prepared an overwhelming lunch. She and Zahra’s father, Samir, want to thank us for our interest in their daughter. For this occasion, Asma has been cooking for two days, and on the table is a big serving plate of fried rice with slices of carrot and onion, chunks of meat and raisins, and the special dried herbs sent from Andkhoy hidden inside the rice, Uzbek-style. The quorma is luxurious: a whole chicken cooked in tomato sauce. Manto are carefully folded dumplings with minced meat inside, steamed in a cooker with onions. There is a large plate of minced tomato, cucumber, and onions that have been tossed with thick mayonnaise. All food is prepared with the expensive vegetable oil used for special occasions, marked “USA” and “Vitamin A fortified.” It is a World Food Program item openly sold at one of the bazaars, and considered to be better than the Pakistani versions. The dessert has already been set out; it’s firiny, a creamy version of rice pudding with a shivering poison-green Jell-O on top. Pepsi cans are lined up next to drying oranges and darkened bananas. The fruit is a rare treat from Pakistan.
Samir, in a great mood and still wearing his well-worn khaki flight uniform, has been dismissed early from his work piloting helicopters for the Afghan air force. He balances his youngest, a fourteen-month-old girl, on one knee. The baby is wearing a red jumpsuit and has little hair; without the announcement of her gender, no observer would know for sure. Dressing little boys and girls in blue or pink was a marketing gimmick invented in the United States in the forties. Before then, all children were mostly dressed in white, with lace and ruffles. Pink was actually regarded as the more masculine, fiery color before it came to be the signifying color for a baby girl.
A three-year-old boy tries to climb up onto his father’s other knee, only to be gently brushed away. The other siblings move around the table; they are too young to be invited to sit with the grown-ups and too old to earn a place in someone’s lap. Still, Samir gives everyone a good chunk of attention. He beams when speaking of his children. “I am so happy I have a big family. The dream of every parent is for their children to give them grandchildren. And if they don’t have children, it’s a big problem. I was lucky.”
Samir smiles at Asma. Nine children puts her above Afghan women’s national average of six surviving children. Zahra, at fifteen, is number three, with four sisters and four brothers.
Asma and Samir are first cousins in an arranged marriage. According to Samir: “It was both our parents’ choice. And Asma’s choice.”
Asma shouts in protest. “Neee neeee! It was you who came to my home a hundred times and told me you wanted to marry me.”
Samir chuckles. “You wanted to marry me—I still have your love letters.” He turns to me: Asma found him irresistible; is that so hard to imagine? “I will show you a picture from my youth, and you will see I was very handsome.”
He corrects himself: They were lucky, too, in what their parents decided for them. Most marriages are not like theirs. The big family, however, was Asma’s doing. “It was your fault,” Samir throws out in the direction of his wife, grinning. “Maybe you want another one?”
She grins back at him. There are four sons in the family already and her work is more than done. “I have told you the factory is closed. I have put a lock on it!” Their youngest was unplanned. When Asma went to the doctor for a sore throat, she learned that she was three months pregnant.
Samir roars with laughter as he is reminded of her surprise, and starts to shovel up rice with a fork over to his own plate. Another child would be hard. They have almost outgrown the apartment already and cannot afford to go anywhere else. They rented it from a wealthier relative when they returned from Peshawar after the Taliban years. Their time in Pakistan was not bad—the family ran a small carpet business there. But during those years Samir was unable to fly, and it was almost unbearable for him. He was never quite a carpet dealer, like his relatives.
Asma worries about her overgrown bacha posh daughter: “At first, I only had two daughters, and when Zahra wanted to wear boys’ clothing, I was pleased. I liked it, since we didn’t have a boy then.” She hesitates before continuing: “Now, we don’t really know.”
Samir agrees it’s time for Zahra to change: “I have told her one thousand times that she needs to cover herself in long coats and let her hair grow out. But she says it’s her own choice. She’s even taller than her older sisters now. She refuses. Maybe she has some of me in her.” He says it with a father’s sense of pride.
Asma is not amused by her husband’s relenting on Zahra’s appearance, and she is eager to convince Samir that something is not right any longer in how their daughter looks.
I have told her that we have met many girls like Zahra, although so far, all have been younger. But what is it like in the West? Asma wonders, urging me to explain what the universal rules are for what women should look like. “If you walk in the street in your country and a girl had short hair and looked like a boy, do you think it’s shameful?”
I weigh my words carefully, noting that Zahra is listening intently.
“It’s very common for girls to have short hair and pants, and it’s not considered shameful.”
Asma is not satisfied. “But what do you think?”
“I have met many girls who live like boys here,” I say, trying to turn it back to her. “It is a choice within each family. But I am not sure if it is a good thing for the girls, or if it is a problem. Perhaps it can be both?”
But Asma is not interested in psychological consequences. She is more concerned with the social ones. “It could maybe be a shame in Afghan culture, now that Zahra is older.” She pauses. It’s something she has been thinking a lot about lately. But there is no manual for this; Zahra certainly doesn’t look like a woman just yet. For some reason, she has not developed as quickly as her sisters, although she is physically normal, Asma explains: “She has what other girls have.”
Zahra looks at her mother in astonishment. “Why are you telling them? It is personal business!”
Asma rolls her eyes. It’s the truth that she is a woman; why would that be shameful?
“In my view, it’s not too bad,” Asma continues, almost to herself. “It’s not like she has shaved her head or anything. She wears pants and she has short hair. But she is not too masculine. Zahra is something … in between, I think.”
Her father just shakes his head. He doesn’t actually condone Zahra’s choice of clothes and haircut, but as he is away during the day, it’s hard to control. Today his daughter is in her usual outfit of pants and a baggy shirt. Her father does not seem to mind. But with one eye on Asma, he declares that Zahra does not respect her mother the way she should. And they do not allow her to go out in the evening anymore. Samir has always considered it a privilege to have an extra boy, even though Zahra is a little older now. There are still advantages; she can help with errands and other heavier tasks, he points out, in both his own and Zahra’s defense.
