Kabul Beauty School

by Deborah Rodriguez

  When I arrived in Kabul in March 2003, I couldn’t believe how much things had changed since the nearly one year since I had been there. Even though parts of the city still looked like ancient ruins, new buildings—fancy buildings with curved porticos and mirrored glass windows and some sort of sparkly stuff set into colored stucco—were going up all over. Where before the streets had been teeming with people, bicycles, produce wagons, donkeys, and water buffalo, they were now clogged with those as well as cars, SUVs, and tanks. There were rotaries at intersections, presumably to slow the traffic, but there seemed to be no agreement about whether the flow should go clockwise or counterclockwise, so the drivers did both. As a result, there was always a dense knot of over-heating cars clogging each rotary. The roads weren’t much better than they had been the year before—still mostly dirt, with huge ruts and piles of rubble to dodge—but the cars and SUVs raced along them as if they were fleeing the apocalypse. There seemed to be no traffic rules whatsoever. Two lanes might quickly become three, with rogue cars darting around the others if they saw an opening. When I arrived at Mary MacMakin’s PARSA house on Plumber Street, I felt as if my entire body had been shaken apart and then achingly realigned.

  The PARSA house had a living room decorated in the basic Afghan style, which means a nice rug—almost always red—on the floor and long, flat cushions called toushaks around the walls. There were also some beat-up tables made of dark wood, but that was about it. Mary had a few bedrooms upstairs for her steady stream of guests, and these were divided internally with plywood partitions. I threw my suitcase onto the toushak in my sleeping area and started to go back downstairs.

  Then I noticed an open door leading to the top floor. On top of the house, there was a flat space that fluttered with clothes hanging from lines. Off to the side were clay pots of herbs. I pushed the clothes aside and found I could look right down onto Plumber Street. I expected it to be full of men marching around with plungers and plumb bobs, but it looked like all the other streets—crowded and lively, with some buildings that looked as if they were either in the process of being built or in the process of being torn down. It was hard to tell which. I could also see into the courtyards on either side of Mary’s house. In one, a woman and children were tucking little plants into long, neat furrows in the yard outside their front door. They made a peaceful contrast to the ever-present sounds of traffic, construction, and demolition.

  Downstairs, I finally got to meet Mary. She was a tall woman in her seventies with dark, determined eyes and a cap of slate gray hair, and she was chattering to a group of Afghan women in Dari faster than I could speak English. She seemed to be managing the details of about fifty different projects at once. She was sweet and gracious and dignified, and also outraged about something going on somewhere in the country. This is the way she still is, every time I see her. She told me she hadn’t seen the new school and salon in the Women’s Ministry but had been told that the space was almost ready for us. In a little while, she wheeled a bicycle out the door and rode off with her head uncovered into the traffic. I already knew that she was brave, that she had been imprisoned by the Taliban but they had failed to break her spirit. Still, riding a bicycle off into that traffic took another kind of guts.

  The next morning, I had a joyful reunion with Roshanna and Daud outside the Women’s Ministry. I arrived there with some of the other people who were involved with the beauty school, including Patricia O’Connor, a consultant from New York, and Noor, a young Afghan-Australian man who had been hired by Beauty Without Borders to stay in Kabul full-time to manage the program between visits by the instructors. Near the gate, two men with machine guns approached us, but they were friendly and waved us into the compound right away.

  The sight of machine guns wasn’t even alarming to me anymore. On our way there, we’d passed one compound after another with little clusters of uniformed men and their guns in front. Some looked serious and glared at every car that passed. Some were in animated conversations with friends and waved their arms around while the guns dangled at their waists. Some looked as if they might fall asleep standing up. One of them actually was asleep in a green plastic lawn chair, his gun balanced precariously across his knees. There was a feeling of great optimism in Kabul, and I felt no danger on the streets. All those guns just seemed like manly accessories, not weapons.

