Making Soapies in Kabul

by Trudi-Ann Tierney

  From then on, the two of them would stroll into stores separately and then, using some weird facial tic and a roll of her eyes, Muffy would indicate to Aleem what she wanted to buy. She’d then saunter out again, with Aleem finishing off the transaction in order to secure us a reasonable price.

  Corruption was also a major workplace problem that management had worked hard to tackle. A few years ago the banker on one of our game shows arranged for his best friend to be a contestant and the guy rather fortuitously won the grand prize. My Australian producer mate, Rick, was mentoring on the project and he quickly uncovered the feeble deception. The contestant never got his money, the program never went to air and, lacking any solid evidence that the ‘win’ was actually a scam, the employee kept his job but was severely reprimanded. Rick was truly shocked by the outrageous brazenness of it all.

  Nepotism had also been an issue. Over time, a whole host of cousins, brothers and in-laws had managed to gain positions in the company due to their family connections.

  A few years back, when we’d interviewed for two new writers, I oversaw the process, but I let Hamid make the final decision. It was only six months later that I learnt that one of the writers he’d hired was, in fact, his brother. He was a gifted young scribe and nobody else in the team had a problem with it—it was just another cultural norm that I had to struggle to get my head around.

  However, the latest HR policy decreed that siblings were no longer allowed to work in the same department. In the past, logistics officers had been caught trying to hand out lucrative contracts to unworthy relatives, and employees had been investigated for doing jobs on the side using company equipment.

  But still, I struggled to believe that Aleem—the kid who had been with me from the start, the boy who called me ‘Mum’—could be capable of such deceit.

  Christof initially presented me with scant evidence to back his claim—it seemed entirely based on some unnamed colleagues accusing Aleem of the theft. And he couldn’t seem to explain to me why the production manager on Salam 2, Najim, who was actually the person on the shoot accountable to Finance (and who coincidentally was related to one of our senior managers), was not being investigated as well. Aleem was not at all well connected, but he had worked incredibly hard to distinguish himself, moving rapidly through the ranks. I suspected that there could be a bit of jealousy and resentment at play.

  Christof finished off our meeting by assuring me that Muffy and I would be kept in the clear. I honestly had no idea what he was on about so he had to explain to me that, because Muffy and I had done the final sign-off on all the finances, the company and the police would be entitled to pursue us as well.

  Yeah, right. I was quietly confident that the command at the mother ship would merely scoff at any suggestion that I was ripping off the company. Certainly, if management did inexplicably decide to pursue me, they’d be doing it along the runway of Kabul Airport as I hightailed it out of town on the first available flight.

  For the past six months, Aleem had been working on a crime re-enactment series with Tahir, a talented Canadian–Afghan director. So I met with Tahir soon after these allegations surfaced to get his take on the whole thing. He was adamant that Aleem was innocent but added that, regardless of the final outcome, Aleem’s name had now been blackened and the shame over the incident would be something he would never live down.

  When I finally got to speak to Aleem about it, he simply screwed up his face in disgust. ‘Mum, you know that I’m a good and honest boy.’ He then went on to describe his fantasy of revenge on Christof—a chilling scenario that saw our general manager being arrested by a police chief Aleem knew and thrown into jail. It seemed my ‘good and honest boy’ could be a vengeful one too.

  On the next Wednesday afternoon, in order to ease our doubts about the lack of due process and transparency around the matter, Christof called Muffy and me into his office and presented us with some irregularity over the payment of a driver that he had uncovered, to which he added assurances that he had finance searching for more.

  Muffy had been subjected to a similar style witch-hunt over Eagle Four, so we both knew that finance sometimes could and did get it wrong, but we ended the meeting in tears. Our distress had nothing to do with us doubting Aleem, but we now realised that Christof wasn’t going to let this go. He honestly believed that he was on to something, the recent crackdown on corruption and workplace theft no doubt fuelling his crusade. And as Muffy and I sniffled outside his office and calmed ourselves with nicotine, we both agreed that the best thing would be for Aleem to leave.

  I was truly heartbroken, but managed to find him a position with another production company that same day. The company’s CEO was an Aussie mate, Peter, who used to work for Moby.

  ‘Well, what do you make of it all?’ he asked me.

  ‘I honestly don’t know. It all seems so strange. That shoot wrapped almost a year ago; HR here knows nothing about the investigation, so I doubt Dubai does either. Right now, I just want him to go on his own terms while he still can.’

  Peter, who was busy tackling corruption and nepotism in his own organisation, seemed unfazed by the whole affair. ‘Sure. I really like Aleem. He’s a great worker. Happy to take him on.’

  And so, the next morning, Tahir and I convinced our dear young friend to resign. He was initially determined to fight it out, but in the end, he angrily conceded that he’d had enough. He emailed his resignation to Christof and HR later that day:

  I don’t have anyone in this company to back me up and don’t have any groups I belong to. I only have the work as my friend. This is why I think it was easy to blame me for corruption in the company.

  I feel that I am not guilty of anything. I feel tired of all this and now am leaving the company.

  I want to say thank you for all the years of work. I learned many things. It was like a big school. It has made me proud to work here.

