Kabul Beauty School

by Deborah Rodriguez

  I still wonder if that videotape will show up on Aljazeera television someday, as evidence that American hairdressers are torturing Afghan men.

  AS I LEFT MY ROOM and clomped downstairs, I nearly mowed down Allen, the head of our group. He regained his footing pretty quickly but stared at me for a few seconds too long. “Is something wrong?” I asked.

  He reddened a little and cleared his throat. “Is it really necessary to wear such bright lipstick? And all that eye makeup?”

  I planted my feet and stared back. “Have you taken a good look at the Afghan women? They wear a lot more makeup than I do.”

  “I suppose they do,” he conceded, then continued on his way.

  It was clear that my behavior was starting to make some of the CFAF people nervous. I adored Allen and I still do, but he had started to think of me as a loose cannon. He’s a really brainy guy who spends his time doing good deeds all over the world, and I don’t think he had ever spent much time around someone like me. Even my appearance made him nervous. Whereas all the other women in the group had neat, conservative hairstyles, mine was short, unnaturally red, and spiked. While this was the first time he had spoken to me about my makeup, sometimes I could feel him wince at the sight of me. I felt vindicated on the makeup issue when four of CFAF’s major funders came to visit us at the guesthouse. These were four Texas ladies—we called them the Texas Dolls—who breezed through the gate with the biggest bouffant hairdos, the most extravagantly applied perfume, and the glossiest nails, as well as faces made up as if they were stars in a daytime soap opera. While they were there, there was some discussion about the emergency kits we were all supposed to carry, with things like maps showing where safe places were, a compass, a whistle, a five-hundred-dollar piece of gold, and such. One of the ladies drawled, “I just have plenty of lipstick in mine,” and turned on her battery-operated fan to keep the sweat from ruining her makeup. I told Allen that if our funders could wear lots of makeup, so could I.

  Still, our head worried and tried to rein me in periodically. My luck turned when a second group of CFAF volunteers arrived and our team swelled from seven to fifteen people. The guesthouse was now so crowded that everyone was getting uncomfortable, so Allen asked if a few of us would move over to the Mustafa Hotel for the rest of the month. I don’t think he had me in mind, because he thought he needed to keep an eye on me for my own safety. He had already asked one of the other girls if she’d move. She was a sober, responsible midwife, and he trusted her to be safe away from the main group. You’d never imagine that this girl and I would be partners in crime, but we had already gotten to be friends, and I asked her to request me as her roommate. She did, promising Allen that she’d watch out for me. We moved into a room at the hotel, and that was the point at which I was turned loose on Kabul.

  That wasn’t Allen’s plan, of course. There still wasn’t a lot for me to do with the team because I just didn’t have skills that were very helpful to them. So he and some of the others came up with a new job for me for the rest of the month. Good Christians that they were, they figured that, since I had all this time on my hands, I should sit in my hotel room and pray for the team while they were out in the field. I’m a good Christian, too, but there are some things I’m not so good at. Intercessory prayer is one of them. I tried, though. I’d sit in my hotel room and start to pray for the team, and then I’d hear one of the Afghan vendors going by singing about his turnips or whatever, and I’d just have to go outside to investigate. Then I thought I’d try listening to spiritual music to drown out any alluring street noise. I put on a CD and my headset and tried to sit still but quickly got bored. I just decided that I was a naturally fast prayer. Instead of taking three hours, I’d whip those out prayers in about three minutes. Then, arm in arm with Roshanna, I was out the door.

  And where did we go? One block away, to Chicken Street!

  Once upon a time, Chicken Street was the place where vendors sold chickens—just as Plumber Street is still the place where they sell kitchen sinks and copper pipes, and Bird Street is the place where they sell canaries and parakeets. Now Chicken Street is lined with stores that sell traditional Afghan goods and handicrafts. Roshanna and I clung to each other so that we wouldn’t get lost in the rush of people: boys headed to school, men pushing wagons filled with oranges, burqa ladies who were begging for coins. We were immediately surrounded by little boys who shouted, “Let me be your bodyguard!” When we waved them away, they raced after one of the peacekeeping troops who was eyeing a rug hanging in a shop window that had pictures of machine guns and helicopters instead of the traditional geometric designs. “Let me be your bodyguard!” they shouted at the soldier, and he looked at them with a bemused smile.

