LIVING AND WORKING in the safe house meant that gradually I became accepted as a member of RAWA. The association did not believe in formal initiation ceremonies, and one day I was simply handed my membership card. Soon afterward, Soraya told us that the Mujahideen warlords had put several members of RAWA on their unofficial death list. Our headquarters in Pakistan received hate mail and threatening phone calls. Several women who said they wanted to become members were turned away because they were suspected of being infiltrators sent by the warlords.
We girls were inexperienced, and we made mistakes. One night soon after we came to the safe house, one of the girls slipped a lizard into a friend’s bed while she was sleeping, and woke her up. The girl jumped out of bed and screamed in fright. Soraya warned us that this kind of prank could put our lives in danger because a neighbor might hear us and become curious about what was going on in the house.
Our house was in a poor district, and the neighbors were more friendly and inquisitive than those in the smarter areas of the town. Soon after we moved in, an ugly old woman came to see us. It would have been very rude to leave her out in the street, so I had to invite her in. She started firing questions at us, asking why we were all in the house. I told her we were sisters.
The old woman had a sharp eye. “But you don’t look very much alike,” she said. She was right. We were all from different tribes and it showed.
“But then again,” she continued, “I can see that yes, you do look alike.”
She wanted to know more. “Where are your parents? Surely you are not living here all on your own?”
I launched into a complicated story. Our parents were divorced, our father had gone to live in America, and our mother had sent us here to live with a brother. The old woman tut-tutted in disapproval, then left at last.
We had a more serious incident with a police patrol that was called to our house a few weeks later—perhaps by the ugly old woman—when more than a dozen of us had gathered there to record some songs for RAWA to distribute to supporters. Perhaps whoever had alerted the police was surprised to see such a large group of girls talking and laughing on the terrace after the recording. They must have been surprised that there were no older men or women to be seen, and they were certainly shocked to see young men arriving at the house (they played the musical instruments to accompany us) and then staying into the night. This didn’t shock RAWA—we were treated as responsible adults, and the only rule was that men and women were expected to sleep in separate rooms if at all possible.
The laughter was inevitable. I think that Afghan people, when they are having fun together, laugh more than any other people in the world. By the time the three police officers arrived, armed and in their dirty gray uniforms, it was midnight and we had gone to sleep on the carpet. We had no choice but to let the officers in, and they started picking their way among the blankets, lifting them up and mumbling in surprise when they found girl after girl, and then a few young men.
We told them that they were all relatives of ours who had come from Afghanistan to visit us, but it was clear that the officers thought we were prostitutes. They threatened to take us all to court. In the end we had to call in some older members of RAWA, who testified that they were our mothers, and we settled the question by paying a steep bribe to the officers.
The police were corrupt, and it was often necessary to pay them to leave us alone. Small problems usually cost us fifty rupees—what the police liked to call “tea money.” But the police were always trying to find RAWA’s safe houses and to identify the association’s members. If they had realized what they’d stumbled across, they would have arrested our male supporters and questioned them without a moment’s rest until they found out all they knew. We girls could also have been dragged to prison, which was not safe for young women.
Sometimes I made stupid mistakes that could have cost my friends a great deal. I would forget to arrange for a bodyguard to take a RAWA member to a meeting, and she would be forced to take a risk and get to it on her own. In Quetta it was dangerous even to keep a member waiting in the street for any length of time because the town was not safe. I always apologized, and I was never punished for such mistakes.
But what made Soraya really angry—the angriest I ever saw her—was some pieces of nan (unleavened baked bread) that we had thrown away. We liked to eat our bread fresh and warm from the shop, and every day we would throw away the bits left over from the previous day, stuffing them into a plastic bag that lay in the dirt outside the kitchen door.