  And so it was, at sunrise on a cold February morning, as my bed buddies and I floated off into a Valium-induced sleep, I had a sudden little cry about losing my favourite boy. Hamish wrapped his arms around my waist and comforted me. ‘Sweetheart, you did everything you could for him. You even found him another job. Hey, you’re not going to be around forever to look out for him . . . for any of them. Trust me, he’ll make it on his own.’

  We were still all asleep when a mobile phone started ringing from somewhere in the bed. Bruce groped under the sheets for it and, after looking at the screen, let out an almighty ‘Fuck!’ It was his private security detail—he operated under a strict curfew, which he had broken by a good twelve hours.

  There was a bit of chatter down the other end of the line and we listened as Bruce told the caller that he was in his room. The man calmly informed him that he was, in fact, standing in Bruce’s room and that he was nowhere to be seen. The caller demanded to know where Bruce was so they could pick him up.

  Aleem was momentarily forgotten as we waited for Bruce’s ride. He was agonising over whether or not he would be placed in lockdown for the remainder of his stay. ‘I just wanted to get laid!’ he moaned. Which, sadly, hadn’t happened.

  Unfortunately, in his fragile state Bruce repeated this phrase to the PSD dudes who picked him up; it featured in the official security report that was subsequently written up about his night on the town.

  When he called that night to tell me this, I laughed—the biggest and best belly-laugh I’d had all week. It almost felt improper considering the sadness I was still carrying over Aleem. But that was how we learnt to roll; our ups and downs were often spaced so closely that we barely felt the shift, and Bruce’s shameful predicament was just what I needed to pull me out of my funk. Besides, Hamish was right. My cherished Aleem would indeed survive, while poor old Bruce had to wait two more days to learn his fate.

  Nilu was leaving soon. The excited, hopeful woman who first returned to Afghanistan a decade ago was planning to exit her homeland, disillusioned, exhausted and angry. My spirited
friend, who had talked to me on the Mazar bus ride two years ago about her dreams for rebuilding a glorious new Afghanistan, had given up the fight.

  It had been a long time coming, even if she didn’t realise it herself. As an Afghan–American woman, she had seen a side to this country that I had never really been exposed to.

  Quite early on, Sue told me that western chicks are like purple caterpillars—so strange and foreign to the Afghan men that they don’t even try to understand us. An Irish mate in security, who had been in Afghanistan for seven years, put it more bluntly. ‘You’re all wanton infidels. You’re going to hell anyway, so they don’t really give a fuck what you do.’

  But as a Muslim woman, Nilu had needed protecting. When she was still working with our company, certain drivers would lecture her on the clothes she wore or the way she spoke. There were a couple of security guards who would gossip about her if she went to a bar or a night club or met a man for dinner. She was one of theirs and they felt that they had every right to try and keep her on the straight and narrow.

  I remembered one day about a year before, shortly before she left to work for a rival TV network, when she arrived at the office shaken and distressed. On the drive in, she had seen a woman in a burqa trip over and drop her tiny baby on the footpath as she fell. Men all around her just watched it happen, and not one of them tried to help the distraught young mother or check on her child. Nilu screamed for the driver to stop but, with the traffic in Kabul moving for a change, there was no opportunity for him to pull over.

  As she looked back through the rear window, watching the woman kneeling on the footpath consoling her crying child, Nilu demanded to know why none of the men had bothered to assist. The driver explained that it was against Islam for a man to touch a woman who wasn’t his wife, mother or daughter (this was delivered as a lecture, the implication being that she should have known better).

  Nilu ranted and raged at him for the remainder of the trip. She arrived at work sick at heart. Through tears she told me that she was just so tired of Afghans who used Islam to justify bigotry, a lack of humanity and hate.

  I, too, had moments of despair, but the stakes weren’t as high for me. I was just a purple caterpillar watching sadly from the sidelines. I still had hope that this country could right itself. There were progressive men trying to lead the way, but I believed, and still believe, that the future of Afghanistan lies in its women.

  It floored me that, during my three years as a ‘propaganda merchant’, female empowerment had never been a primary concern for our clients. At times, and after prompting, it had sometimes been included as secondary messaging—behind counter-narcotics, anti-insurgency and transition. At a meeting with one of our clients late in 2011, where my new female head writer, Alka, and I outlined storylines for the upcoming season of one of our shows, we were quite bluntly told by an American major that they weren’t really interested in women’s rights. Then he asked us to cut back a bit on ‘the ladies stuff’.

  But I just had to look around my company, at all the amazing young women fighting for change, to know that they were the way forward. The next day a group of women were heading to India. Shakila had had a short film, which she wrote, produced and directed, accepted into an international film festival there and they were all going for the screening. They had been planning the trip for weeks—all five of the women were fortunate to come from liberal families, who were happy to allow their single young daughters to travel alone outside their homeland.

  Young girls like these demonstrated on the streets against public harassment, and had founded organisations for women’s rights. They took on the boys in the office with terrifying boldness and had inevitably been labelled as lesbians for their refusal to marry the first cousin who came along.