  We walked along the street and peeked in the shop windows. Gorgeous rugs in a thousand different shades of red, with a few other colors thrown in for contrast. Camel bags and donkey bags, which were so beautiful that I didn’t believe they were really used on camels and donkeys until I saw it for myself. Intricately painted furniture from Nuristan, an area in northeastern Afghanistan. Wonderfully embroidered fabrics, from purdah curtains—used to separate the women’s part of a house from the public rooms—to tea cozies. Thick knitted woolen gloves, sweaters, and slipper socks. Heavy jewelry made of semiprecious stones from Pakistan and the jingly metal jewelry worn by the Kuchis, Afghanistan’s nomads. Hookahs, metal pots, horsewhips, colorful tassels to braid in your hair—Chicken Street is the place to go for all that and more.

  I loved Chicken Street, and it wasn’t just because of the fabulous things I could buy there. The shopkeepers had clung to their businesses through the war against Russia, the war among the mujahideen, and then the bleak years of the Taliban. Now, they were thrilled to have some foreigners back in the country to exclaim over their goods. I didn’t have enough money to buy much, but they didn’t seem to mind. As soon as Roshanna and I peeked into their stores, they’d jump up from their lunch spread out on a tablecloth at the back of the store or from their game of backgammon on the counter and beckon us inside with gracious smiles. Usually, we’d wind up sitting there and having tea with them for a while. We’d leave with a gift of apples or sugared almonds or biscuits imported from Iran; they insisted upon sharing whatever sweets they had. After a little less than a week of this, most of the shopkeepers on Chicken Street knew me by name. “Miss Debbie!” they’d shout as I walked by. “Chai for you now?”

  Of course, I wasn’t supposed to be doing this, because security had gotten even tighter since we’d arrived. The first Loya Jirga since the fall of the Taliban was getting ready to convene. This was the “grand council” elected from all the Afghan tribes that was going to select the transitional government in June 2002. That was why all the walls in Kabul were covered with pictures of stern, bearded men—they were posters left over from the elections. Because there were still Taliban sympathizers and other people who opposed the Loya Jirga, security was being ratcheted up all over town. It seemed as if every vehicle on the street was a tank belonging to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the peacekeeping troops sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council in December 2001.

  We were on an 8:00 P.M. shoot-to-kill curfew, and by 7:30, people were really scrambling to get off the streets and back to their quarters. The tension was also high because there was yet another crisis in the ongoing friction between India and Pakistan. It was feared that either country might nuke the other. Our team met every morning for a few hours to plan our day and talk about what was going on, and one day we had some big security honcho in to discuss this new development. He told us that if we saw a dark cloud in the east, we were supposed to make our way as fast as we could to the American Embassy. I was glad that they had given me a compass, because I never would have known which way was east.

  So I wasn’t supposed to be going out to Chicken Street; I was supposed to be in my room praying, but that felt like house arrest. I know the team leaders were only trying to protec
t me. They figured that if anyone in our group got injured, it would be me. They thought I was too friendly and didn’t have an appropriate level of fear about our situation. And that was true. I just wasn’t afraid, not of Afghanistan or of any of the things that I’d been through before I came to Afghanistan. I felt fear for what might happen to other people, but I had no fear for myself.

  I finally got busted for my Chicken Street excursions. Toward the end of our stay, there were some other people in the group who decided they had heard so much about this famous place called Chicken Street that they just had to go before they left, even if security was tight. They went around asking if anyone on the rest of the team wanted to join them; of course, I did. We arrived at Chicken Street one day flanked by our translators and drivers, the women from the team wrapped like mummies in our shawls, the men trying to blend in with native scarves and hats. Then one of the shopkeepers ran out of his store, crying, “Miss Debbie!” Many of the others poked their heads out to wave, big smiles on their faces.

