The Underground Girls of Kabul (10 page)

One lives “next to the third house where the tree was cut down.” Another is thought to be “on the first floor in the house without windows next to the bazaar.” Or “on the other side of the refugee camp, just up the road, inside the blue gate with barbed wire.” There is one in a certain middle school; another is thought to be in a particular neighborhood. Someone’s daughter has been known to play football on a field, and to help out in her father’s tailoring shop.

In our search, we are often confused and at times completely lost, circling alleys and neighborhoods that always lack street signs for hours. But once we finally come upon the right family and discreetly inquire whether their son may possibly be
a girl
, an invitation for tea is usually extended by the ever-polite and hospitable Afghans, regardless of whether they live in elegant villas or in houses made from tarps and mud. After lengthy introductions, always with some fine diplomacy by Omar or Setareh, often with questions about Sweden and my own family—particularly about my father—and many refills of tea, we are permitted to meet and speak to the family’s made-up son.

Setareh and I soon begin to challenge each other on spotting the
common traits of the girls in disguise. Some are given away by softer features. Or the occasional giggle. Others are show-offs, trying a little too hard with the boyish attitude and displays of aggression. But most often, we recognize the steady, challenging gaze, as though we had a secret in common. It happens that a little boy will give either of us a sly smile, out on the street or in school, only to later, in private or with her parents, confirm that she is indeed a little different from the crowd she moves with.

Although none of the girls chose their boyhood voluntarily, most say they enjoy their borrowed status. It all depends on what they get to
do
with it. For each child, it boils down to perks versus burdens. Those who, like Mehran, are part of upper- or middle-class families, are often their families’ token of prestige and honor, thriving on speaking up at school and playing violent outdoor games in the neighborhood.

Others, in poor families, are broken down by forced child labor, just as the actual boys in the same position often are. “This can be an awful place to be a woman. But it’s not particularly good for a man, either,” Carol le Duc is fond of observing. Among street children in the merchant business, selling chewing gum, polishing shoes, or offering to wash car windows on the streets, some are actual boys, and others are girls in disguise. They are all part of Kabul’s underbelly and, to those who pass them by, mostly just invisible.

I even find that there is a name for those children who are not actually here. The colloquialism for the child who is not a son or a daughter is
bacha posh
. Together with a translator, I settle on that spelling in the Roman alphabet, as there are no existing written references. It literally translates as “dressed like a boy” in Dari. In Pashto, this third kind of child can also be referred to as
alakaana
. That the term exists and is well-known indicates that these children are not unusual. Nor is it a new phenomenon.

At times in our search for the
bacha posh
we get it entirely wrong, approaching the wrong family or arriving at the wrong house in the wrong neighborhood. And at times, we find something quite different from what we were looking for.

T
HERE IS NO
electricity in the house at the compound built for handicapped war veterans near Kabul airport. The sun set several hours ago, and in one of the family’s small, dark rooms, twelve-year-old Esmaeel has been introduced as “the only son” among ten siblings. Esmaeel has dark hair, bushy eyebrows, and even a hint of black hair on his upper lip. There is nothing feminine about him, and I feel both impatient and confused. We may simply have been misinformed about this family.

But it would be rude to leave now that we have been invited in, so we sit for tea while Esmaeel’s mother tells her story. She moves slowly, supporting herself on a homemade crutch wrapped in pieces of cloth. She has only one leg. The other was lost in a bomb explosion in 1985. Her ten children, ranging in age from one to twenty, gather around her on the thin carpet covering the cement floor. The eldest grew up under the Taliban, and like many girls that age she is illiterate. She is far less confident than her younger sisters, who have attended school since 2002 and excitedly speak of becoming doctors or lawyers when they grow up.

But their mother hushes them. All she wants to talk about is Esmaeel. He is the most intelligent of them all, and whatever money the family can spare will go toward his higher education. The girls will have to wait their turn, if there’s anything left. Esmaeel is her “light,” his mother says. “I don’t want to make any difference between my children, but I know that Esmaeel will reach a high position in society.”

Esmaeel came to the family through divine intervention, she explains. When her sixth daughter was born, this desperate mother decided that the child should be presented to the world as a son. She told everyone her new little girl was, in fact, her firstborn son. The made-up baby boy held no practical purpose for the family as an infant. But she held a
magical
one. Her mother had been told by friends and neighbors that if she were to turn her girl into a boy, it would bring her good luck. Good luck, in this case, was a
real
son. The maneuver
had helped many families before her: Through visual manifestation, when a woman looks at the image of a male child every day, her body will eventually conceive a son.

With that, the coin finally drops: Esmaeel is not a girl disguised as a boy—he
is
the family’s only son. Telling her story of giving birth to a son after dressing a daughter as a boy for two years, the mother looks immensely pleased. Her sixth daughter, who had been a
bacha posh
, died shortly after her third birthday, but she had fulfilled a greater purpose.

Trying to grasp this new and additional motif for turning a girl into a boy, I shift my position on the floor. The room goes silent, indicating that we have once again entered the realm where my kind of logic or science is no longer valid.

“Okay. But how can you know this works—”

Esmaeel’s mother cuts me off with a quick gesture toward her son.

“Look at him. You can see it for yourself.”

“O
F COURSE
.” I
T
is one of the most common ways to produce a son, Dr. Fareiba confirms when when I locate her in Kabul later that week. Certainly not as foolproof as her tips and tricks, but an oft-employed method in the villages throughout Afghanistan, where there is no access to Dr. Fareiba’s level of expertise.

