It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War (13 page)

Yes.

“Do you love him a lot?”

Yes.

“He will cheat on you one day.” And he walked away.

I didn’t believe him. I was still naïve then. Someday I would know what Gilles meant: that in this profession relationships ended in either infidelity or estrangement. A dual life was unsustainable.

 • • • 

E
VERY JOURNALIST
at the Serena wanted to be the first to get the news of the final fall of the Taliban in Kandahar. The competition put an extraordinary amount of pressure on all of us to take risks, and it was important to be cautious, to avoid running into heavily armed Taliban fighters as they fled or getting blown away by American air strikes that might mistake us for those Taliban fighters.

Our interpreters and drivers, who had sources inside Kandahar, kept us updated on the progress of the fighting; some journalists got intel from Washington. The camaraderie at the Serena disappeared. Photographers who had been sharing the next day’s itinerary became cagey and private. Everyone thought he had some exclusive details that would get him to Kandahar first.

One night the Pakistani government locked the front gates of the hotel to keep the journalists from leaving for Afghanistan. In order to ensure we wouldn’t get locked inside the hotel, a group of us from the
New York Times
sneaked over the fence and into cars awaiting us outside and drove toward a house belonging to one of our fixers inside Pakistan, but closer to the Afghan border. After what seemed like fifty phone calls to the
Times
’s New York and Washington bureaus, and the Pentagon, we made the decision to drive to Afghanistan.

Our mini convoy of cars passed through the same endless brown flatness I knew from my previous trips. I shared a car with another female photographer, Ruth Fremson, and two male correspondents, but most of the ride was silent with the anxiety of the unknown. We didn’t see any Afghans, any U.S. military. None of us knew whether the Taliban had fled or remained in the city. We hoped we would arrive in a liberated city, but it was hard to tell what had taken place: Afghanistan looks bombed out even when it hasn’t been bombed.

Inside Kandahar it was anarchy. Teenage boys walked through unpaved streets with rocket launchers and Kalashnikovs hanging from their necks like giant rock candy. The men—anti-Taliban or former Talibs who had switched sides—wore stacked turbans, dark kohl around their eyes, and Kalashnikovs and necklaces of ammunition strung around their necks and backs. Everyone strutted around aimlessly, milling around boxy, low-hanging storefronts with dirty awnings flapping out front. I was familiar with Afghanistan—how it looked both biblical and lifeless—but somehow the destruction and the armed men all seemed more ominous now.

The
New York Times
crew found several floors’ worth of rooms in a shady hotel above a bakery that dutifully churned out fresh bread several times a day. In war zones most journalists lived like nomads on a college campus: We shared rooms, meals, satellite phones, cables—anything and everything—and often moved around if a better room in a better location opened up. I had been sharing a room with Ruth, also on assignment for the
Times
, and I was grateful to have her as a role model: She was wise but not patronizing, started working before dawn and finished long past dusk. Every night she helped me file my pictures to New York on the satellite phone she set up in our room. Besides one other journalist who was staying at the same guesthouse, I don’t remember any other women in Kandahar at all.

The
Times
Magazine
correspondent I had been paired with decided to profile Gul Agha Shirzai, an anti-Taliban warlord helping the Americans, who had appointed himself the new governor of Kandahar. But he, too, had killed a lot of people in his time. I assumed that the writer and I would work as a team and that the writer would help secure access for me, because writers generally want to have good pictures for their story.

On the first morning we were slated to go out together, I bounded up to him with a huge smile. “Hi!”

The fall of the Taliban in Kandahar, December 2001. Afghan men sit around outside self-appointed governor Gul Agha’s mansion.

Gul Agha after
iftar
dinner with supporters.

Young Afghans listen to music publicly for the first time since the fall of the Taliban.

“I think that, as a woman, you are going to ruin our access,” he said, “so it’s probably best if we do this story separately.” And he walked away. I was dumbfounded.

My survival instinct kicked in. I asked one of the interpreters from the
Times
team to help me get into Gul Agha’s mansion. He smiled. He knew the new governor well.

I was soon seated beside the burly Gul Agha and sharing
iftar
—the evening meal breaking the day’s fast during Ramadan—with a bunch of male villagers who had definitively never shared a meal with a woman outside of their family. The whole mansion was carpeted and without furniture, and rows and rows of men from surrounding areas had come to break their fast with their new leader. They looked as if they had walked out of the tenth century, cloaked in turbans and capes, their kohl-laden eyes fixed on me as they ate. I stayed close to Gul Agha, unsure of my boundaries. He encouraged me to take pictures. I lifted my camera tentatively at first and photographed the sprawling table laid out on the tattered carpet as the men feasted.