  “Well, I guess we know what you’ve been up to!” one of the other members of the group said. And then they gave up trying to contain me.

  “THERE!” ROSHANNA POINTED at a cracked window covered with a dingy lace curtain. “I think that’s the place.”

  Daud swerved over to the sidewalk so suddenly that I nearly fell into Roshanna’s lap. I sat back up again and inspected the window. There was a big, faded photograph of a woman with Catwoman makeup and barrel curls piled on top of her head. There was also a mannequin head wearing a poufy blond wig, flanked by a couple of mismatched vases with red plastic roses on the ledge just inside. “It looks dark,” I said. “Maybe it’s not open.”

  Roshanna shook her head. “Everything in Kabul is dark, Debbie. These ladies only turn on their generator if they absolutely have to.”

  So I took a few moments to cover my head for the short trip from the car to the door of the shop. It seemed as if it was the only door on the street that was closed; the day was balmy and other shopkeepers were letting the warm breeze inside. Then Roshanna reached out for the handle, and I got ready to walk inside my first Afghan beauty salon.

  As the days passed by, I had become fonder and fonder of Roshanna—who was calling me Mom by this time—and Daud and my other Afghan friends. The idea of leaving them was killing me. And it wasn’t even just them: it seemed as if I had fallen in love with the Afghan people as a whole—with their friendliness, their humor, their hospitality, and their courage. I wanted to think of some way I could come back and actually do something that would help them. And I was starting to get an idea.

  When I moved to the Mustafa, it became much easier for all the Westerners who were pining for haircuts to find me. The Mustafa has an ever-shifting clientele of reporters, aid workers, and travelers—some people say spies and smugglers, too—and most seemed to be delighted that there was a hairdresser on the grounds. Again, my door was papered with notes begging for appointments. Again, I spent hours trimming while the hair piled up on the floor. One day an Afghan woman who had been living in Canada for the last twenty-five years stopped in. She was part of a medical-humanitarian team like mine, and she was also checking on some property that one of her uncles had owned but abandoned during the Taliban years. Unlike so many of the other people coming in from the West, she was swamped with memories of the Kabul she had seen as a young woman, when the last king was in power, in the early 1970s. She told me he had been trying to push Afghanistan into the twentieth century and had set off a chain reaction of fury in the more conservative countryside as well as among the city’s most traditional clerics.

  “People wore miniskirts out on Chicken Street!” she said. “Can you imagine anyone wearing a miniskirt in Kabul now?” She told me that, back in the 1970s, there were dozens of beauty salons in the city and that they did a thriving business. “Afghan women have always been meticulous about their hair and makeup,” she declared. “Even underneath those dreadful burqas.”

  When this woman left, Roshanna explained that beauty salons were among the many things banned by the Taliban—along with music, dancing, pictures of people or other living things, white shoes, flying kites, and growing grapes. “When I was a little girl, my mother took me often to the salon of my cousin,” Roshanna reminisced. “While she worked on the ladies, she would let me pour the tea and sweep up the hair from the floor.” Sometimes the hairdresser and her mother would sing old songs together, and they’d ask Roshanna to sing along and she would, even though she was too shy to sing around people anywhere else. This hairdresser hadn’t really set out to defy the Taliban, Roshanna said, but one of her best customers’ daughters was getting married and wanted just a little of the glitter and glamour that these occasions usually inspired. So the hairdresser obliged. She kept the lights low and gave the daughter the kind of modest, under-the-radar makeover that she thought would keep them both out of trouble. But word got out somehow.

  “Two days later, she finds the windows of her shop all broken,” Roshanna said mournfully. “Everything inside is destroyed or stolen. And her husband loses his job then, too.”