She is in fine form on this day, leading a workshop at a run-down guesthouse in the Shar-e-Naw neighborhood for dozens of Afghan medical workers from the country’s far-flung provinces.

High on the agenda is the issue of breast-feeding: A problem has arisen in the provinces where aid organizations have been distributing milk powder. The original recipients of the milk powder, the poorest women, resell it at markets, enabling those of slightly better means to buy it, considering it a sign of wealth not to breast-feed. In an attempt to fix an aid initiative gone wrong, Dr. Fareiba and her colleagues are trying to reverse the trend and talk women into at least trying to breast-feed their newborns for a few months.

Kabul is having an early spring, and the female participants have
retired to a room at the back with two chubby sofas and a plastic fan on the floor pushing the air around. The male health workers eat elsewhere. Dr. Fareiba invites us to join the lunch, where eight female Afghan doctors and midwives from eight different provinces are passing around watermelon slices on glass plates. As I sit down with Setareh, they all want to offer us the best bites. Predictably, the oldest woman gets to serve us, and offers an entire pile. But there is something I want more than watermelon: I wonder if the
bacha posh
are all around Afghanistan, in their provinces too?

After a careful introduction to the topic by Setareh, and some nudging by Dr. Fareiba, the women tell one story after another of newborn girls announced as boys at birth in their villages.

Families can be rich, poor, educated, uneducated, Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazara, or Turkoman—it doesn’t matter, they tell me. The only thing that binds the girls together is their family’s
need
for a son. These women have met girls who live as boys because the family needed another income through a child who worked, because the road to school was dangerous and a boy’s disguise provided some safety, or because the family lacked sons and needed to present as a complete family to the village. Often, as we have seen in Kabul, it is a combination of factors. A poor family may need a son for different reasons than a rich family, but no ethnic or geographical reasons set them apart. They are all Afghans, living in a society that demands sons at almost any cost.

And to most of them, the health workers say, having a
bacha posh
in the family is an accepted and uncontroversial practice, provided the girl is turned back to a woman before she enters puberty, when she must marry and have children of her own. Waiting too long to turn someone back could have consequences for a girl’s reputation. A teenage girl should not be anywhere near teenage boys, even in disguise. She could mistakenly touch them or rather be touched by them, and be seen as a loose and impure girl by those who know her secret. It could ruin her chances of getting married, and she would be seen as a tarnished offering. The entire family’s reputation could be sullied.

So how many
bacha posh
children are there in Afghanistan?

No one knows. They are a minority, but it is “not uncommon” to see them in the villages throughout the country. There are usually one or two in a school. Often one as a helper in a small store. And the health workers have all known them to appear at clinics, escorting a mother or a sister, or as a patient who has proven to be of another birth sex than first presumed. The health workers have all witnessed it and agree that every family with only daughters will consider switching one to a boy. In their view, it is mostly to the girl’s advantage to live a few years as a boy, before the other, hardship life of childrearing of her own begins.

One of the doctors, this one from Helmand, is four months pregnant. She has four sons already. The others joke she is in the clear. She would like a girl this time. Her husband supports her wish. It is the first time I’ve heard someone say they actually want a daughter. The other women congratulate the doctor. They love girls, they say. But they are also women and realists. There is a deep and personal knowledge of the difficulty of bringing another girl into a country such as their own. The future of a daughter here depends on her father. A Wardak midwife lays it out clearly: “It’s only good to have a girl with a good man. With a bad man, you don’t want to have any girls, because they will suffer, like their mother.”

For instance, she says, if a husband abuses his wife, he will most likely abuse the daughters, too. That’s when you, as a woman, pray intensely for all your children to be sons. In her line of work, one of the hardest things to watch is when an abused woman gives birth to another girl. They know the girl will be brought into an abusive home.
Nine out of ten Afghan women will experience domestic abuse in some form, according to surveys from the United Nations and several human rights organizations.

In neighboring countries such as India, where sons are similarly much preferred over daughters, ultrasound machines are among the most sought-after equipment by doctors and patients.
According to Mara Hvistendahl in
Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men
, 160 million female fetuses have already been aborted throughout Asia, skewing the demographic for
generations to come and creating acute problems for societies lacking women. Although both ultrasound screenings and secret late-term abortions are available in Kabul for those who can pay, most rural parts of Afghanistan are not there yet. Women in these areas just have Dr. Fareiba’s low-tech, ancient recipes to depend on, for now, as they hope to avoid bringing too many daughters into this world.

T
O FURTHER THAT
mission, the health workers also each have at least one example of
magical
son making from their home provinces. They confirm that the prevailing reason to create a
bacha posh
might very well be to beget a real son. The young midwife from Wardak in a bright orange scarf says her cousin was dressed as a boy for nine years, until her mother finally gave birth to a son. It often happens that a daughter will remain a boy only until a real son is born; he will then replace the
bacha posh
as their parents’ pride.

This mystical way of ensuring sons has parallels with the new-age concept “power of positive thinking,” used to such great effect by athletes and salesmen.
See it, believe it, and it will happen
. The Afghan version is a form of prayer that doesn’t quite fit into any of the religious practices I am aware of in Afghanistan. It’s just magic, the women explain. But is God still involved, somehow? I inquire, as they refer to a divine intervention.