Kabul Beauty School (2 page)

FROM THE MOMENT
that I met Roshanna during my first visit to Kabul in the spring of 2002, the first spring after the rout of the Taliban, I puzzled over the sadness in her. Why did I respond so strongly to her sadness when there are millions of sad stories in Kabul? It’s a city that’s dense with sadness. There are so many people who lost loved ones in the twenty-seven years of war in Afghanistan, who have lost homes and livelihoods, who have lost entire towns and families, who have lost every dream they ever had. And there is still the occasional bombing or surprise mine explosion that rips away the happiness people finally think might be theirs. So why did Roshanna stand out amid all that sadness? I think it was her gaiety, her warmth and exuberance, her colorful clothes and bright smile. She was trying so hard to be happy that it hurt me when her sadness showed.

It had taken a few weeks for her to tell me her story. I had noticed that she seemed to light up when a certain young man came into the building where she was a secretary and I was a volunteer with a nonprofit organization. At first, I thought she might be sad because he wasn’t interested in her, but then I thought I saw the same light in his face when he caught sight of her from across the room. I started to tease her about it.

“Got a boyfriend?” I’d whisper, and she’d blush and turn away.

“We don’t marry for love here,” she told me after I had teased her a few times. “I have to marry the man my parents pick.”

I knew that Roshanna and the boy couldn’t admit their feelings or be obvious about them—they couldn’t do a damn thing about them, in fact, because there isn’t any dating in Kabul. But I thought that maybe his mother could talk to her mother and a match could be made that began with love. My mind started to race ahead with the possibilities. Which I mentioned to her one day, but she pulled me into a dark hallway.

“It can’t happen, Debbie,” she said, her eyes glistening in the faint light. “I was engaged once to someone else. This boy’s parents would never let him marry me.”

I slumped against the wall. “Why is it a problem if you were engaged before? Aren’t you allowed to change your mind?”

“You don’t understand,” she insisted. “We signed the
nika-khat
at the engagement party.”

This other, almost-marriage had taken place when the Taliban were still in power. Her family was living the miserable life of refugees in a camp just over the border in Pakistan. Roshanna was then sixteen years old and so bright that she’d actually found opportunities to get ahead in the camp. She learned English and some computer skills, and then found a job as a secretary with an international aid agency. She often had to cross back into Afghanistan—accompanied by her father, of course—to do some work for the agency.

That brought her into dangerous proximity to the Taliban, then at the height of their power. They would often snatch up young unmarried girls without warning and force them into marriage with one of their men. During this period of time, many Afghan families didn’t let their daughters out of the house for fear that the Taliban might see them. Even with these precautions, the Taliban might hear a neighborhood rumor—or get a tip from someone eager to curry favor with them—about a family with a beautiful daughter. They’d break down the family’s door in search of her.

So Roshanna’s family had a dilemma. They needed her income but were afraid she’d be stolen away from them and end up leading a life of bondage to a man they hated. And they hated the Taliban. Like many Afghan families, they had greeted the Taliban with cautious optimism when they first rolled into the city in 1996. Before their arrival, Kabul was being blown to bits by the mujahideen factions who had trounced the Russians, then turned on one another in a bloody fury, fighting for control of the country. Even though Roshanna’s parents weren’t deeply conservative Muslims, they wanted to see their country return to normal, and the Taliban seemed determined to make this happen. But her parents were horrified by the growing savagery that the Taliban used to enforce their kind of order.

To keep Roshanna safe, her parents did what many Afghan families did at this time. They searched frantically for a suitable husband among members of their tribe, hoping to marry her off to a good man before the Taliban found out that she was available. They thought they had succeeded when they heard that there was a single male cousin living in Germany. It was a buyers’ market for grooms in those days. The girls’ families couldn’t afford to dicker over dowries, dresses, and gold rings with the Taliban circling like wolves. So an agreement was quickly reached, with only a very small dowry. Because the families wanted the union to take place as soon as possible, the groom came back to Afghanistan for the engagement party right away. And because the actual wedding would take place in Germany months later, they signed the nika-khat that same night.

The nika-khat is the marriage contract drawn up according to Islamic law. This contract, more than the wedding itself, is what makes a couple legal husband and wife. In ordinary times, the nika-khat is signed well after the engagement party to give the groom’s family time to put together their resources for the dowry, the clothes, the wedding, and so on. Roshanna’s family took the less ordinary step of allowing her to become this man’s legal wife before the wedding by signing the nika-khat at the engagement party. His family had insisted upon it, so that she couldn’t change her mind about marrying him after he went back to Germany. And everyone agreed that it would be easier for her to emigrate there if she was already his legal wife. But within days her new husband left—without a word, without reason, and without her. She was crushed and humiliated, but it only got worse. Two weeks later, she was told that the cousin had divorced her when he got back to Germany.

“It is so easy for a man,” Roshanna told me. “All he has to do is say ‘I divorce you’ three times in front of witnesses. We found out later that he already had either a girlfriend or a first wife in Germany. When he went back there, he decided to defy his parents’ wishes and be with this other woman.”