  When I saw the outside of the building that would house our school and salon, I got tears in my eyes because it was so beautiful. It was a low building built from a sort of caramel-colored marble on a side of the compound where someone obviously intended gardens: there was a big, circular flower bed made of stone as well as three narrow, rectangular ones. There were also three pine trees near our building, which immediately made the setting seem incredibly lush—there weren’t many trees left standing in Kabul because the Taliban had cut them all down just in case anyone wanted to hide or shoot from behind them. The windows looked as if they were newly installed, and they had gracefully curved mullions of some kind of golden brown wood. The front door was made of this same wood.

  When we went inside, however, we discovered that the building was not even close to being done—certainly not ready for the shipping container full of beauty supplies we were supposed to start moving into it the next day! There were the whitewashed walls I seemed to see in every Afghan building, but they were dirty and stained in many places. The overhead lights were in, but the switches weren’t—in fact, there were holes in many parts of the walls with long wires dangling out. The floors were still just rough concrete, and none of the closets, cupboards, and tables we had requested had been built. And it didn’t look like any of this work was in progress, either: instead of tools, there were some old bikes and a wheelbarrow stored in the room. Noor went to find the workmen who were supposed to be finishing up the school while the rest of us tried to figure out where we could move the beauty supplies. Most of the stuff could stay inside the shipping container until the next team of hairdressers arrived in a few months. However, there were some things—especially the hair color products—that would be ruined if they baked inside the shipping container for that long. We were also afraid the makeup might melt.

  It turned out that Mary had space on the third floor of the PARSA house. Even though unloading the hair color products and makeup at Mary’s meant that we would ultimately have to move them twice, this was our only choice. It also meant that someone would have the onerous job of removing almost everything from the shipping container and sorting through the products to figure out what had to be moved and then jamming the rest back into the shipping container. I offered to do this—I figured that I was the one who knew the products best—but I would obviously need lots of help. Roshanna had the solution right away. “You must hire men from the mosque,” she said.

  I was confused. “Why would the mullahs want to help me? I didn’t think any of them liked the idea of beauty salons.”

  “Not the mullahs,” Roshanna said, putting her hands over her mouth to laugh. “Lots of men wait outside the mosque for work. You’ll see.”

  Noor and Patricia had to go somewhere, so Roshanna and I started walking to the mosque, where Noor would meet us later. I don’t think I had ever walked so far before in Kabul, and I was loving it. It was hard to walk, though. I was wearing low-heeled sandals, and the sidewalks were as rough as a mountain trail, so I often found myself pitching to the side. Roshanna was in high heels and managed it gracefully. It was also hard not to stop and stare into the windows of the stores and peer into open doorways as we passed. Roshanna would wait patiently, but then I’d realize I had been looking too long and hurry along.

  But there was so much to look at! I was also getting an eye-to-eye view of the people on the streets as I’d never had before and was struck by the many different looks of the Afghan people. I think Americans tend to think of Afghans as uniformly dark-haired, dark-eyed, and wrapped in turbans. Many Americans think Afghans are Arabs, just because both are mostly Muslims,
but this is not true. Afghanistan was the original melting pot. Its geographic location made it a central thoroughfare on the Silk Road from Asia to the rest of the world, and—contrary to its distinction today as one of the most remote and isolated countries in the world—ancient peoples crisscrossed it again and again. Some came to trade, some came to conquer, and all left their mark. Most Afghans have Turkish or Persian roots, but many other ethnicities abound, too. As we walked along the streets, I saw so many faces that looked purely Asian that I pulled Roshanna’s arm and asked if there was an immigrant community of Chinese in Kabul. She shook her head. “Those are people of the Hazara tribe,” she said. “They came after the invasion of Genghis Khan.”

  “And that was—”

  “Eight hundred years ago.”

  I nodded my head at another man with Asian features who was arranging a pile of rugs outside a store. “So, he is Hazara, too?”

  “No, he is an Uzbek. Also some Mongol background, but you can tell the difference because of his embroidered hat. Also, many Uzbeks make and sell the carpets that you see here. They are all brothers.”

