I NEVER DID see my house. Nor did I see any of the people I had known in Kabul as a child. Once, when Abida, Javid, and I were on our way to some meeting, I saw that we were close to my neighborhood, and I asked the driver to take the main road from which I could see my street. I asked him to go very slowly as we got close to the street.
I pressed my face to the window, the mesh of the burqa obscuring my vision. Many of the buildings in the road had been bombed, and most of the shops that were still left standing had closed. I saw that there were no children playing, no hens or goats, in my street. I could not make out the blue door of my old house.
The driver asked me whether he should stop the car for me to get out. He had guessed. I was tempted, but I said no. I didn’t want to see it now. In any case, I hadn’t asked Grandmother for the keys. Perhaps one day, I thought, if peace returns, I will come back to see my house.
When I said good-bye to Zeba before leaving Kabul, she smiled at me and said, “It’s good that we saw each other, because you may not see me again.”
I tried to laugh, but something stuck in my throat. “Don’t say such things. Of course I will see you again,” I replied.
“Well, it’s true. You should prepare yourself so that if I am arrested, you are ready for it,” she said.
This time, we embraced before I put on the burqa. I knew she was right, and I thought about her and the danger of her work for much of the journey. I felt so sick, so tired, and so sad when we crossed the border back into Pakistan that I did not bother to take off the burqa. I took it off only once I had reached my home.
When I looked at myself in the mirror, I saw something that looked like the mark of a cage in the middle of my forehead. I realized that when I had slept during the last part of the trip, the mesh of the burqa had ridden up over my face and left its imprint on my skin. It was the only mark that my journey to Kabul left on my body, but my heart was wounded.
I RETURNED SEVERAL TIMES to Kabul over the next few years. Increasingly I was struck by the absurdity of life under the Taliban. Once, as I walked in the street, a man started asking me what kind of vegetables he should buy. I thought he was crazy, but then I realized that he had mistaken me for his wife. The burqa I was wearing was the same color as hers, and she had stopped to look at something.
Even something as mundane as eating ice cream became a ridiculous undertaking. Only certain shops agreed to sell ice cream to women, because the owners worried that a Taliban patrol would come and beat them for allowing women to gather together. Friends told me that there were no chairs for them to sit on, and they would have to stand there, lifting the burqas off their faces with one hand and trying to eat the ice cream with their other hand under the cloth. They said they looked like clumsy birds with long beaks. They complained about the Taliban while they tried to eat as fast as they could because the ice cream melted fast and dirtied their burqas. Washing them is never easy because all the creases have to be ironed, and women would often only clean the part in front of the mouth.
On one of my visits to Kabul, the film Titanic was all the rage, so much so that a man’s haircut was called after it. Videocassettes had been smuggled into the city, and boys would go to the barber and ask for the “Titanic cut” inspired by Leonardo DiCaprio. But a Taliban mullah preached against DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, saying they had sinned against Islam by having physical relations before getting married. He decreed that the Titanic had sunk because Allah was angry at the lovers’ behavior. The Taliban thought the iceberg was fitting punishment. But they had more in store for the stars: if Di-Caprio and Winslet ever set foot in their country, they would be stoned to death.
In the meantime, the Taliban decided to punish any boy who had sinned by getting himself a Titanic cut. When they caught an offender in the street, they would whistle to him as if they were calling a dog. Then they would jeer at him. “Hey, handsome boy,” they would say as they pulled roughly at his hair. “What is this hairstyle? We like it so much. Oh, so you want to be an actor in the infidel film?”
Then someone would fetch a pair of scissors and the Taliban would start chopping at the boy’s hair. They would send the boy home, his hair a jagged mess. He was lucky if he got away without a whipping.
But the Taliban disapproval did not stop stallholders at markets in the center of Kabul from shouting “Get your Titanic apples here!” or “Titanic cabbages for sale!” One market that moved for a time during the summer to the bed of the Kabul River, when there was little water in it, called itself the Titanic Bazaar. Nothing the Taliban did could quench the thirst of the people in a country where forced marriages were the rule for a story of undying love.