When the correspondent entered, I was still seated beside the governor. He gave me a faint nod, and I felt triumphant. His presence also emboldened me to move around the room, to photograph Gul Agha surrounded by villagers in various states of postprandial repose. The photographs were intimate, a new window into the lives of the conquering warlords who declared themselves in charge and whom the Americans would eventually prop up. My editor was pleased with the candor of the images, knowing I was working under difficult conditions.

Several days later, as the city celebrated, dozens of men and boys gathered around speakers screaming Bollywood tunes that had been banned under the Taliban. It was Christmas, and I told my editors I wouldn’t be able to stay on. It was time to go home to Uxval, my other life.

 • • • 

U
XVAL PLANNED OUR
C
HRISTMAS VACATION
in a beach village on the Oaxacan coast. Within seventy-two hours of leaving Afghanistan, where I had been swaddled in scarves and couldn’t look men in the eye, I was wearing a bikini and kissing Uxval on the beach. After three weeks surrounded by thousands of refugees living in squalor in Pakistan and Afghanistan, I struggled to acclimate to the vapid world of partying Mexicans and Americans who smoked pot and drank beer all day and all night. Uxval had signed us up for surfing lessons. I was exhausted and weak from giardia, a nasty stomach ailment caused by unhygienic foods and water most probably tainted with feces, which caused constant diarrhea, burps of sulfur, weight loss, and days and nights of little sleep. But I had to step up and be a real girlfriend—an exciting, attentive, normal girlfriend—to make up for the weeks away.

I couldn’t do it. I was unable to switch off my brain. I admired the lithe, smiling women, surfing effortlessly. They seemed so happy. At night I drank a few glasses of wine, and by eleven I went home to sleep. Uxval stayed out partying until dawn. I couldn’t muster up the strength or desire to go out with people with whom I had little in common. By then most of my friends were photographers and journalists who shared my obsession with international politics, world events, and breaking news.

We started fighting. I was jealous of the women flitting around him. He was jealous of my job. We established a pattern of incredible romantic highs and tormented lows, where I saw an insecure side in myself I hadn’t even known existed. I knew I could never be the woman he needed. I feared this would be true for every man. My work would always come before everything else, because that was the
nature
of the work: When news broke, I had to go, and I wanted to. I knew that if I wasn’t there when the story broke, another photographer would be.

My friends and family sometimes asked why photographers didn’t just take fewer assignments to preserve their marriages or relationships, why they didn’t simply become a different type of photographer, one who worked in some sunny studio adjacent to her home. The truth was, the difference between a studio photographer and a photojournalist was the same as the difference between a political cartoonist and an abstract painter; the only thing the two had in common was the blank page. The jobs entailed different talents and different desires. Leaving at the last minute, jumping on planes, feeling a responsibility to cover wars and famines and human rights crises
was my job.
Not doing those things was the same as a surgeon ducking out of an emergency operation or a waitress refusing to bring a customer’s plates to the table. But I didn’t have a boss who would glare at my inadequacies—who would fire me when the patient died or the customer complained. Neglecting any aspect of my job was like firing myself.

Even so, I always rushed home from trips to post-9/11 Afghanistan to keep Uxval happy. I shuttled from a Kabul mental hospital, where I saw naked women wandering through the garden and other women chained to the walls, to twenty-mile mountain-biking trips in Mexico, where we cooled ourselves in glittering streams. I tried to keep up, to love what he loved, to be the complete woman.

One night there was to be a meteor shower, and Uxval suggested we climb Iztaccíhuatl, a mountain outside Mexico City, to watch the stars fall out of the sky. The last thing on earth I wanted to do when I wasn’t in Afghanistan, where I was climbing mountains for professional reasons, was to climb a mountain for fun, but of course I agreed. He excitedly packed the tent, our gear, and a stove and was ready in an hour. We set out around noon and climbed twelve thousand feet. I could barely lift my legs. My temples ached. I had altitude sickness.

We stopped and set up our tent. Images from Peshawar, Quetta, and Kandahar flashed through my mind. All I wanted was to go back to South Asia on assignment for the
Times
. Around 1 a.m., Uxval roused me from a deep sleep and pulled me out of the tent into a bitter cold night. He held me in his arms, as the stars poured out of the weeping sky. I lived in that beautiful moment, not wanting to be anywhere else. But a few minutes later I was cold. My mind slipped back to the mountains of Afghanistan as we fell asleep.

 • • • 

I
N THE FALL OF 2002,
two months before my twenty-ninth birthday, on a Saturday morning in Mexico City, I sat down at my laptop. Yahoo! Mail was on the screen. There were dozens of messages from a woman named Cecilia with a similar subject line from the top to the bottom of the page:
te quiero, te quiero, te quiero
, the occasional
te extraño
(I miss you).
I stared at the screen in disbelief.
These proclamations of love were not for me. Uxval had inadvertently left his e-mail open on my laptop. The e-mails were to him from another woman. He was cheating on me.