His opinions about marriage and family extend to all of his daughters, including Zahra—every Afghan should get married and have children. It’s the natural course of life. It will happen, sooner or later. But right now, he admits he can get confused by her appearance. “All the time I am reminding myself that she is really my daughter. But she has made herself into so much of a boy, I can’t help it that I forget.”
He laughs again. His daughter is just a little bit of a rebel, just like he is. Zahra smiles down on her plate of manto.
LATER, ASMA BRINGS out a picture of herself as a glamorous, made-up young married woman. Looking serious before the camera, she is in a pale blue dress, with a tiny Zahra next to her on the sofa. In the photo, Zahra is barely two years old, in jeans and a tight little denim vest, with a short haircut—all by her own choice, Asma exclaims. Since Zahra had no older brothers at the time, the outfit must have been bought for her. I say that as far as I know, every bacha posh has been the result of the parents’ desire to have a son in the family.
As Asma reveals her pregnancy history, the truth slowly comes out. After she had Zahra, her next pregnancy ended with a late-term miscarriage. It would have been a boy. The next year, she gave birth prematurely to a son who died. After having three surviving daughters but two sons who had died, Asma felt increasingly desperate. “Please, please God, give me a son,” she prayed. She needed some good luck to boost her prayer. Her relatives were prodding Asma to get pregnant again, and Zahra was being cared for by her cousins—one of whom had been turned into a bacha posh to ensure her mother’s next-born would be a son.
Asma’s relatives urged her to try the same tactic. And what harm could it be? she thought. It had worked for others. It was also easier to have Zahra dressed as a boy, so she could move around with her cousins. If it had magical benefits beyond that, it would be a bonus. So before she turned two, Zahra became the family’s son.
By the time she turned six, she would attempt to cut her own hair—or, rather, try to shave her head—and refuse to play with other girls. Zahra’s older cousin who had been a bacha posh moved to Europe, where she now lives with her husband and three children. She warned Asma that her path back to womanhood was very difficult. But Asma gave birth to four living sons after Zahra, so to her, no one can dispute the power of magic in bacha posh.
THERE IS FURTHER, empirical evidence of benefits in the family, too. Turning girls into boys is a practice that has given them many sons through the generations, according to Samir’s white-haired mother, who shows up at the family’s apartment one day. The family has a long history of powerful women who took on the role of men, both in looks and tasks. In the grandmother’s view, there is no downside to Zahra remaining a bacha posh until she gets married. Zahra’s great-great-grandmother also dressed like a boy and lived as a young man for years.
The great-great-grandmother rode horses just like the famous warrior Malalai of Maiwand, an Afghan equivalent to Joan of Arc who helped drive the British army out of Afghanistan in the 1880s. Zahra’s foremother held the prestigious male position of a land inspector during King Habībullāh’s time, when the female guards in Nancy Duprée’s photo also dressed as men. She married at age thirty-eight and bore four children. She had switched over to women’s dress by then, after holding out as a man longer than most. But it certainly did not do her any harm to live as a boy for a few years, says Zahra’s grandmother.
Finding a suitable husband for a bacha posh was never an issue, either, as far as she knows. Living as a man a little longer is nothing unusual in the family; there will be plenty of time to get married later on. Afghans of an Uzbek heritage are liberal, independent people who don’t care what people think of them, the grandmother says. She supports her son in not strictly enforcing Zahra’s transition right now, and she can’t see why Asma fusses over it. Eventually, Zahra will marry, like everyone else. She is certain of it.
To the grandmother, there is something distinctly Afghan about bacha posh: “It is our tradition from a long time ago. Afghan girls dressed as boys when there were no weapons, only bows and arrows.”
She has never read it in a book, but everybody has heard tales of girls who grew up as boys and later lead brave and unusual lives as women. And, she adds, it was not just the fearless Malalai who drove out invaders. Other Afghan women warriors came both before and after Malalai; the grandmother heard their stories many times growing up.
Different tricks have always been employed, too, for producing sons, according to the grandmother. “Our mothers would tell us about the bacha posh and then we told our own families,” she says. “It was before Islam even came to Afghanistan. We always knew about it.”
“Before Islam” would be sometime before the seventh century and more than 1,400 years ago. Islam is just the latest religion to take hold in Afghanistan, where Louis Duprée’s excavations revealed settlements as old as 35,000 years, and where modern oil and gas explorations regularly uncover evidence of ancient civilizations. As conquerors came in over the mountains from different directions, they brought with them new religions, practices, and beliefs. Some were erased by those who came after, and others have stuck to this day. Afghanistan, believed by anthropologists to be one of the original historical meeting places between the East and the West, has in fact seen and often tolerated most known religions as well as an influx of believers in such faiths as Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, and Christianity. Even with the advent and dominance of Islam, other religions were still practiced freely by minorities in Kabul up until the 1980s.
But through decades of war and with every wave of refugees, the most educated Afghans have usually been the first ones to leave, and with every shift of villagers into urban areas, more conservative elements have crept into society, bringing with them stricter rules and far-flung tribal customs and rules from isolated provinces.
I finally understand that Zahra’s grandmother is trying to steer me in the same direction as Dr. Fareiba’s gathering of health workers, without saying it out loud. They speak of an entirely different time. The old woman just cannot spell it out to me: Beliefs and practices for producing sons from a time predating Islam are still very much alive in one of the most conservative Muslim countries on earth. It means that the trail of Afghan bacha posh could go much further back than to the Taliban, or even to Zahra’s great-great-grandmother.