  Unfortunately they were in the minority, as unique and strange to most Afghans as purple caterpillars. In Kabul, there are still women forbidden to leave their homes unless decked out in the blue burqa and escorted by a male relative. Shakila had turned up at work just the previous week feeling frustrated and angry over an incident that happened on her way to the office. An outraged woman in a burqa stopped her as she made her way along a road she travelled every morning.

  ‘She was yelling at me. You know what she say to me, Trudi? She say I shame all the women living in her street because I dress like . . . oh . . . you know the woman who has sex and gets money?’

  ‘A prostitute?’

  ‘Yes! That woman! She say I dress like a prostitute! You look at me, Trudi Jan. Do I dress like this woman?’

  Shakila was an eclectic dresser—Muffy and I dubbed her the Carrie Bradshaw of Kabul—but still, she was covered from head to toe, and only her hands and face were visible.

  ‘No, darling! You look decent and gorgeous. Was she old?’

  ‘Yes! Very old! She was, I think, thirty.’

  I smiled at this, despite feeling incredibly saddened by the knowledge that this beautiful young woman had been so cruelly attacked by one of her own.

  In the provinces there are thirteen-year-old girls being married off to old men to settle debts; there are fathers who would never contemplate the notion of their female children attending school. A recent case—of a man who, together with his mother and sister, imprisoned and systematically tortured his fifteen-year-old wife for being disobedient—had even President Karzai speaking out.

  In the eyes of many Afghans, being an actress is akin to being a sex-worker. Our actresses were often shunned by family members and harassed on the streets. The lead actress on Secrets of this House had recently fled to India because her uncle was threatening to kill her. And even when the actresses had initially enjoyed the support of their families, some seemingly innocuous storyline could turn all that on its head.

  One of our actresses, Sahar, spent Season Four of Secrets embroiled in some of the most progressive, controversial narratives my female-heavy team had ever written. Her character, Laily, had fought against her parents’ wish that she marry a drug-addicted cousin she had been promised to at birth; with the support of her brother, she took the matter to a council of tribal elders, who decided in her favour.

  After that, Laily was sexually harassed by a university lecturer; when she reported this to his superiors and the police, she managed to get him fired from his job and arrested. Because she’d had a tough year, we decided that Laily should finish the season on a celebratory note—our storyline provided for her engagement to Manochehr, the man she truly loved.

  When one of our producers outlined this scenario to Sahar on set, the very next day she arrived at our office with her mother, claiming that she could no longer appear on the program. Apparently her family felt that if she was to become engaged on television, it might spoil her chances of finding a husband in real life.

  It seemed crazy, considering all the contentious issues Sahar had so bravely tackled on screen during the course of the year, but I simply explained through Merzad that her decision would place us in a very difficult position. We had been working towards this engagement for months—surely she had noticed the blossoming romance between Laily and Manochehr?—and scripts had already been written (and approved by the client!) for their betrothal. But mother and daughter were immoveable—if we insisted on keeping the engagement in, Sahar would be quitting the show.

  After they left, I hastily convened a meeting with Merzad and Hamid. With all the build-up it was implausible that Laily would reject Manochehr’s proposal and, besides, the engagement party was meant to be our season finale. We ultimately decided to write her out of the show—her jilted cousin would run her down and kill her for shaming him, and the party would be replaced by her funeral.

  I instructed Merzad to call Sahar and her mother back into the office so we could explain the difficult decision to axe her from the show. But both he and Hamid were adamant that we shouldn’t reveal our plans to her. I argued that it was only fair to give her proper notice—that she needed time to start looking for another
gig.

  But Merzad just shook his head. ‘Trudi Jan, this would be the wrong thing to do. You know, if she finds out that we are sacking her, she will just stop turning up for work.’

  ‘Surely not!’

  ‘Yes, Trudi Jan. This is exactly what she will do, I’m telling you the truth.’

  Hamid nodded in agreement.

  Against all my instincts, we kept Sahar’s on-screen death from her. We actually filmed out of sequence the scenes where she got hit by the car and lay unconscious in hospital the following week, just in case she got wind of the fact that Laily was never going to wake up from her coma.

  When, at the end of the run, Merzad told Sahar that she wouldn’t be needed for the following season, she simply shrugged her shoulders and told him that she’d prefer to work in a bank anyway.

  There were a number of occasions where I had to step in and fill the gaps when actresses failed to turn up for filming. My first appearance in an Afghan television show was on Salam. It also marked the first time that I’d seen our Pakistani actresses really laugh. Unfortunately it was a funeral scene, but the sight of me—wrapped in a headscarf, my back to camera, wailing and keening and howling with grief—made them all giggle uncontrollably. I ended up laughing too, but at least my mirth-induced convulsions, filmed from behind, could easily be interpreted as anguish.

  My second appearance came in Eagle Four. An actress didn’t show and I was enlisted to play the wife of a criminal and the mother of Roya, an extremely energetic, talkative six-year-old. In the scene, a police team bursts into our home to arrest my husband, and my daughter and I cower in the corner before being hurried out by one of the arresting officers. To mask the fact that I was clearly a fair-skinned, middle-aged, blonde woman, I had to wear a burqa.