As Roshanna finished her story, she sobbed, and I held her just as I had once held my children. Even though I hadn’t been in Afghanistan long, I knew that things could hardly be worse for a girl. People don’t dismiss a divorce with a benign label such as “irreconcilable differences” in Afghanistan. If a man divorces you, other people assume there must be something wrong with you. People will whisper that you are lazy or willful or a bad cook or—worst of all—that you were not a virgin. I love the Afghan people, but their true national sport is gossip. As a hairdresser—someone whose professional motto could be “Do tell!” and who takes great pleasure in the whirl of divulged secrets and suppositions that goes on in every salon—I consider myself an expert on the subject. I wondered if the taint of Roshanna’s almost-marriage had made its rounds though the tea shops and neighborhood stores. She confirmed this, telling me that many of the Afghan men she encountered while she worked as a secretary had already made the mental leap from divorcee to whore. They’d take every opportunity to push her into dark corners and grope her in a way that they would never treat “nice” girls. Her father had been imploring her to leave her job because of this; when I mentioned that I might want to come back to Kabul and start a beauty school, she leapt at this opportunity. But on that day back in 2002, my heart sank as I realized that this lovely girl would probably never be chosen as a man’s first wife again. She would likely be considered only as a second or third wife for a much older man. She was sure of this, too; that was why she cried every time we spoke of it.

Or at least that was why I thought she was crying.

Then this engineer’s mother waltzed into her salon two years later, and Roshanna’s fortunes changed dramatically. I was back in America when it happened, but still planning to return to Afghanistan as soon as I could. Roshanna and I had been keeping in touch by e-mail, and all of a sudden, the whole tenor of her messages changed—it was almost as if music played when one of them dropped into my in-box. She had always hoped she’d be able to marry a man from a good family and have children. Now it seemed that she would get this wish. I was happy for her and didn’t even want to ask about the problem with her first engagement. It seemed impossible that the engineer’s family had not heard about it, especially since they were distantly related. Maybe they ran in vastly different circles. Or maybe they were a progressive family who weren’t about to think ill of her because some cad of a cousin had toyed with her briefly, not caring if he ruined her reputation. Maybe they saw past the innuendo to Roshanna herself, as perfect a wife as any man could want. I hoped this was the case.

BEFORE THE ENGAGEMENT PARTY
, there had been yet another party—a sort of seal-the-deal gala to celebrate the end of the families’ negotiations. Roshanna invited me to attend as her honored guest, and I was back in Kabul by that time and eager to share my friend’s big day. The party was held in a large house in one of Kabul’s old neighborhoods. Men and women from both families filed inside, and then the men stayed downstairs and the women went upstairs and into a room heaped with good things to eat. When the mother-in-law arrived, she gave a basket of imported candies to Roshanna’s mother, then kissed Roshanna, her mother, and then me and Roshanna’s sisters three times on the cheeks. The grooms’ sisters and seven of his aunts and girl cousins followed with their kisses. There was so much kissing that my neck started to feel unhinged. Then the mother-in-law hung a gold necklace around Roshanna’s neck. It was huge, like something a wrestler would win at a tournament. Each of the groom’s sisters and aunts placed a gold ring on one of Roshanna’s dainty little fingers, until she had gold all the way up to her fingertips. I could hear laughing from the men’s room downstairs and then clapping. I went to the landing and peered down, but one of the groom’s sisters pulled me back. “They sign the papers now,” she explained. Her father was probably giving Roshanna’s father the fat envelope stuffed with her dowry.

Then the groom’s female relatives started to clap their hands and sing as one of them pounded a small drum. The mother-in-law and one of the groom’s sisters unfolded something that looked like a huge umbrella draped with a soft netting stitched with flowers. They held it high, and the other women from the groom’s family danced over to take up the edges of the netting; then they floated it over Roshanna’s head and circled her, singing still, dancing, keeping step with the beat of the drum. It was as if Roshanna were at the center of a bright, noisy carousel. She stood still as the room turned around her, touching her hands to her hair nervously, her face pale against the moving backdrop of her in-laws’ brightly colored dresses, her lips pinched together. In the back of the room, her mother and sisters held one another. They looked at the dancers sadly.

If I’d known then what I know now, I might not have been alarmed by Roshanna’s forlorn appearance during this ceremony. Afghan brides aren’t really supposed to look happy at these events. Just as her parents turn down the first offer of marriage to show how precious their daughter is—and continue to look sad at all the wedding events—the daughter isn’t supposed to act as if she welcomes the union, either. She’s supposed to show that she’s sad to leave her parents’ home for that of her husband’s family. Her sadness is a sign of respect for her parents. But even now that I know this, I don’t think all the sadness is feigned. After all, the bride is leaving behind the tight embrace of her own family for one that may bring as much pain as pleasure. A mother-in-law sometimes turns into a tyrant after the wedding is over, expecting that her son’s wife will become a sort of unpaid household servant who will sweep the floors, bring in the firewood, and even rub her feet when they ache. Husbands sometimes turn into tyrants, too. Or they turn into distant shadows as they spend all their time working and socializing with other men, returning to the home only for a meal or two. A man’s new wife will serve this meal without any expectation that he will talk or even eat with her.