The absurdity of the Taliban had no limits. When the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke in America, one of the mullahs at a Kabul mosque could not even get her name right in his condemnations of her anti-Islamic behavior. He kept calling her “Monica Whisky.” She had committed a double sin: not only had she behaved impurely with the president of the United States, but her name, that of a forbidden drink, was also a challenge to Islam.
I never told Grandmother about my journeys to Kabul before I set out. I mentioned them only when I got back. When I told her the news after my first journey, her disbelief gave way to anger and then to relief. “You did well not to tell me before you went,” she said. “Otherwise I would never have let you go.”
My doll Mujda was living with Grandmother. She was pretty much the same as ever but a little dirtier, her colors a bit more faded. It was my fault. I was neglecting her.
Sometime after my return, Grandmother gave me a white nightshirt that had belonged to Mother. Grandmother had brought it with her from Kabul, and now she told me she wanted me to have it.
NOT EVEN IN PAKISTAN were we safe from the long reach of the Taliban and their supporters. In April 1998, a year after my first mission to Kabul, a demonstration we staged in 102-degree heat in Peshawar turned violent, through no fault of ours.
Students from a madrassa Islamic school, their bearded faces twisted with hate, suddenly began pouring out of the school clutching sticks and batons and rushed across the street toward us. As we shouted our slogans for women’s rights and against the bombings, the killings, the torture, and the rapes of women committed under the Taliban government in Kabul, the men in white turbans started lashing out at us.
I had never seen any demonstrations in Kabul, either under the Russians or since. I remember that Mother once tried to explain to me what a demonstration was, but I never quite understood what she meant. In classes, Soraya had told us about the many demonstrations in which she had taken part in Pakistan. “Strange, isn’t it?” she said. “There I was, my face hidden so that no one could see my face and recognize me, but shouting slogans against all that the burqa represents.”
For the protest in the town of Peshawar, several hundred RAWA members and supporters, both women and men, had been driven separately to locations close to the street we had chosen for the demonstration. It was in an area where many Afghans lived and worked. Some women had even traveled from Afghanistan to take part. It was only when we all reached the street that we unfurled the banners with the association symbol and our slogans.
“Down with fundamentalism!” the cry went up. “Women’s rights are human rights!” “Long live democracy!”
It wasn’t long before the cries of the protesters toward the front of the march suddenly took on an even more defiant note. I was walking with Saima, at the tail end of the throng of people. I knew something had gone wrong when a senior member came pushing through the crowd, calling to a male supporter.
“There’s a problem at the front,” she yelled at him. “Bring as many men as you can, and get them up here quickly!”
We were always prepared for trouble. Both RAWA members and male supporters had sticks ready in case we were attacked, and RAWA always supplied a few nurses.
I wanted to find out for myself what was happening. Saima and I struggled toward the front.
The students from the madrassa, set loose against us like dogs by their mullah, were kicking and whipping everyone in sight. Several of them were trying to seize the RAWA banner, but the women holding it were big and strong and would not let it go. There was a big tear in the cloth, and the women had cuts on their faces and arms.
Saima and I did what we could to help them. I took many blows and gave several. I saw that the arm of a friend of mine hung from her shoulder at a crazy angle. It was broken, but she continued to fight with her good arm.
I heard Zohreh, another member, call out to me. She was half lying, half sitting on the ground, her hand to her pregnant stomach. Her breath came out in short puffs. I saw that there was blood on her trousers, and thought that her legs had been injured.
We carried Zohreh to a nearby shop and called an ambulance, hoping it would be able to force its way through the crowd. We could not find the RAWA nurses and tried to give her some relief by fanning her with a newspaper and giving her water to drink.
Later, I found out that Zohreh had lost the baby. I learned that before the demonstration, other members had told her not to take part because of her pregnancy, but she had insisted that she must participate, it was important to her.
Not content with killing children and adults, the madrassa students who gave their name to the Taliban were even killing babies before they were born.