When she caught sight of the contents of the bag, she called us all to her. She was literally red with anger, but she did not raise her voice. “Look at this. You should be ashamed,” she said. “People are dying all around you because they have no bread to eat, and here you are behaving as if you were the daughters of kings. This is an insult to the poor, quite apart from the fact that you are wasting two rupees on fresh bread when you should save everything you have to buy the vitamins and proteins that you need at your age.
“Do you have any idea where the money you are spending comes from?” she continued. “It does not fall from the sky as you seem to believe. It comes from the sweat of our members, from the generosity of our supporters all over the world, who have no idea that you are wasting it.”
We all felt ashamed. For the next three days, Soraya forbade us to buy fresh bread. We felt even more ashamed when she sat before us at mealtimes and ate the pieces of stale bread she had made us serve with the other food. We had to follow her example. We struggled to scrape the gray mold off the pieces of bread and to make them less foul by soaking them in water, warming them on the gas fire, and washing them down with tea.
I can still taste that old, moldy bread in my mouth.
I LEARNED TO CHECK whether I was being followed, to know all the streets around my home, to take long detours when I was going to a safe house, never entering if I had any suspicion that someone was behind me, and to look for a possible escape route every time I entered a new building. We knew our phones were tapped and never dared speak freely.
One afternoon, when a male driver was taking me home from a hotel where I had met a foreign journalist to give an interview, I noticed that a car was following us. I guessed it was the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service, which like the police had the job of monitoring our activities, trying to identify us and locate RAWA’s safe houses and offices. The ISI spies had spotted me meeting the journalist in the hotel and probably knew that I was from RAWA.
I asked my driver to stop. The spies pulled up, not very discreetly, a short distance behind us.
I got out of the car and walked up to them. “What can I do for you?” I asked through the open window. The two men stared at me, too surprised to say anything.
“As you no doubt know, I am from RAWA. We have a telephone number, and you can call us if you’d like to meet us. I am not going anywhere interesting, I’m only going to the market. You’re not going to find a safe house or any other of our members by following me now. So may I suggest you stop following me?”
I pushed my membership card, which carried a false name, under their noses, but they ignored it and just smiled sheepishly at each other. One of them finally spoke. “Why do you hide your offices and why do you use false names?” he asked me.
“Because Meena, our founder, was murdered here in Pakistan, and because the Pakistani government supports the Afghan fundamentalists,” I replied.
They admitted they were from the intelligence service, and drove off.
I WAS GIVEN more tasks to do. With some other members, I was sent to the main bazaar on a busy Friday to distribute our magazine, Women’s Message. I was watched over by a male supporter in case I was spotted and challenged by the police or the Afghan fundamentalists. Wearing a veil, I crisscrossed the dark alleyways, looking out for Afghans, whose complexions were paler than those of Pakistanis. The sight of Afghan faces in the bazaars always made me feel homesick.
I came across a man who sat in the dirt with a small pile of onions in front of him, and we started talking. He told me that he was from Kabul, that he was an engineer by training but had lost everything. He told me he wanted to buy the magazine, that he wanted to read it aloud to his children. But he did not have even twenty rupees to pay for it.
“Could you wait until I sell some onions?” he asked me. I gave it to him for free.
IN SEPTEMBER 1996, the men who claimed to profess religious purity took over my city. After marching north from Kandahar, the first city they had conquered, where Mullah Omar dared to drape himself in the Cloak of the Prophet in front of his followers, the Taliban won control of Kabul—but not before first firing shells and rockets at the capital, just the way the Mujahideen had done.
The Taliban’s first act in Kabul was to drag Mohammed Najibullah, the ex-president and the former head of the KHAD secret service, from a supposedly safe United Nations compound, in the dead of night, to the presidential palace. There Najibullah was castrated, then shot dead. The Taliban hung him up for display in the Ariana square with a noose made of steel, the wire cutting into his bloated flesh. His brother suffered the same fate. The Taliban stuffed banknotes into the mouths and noses of the hanged men and attached more notes to their toes, as a symbol of humiliation.