  I suddenly realized that I hadn’t seen an Afghan beauty salon yet and asked Roshanna if she and Daud could take me to one. They agreed, but it took us at least a week to find a storefront salon that was actually open for business. We had been told that many hairdressers were working again, but they were only operating salons in their homes, still too afraid of public scrutiny to hang up a sign or post the telltale prom-queen photo. In the last few days, we had seen several places that looked like they might be salons, only to find them empty. But someone had told Roshanna about this salon, so we set out to find it—and it was no easy task, since most of Kabul’s streets didn’t even have names at that time. I couldn’t see inside the salon as we approached, and I was afraid it might be another of the empty shells. But when Roshanna opened the door, I smelled perm solution. I felt a little bad about making Daud wait outside and told Roshanna, but she shook her head briskly. “No man comes inside here,” she said. “This is not allowed in our salons because the women have no head coverings.”

  “But Daud and the other Afghan men see you without your head covered at the guesthouse.”

  “It’s different at the guesthouse—like being in a little piece of America,” she replied. “And for salons, it is very strict here. If the husband of the woman who owns this salon saw Daud inside, he would beat him or maybe even kill him.”

  I looked at her incredulously.

  “It’s true, Debbie,” she said. “That’s why the curtain hangs inside the door, so that even when the door is open no man can look in and see the women.”

  “No man can come in?”

  “Not even the beautician’s husband,” Roshanna said. “It’s a place only for women.”

  Roshanna pulled me into a small vestibule, shut the door, and then lifted a pink curtain that hung before the entrance to the room. I had a new sense of curiosity about the salon and wondered if it was going to be different from salons back in the States. Inside, it was smaller and darker than the salons at home, not much bigger than a bathroom. The view out to the street—or in from the street—was blocked by the lace curtains, and there was only one small, broken mirror instead of a wall of mirrors. Instead of a counter, there was a rough wooden plank. I thought I saw blue salon capes hanging from pegs on a wall and then realized that they were burqas, which had been removed when the women came in the door. But aside from those differences, I felt the same warm, welcoming atmosphere that I’d spent most of my life in. There were women’s voices, women’s laughter—and that feeling of women relaxing with one another, laying hands on one another, telling one another the details of their lives and news of the lives around them. I wondered if this was the real reason the Taliban had been so opposed to beauty salons. Not because they made women look like whores or were fronts for brothels, as the Taliban claimed, but because they gave women their own space where they were free from
the control of men.

  All conversation stopped as we walked into the tiny room. Two hairdressers turned to greet us. One was young and thin with deep-set, dark eyes; the other, older woman had frizzy, chin-length hair. The hairdressers and their one customer greeted us with a startled if courteous “salaam aleichem”—the standard greeting, meaning “peace be with you”—when they noticed that I was a foreigner. Then Roshanna spoke with them for a few minutes. “They are sisters,” she said. “Nadia is the young one and Raksar is the other. Their family house is behind this building.” When she explained that I was an American hairdresser who wanted to see what Afghan salons were like, the two women broke into delighted smiles. Their lone customer stood up immediately and insisted that I sit down while Raksar finished styling her hair. Nadia brought me tea. A couple of little girls who had been playing near the lace curtains came to stand and stare at me.

  Before she left to get the tea, I noticed that Nadia had been sorting a box of sticks and rubber bands. I asked Roshanna what these were for. “She uses those to give the perm,” Roshanna replied, seeming surprised at the question. I asked Nadia to describe how she usually carried out this procedure. Aside from using sticks and rubber bands instead of perm rods, her approach was pretty much the same as mine except for the final stage. She told me that they just sent their customers home after they rolled them up in perm solution. The processing stopped when the hair was dry, and then the customers returned the next day to be rinsed off. No wonder Raksar had such frizzy hair—she’d probably had a bunch of these perms! The older hairdresser spoke rapidly to Roshanna for a few minutes. “She says she started this salon when the Russians were here,” Roshanna said. “She had to close it down during the Taliban years. She had to bury her mirror and other supplies in her yard.”