Day after day the Taliban published decrees that spawned the harshest theocratic state in the world. Women were ordered to wear the burqa outside their homes. They were banned from appearing on the balconies of their houses. They could go outside only if they were accompanied at all times by a mahram, a close relative. They were banned from working. At certain times during the Ramadan month of fasting, they were simply not allowed on the streets.
Women who were sick could only be treated by women doctors. Girls could not go to school—according to the Taliban, schools were a gateway to Hell, the first step on the road to prostitution. Women were not allowed to laugh, or even to speak loudly, because this risked sexually exciting males. High heels were banned because their sound was also declared provocative. Makeup and nail varnish were banned. Women who failed to respect such edicts would be beaten, whipped, or stoned to death.
The hammams were closed. Men were ordered to grow their beards. Music and television were banned, and so were games, including kite flying. What could be more innocent, I asked myself, than a child playing with a kite?
All this, I thought, was the work of a bunch of criminals who didn’t even know how to write their own names.
Soon we learned that the Taliban had put all members of RAWA on a death list. I read articles in the newspaper in which the Taliban leaders called us infidels, CIA spies, prostitutes who wanted to go out in the streets and sleep with men. Whenever they found a RAWA member, the leaders swore, they would execute her immediately without trial because we must all be wiped off the face of the earth. Even if it took all the Moslems of Afghanistan to do it, they would hunt us down to the very last member and eliminate us. The blacklist that we knew existed against us under the Mujahideen warlords had become official under the Taliban.
We knew we could not count on any protection from the Pakistani authorities. Benazir Bhutto, the prime minister, greeted the Taliban conquest of Kabul with the statement that if the Taliban managed to unite Afghanistan, it would be a welcome development.
THE WORSE the situation became in Afghanistan, the more the work of RAWA became vital to my existence. It was the most important part of my life, more than anything or anyone else—more important, even, than Grandmother.
I admired the self-sacrifice that Mariam, a friend of mine, made on the day of her marriage in Islamabad. She came straight back from work in her office clothes, got married, and then sat down with us, and her new mother-in-law, for an ordinary meal of chicken and rice. She had barely started eating when the telephone rang: it was RAWA, asking her to leave immediately and travel to another town, three hours away.
Without hesitating, Mariam said good-bye to her husband, told him she would be back in two days, and left. He did not complain, and Mariam’s mother-in-law remained silent, but her expression was frosty. Soon after we sat down again to continue the meal, she began to vent her frustration on us.
“Strange, isn’t it,” she asked with a cold smile, “that a bride should leave her husband on the evening of the wedding? I think RAWA has some very special traditions that you cannot find anywhere else in the world, in the East or in the West. These traditions are so amazing that I have no idea what philosophy they come from.”
I exchanged glances with my RAWA friends. I could see from their eyes that, like me, they wanted to laugh, but we all struggled to keep silent.
A few mouthfuls later, the mother-in-law spoke again. “This evening may not matter very much to you, but it is very important to me,” she said.
Again we exchanged glances. Again we kept quiet.
But she was determined to provoke a reaction from us. “It is very good to belong to this organization, but I never thought political commitment meant that a bride could leave her husband on the evening of her wedding without even asking him for permission.”
I could stay silent no longer. “You should not say these things,” I said. “We have only respect for you, but Mariam has a job to do. She did not leave to go and enjoy herself. Instead of criticizing her, you should be proud of her.”
In defending Mariam, I felt I was defending myself, because I hoped that I would have acted in exactly the same way. In fact, I have never had a private life, and I have no regrets about this. I do not see anything beautiful in me that a man could look at in a special way. I have never dreamed of a man looking at me, nor have I fallen in love. Nor do I feel sad that I have never known physical pleasure with a man. It has never been important to me, and I have not had the time to think about it.
Only if one day there is peace in my country, and a democracy in which men respect women, can I think of marriage. It is very important to me that the man I share my life with respects me and what I do. In that, Father is a model for me, because he respected Mother and her work.