  As we kept walking, I tried to pick individuals out of the stream of men coming toward us on foot and bicycles, looking for differences in their features and clothes. It seemed that lots of them were dressed in tan or gray shalwar kameezes, often with Western suit jackets over them. Then we passed a man in a long, brown robe with a little beard and fair skin. He wore a tan wool hat with a roll of fabric at the bottom and something like a ruffle above it. “What’s his tribe?”

  Roshanna glanced at him. “He is clearly Tajik. You see the hat, which they all wear. Massoud was a Tajik, so when you see all the pictures of him, he will be wearing this hat.”

  “Massoud—”

  “Our great hero, Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader in driving the Russians out. He was attacked by two Arabs just before your 9/11 and died a few days later.”

  We passed two other men, who stared at me as I tried not to stare at them. I was already used to people staring at me, because I was taller than any of the Afghan women I had seen so far and taller than many of the men, too. Plus, my hair was now blond and spiky and refused to stay hidden under a scarf. It seemed there was always a tuft of it sticking out. People also stared at me because I didn’t conduct myself like a typical Afghan woman. Most of them kept their focus either on the street or on some space in the distance—anyplace that wouldn’t cause them to make eye contact with the men. Everything about me was different from these women. I felt as if I might as well be wearing a big, striped Uncle Sam hat.

  “Roshanna!” I pulled her arm and inclined my head back toward the two men. “Those men are very light-skinned, and they both have blue eyes. Are they Americans or Europeans wearing Afghan clothes?”

  “No, Debbie!” She was clearly amused. “They are Nuristanis, from the mountains in the north. They say they are the descendants of Alexander the Great. Some of them have hair like yours.” She tucked a stray piece inside my scarf. “Blond like it is this time and also red, like last time.”

  “What tribe are you from? And what about Daud?” This was all so odd to me, because I’d never thought of them as anything but Afghan.

  “We are both Pashtun,” she said. “We are the largest group in Afghanistan and also often the leaders. We drove out the British in the last century. The king before the Russians invaded was Pashtun, and so is President Karzai. So also were the Taliban.” She made a face at that.

  When we finally arrived at the mosque, Noor was waiting for us in the van, stuck in the four-deep line of temporarily parked cars. There was a stand selling kebabs wrapped in flatbread and lots of people had pulled over to buy. The mosque itself was an old building with a blue dome. It was pockmarked, as most of the buildings in Kabul were, with bullet holes as well as bigger chunks that had been knocked out by bombs. There was a big traffic rotary in front of the mosque, and all around the outside, dozens—maybe hundreds—of men sat on their haunches, some just talking to one another, some fiddling with their prayer beads, some watching the cars that went past with eager eyes. Most of them looked as if they had just come down from the mountains, with their rough clothes and large, bulky turbans. Some of the turbans had pieces of cloth hanging down, which whipped in the breeze of the passing cars. “Many are from the countryside,” Roshanna told me. “Their villages were bombed, so there is not work there. Or they are farmers and their crops fail because of the drought, so they come here to make money.”

  When Noor got out of the van, we walked over to the closest group of men. Noor told them that we were looking for about ten workers to move boxes, and half of the men jumped to their feet. A crowd of them followed us across the street. Roshanna and I climbed back into the van, and then all the men who had followed us dove for the entrance of the van. A knot of them got stuck in the door, all arms flailing and faces straining and turbans flying; then one of them managed to grab the back of the passenger seat and pull himself through. About five more tumbled into the van after him, and then another pushing, writhing knot formed in the door. Noor was outside shouting, pulling men away. Finally, another few men got into the van and Noor slammed the door shut; then we headed off to find the shipping container. The men who had made it inside crowded on one side, so they didn’t have to sit near us women. They spoke to one another softly and nodded at me courteously.

  The shipping container was lodged at the back of a hospital compound, along with several containers of medical supplies. Noor had to go off to take care of some other things, leaving me and Roshanna alone with the men. Then a man came out of the hospital with a battery-operated tool, and he worked on the big bolts that held the door closed. The outer door was soon cranked open to reveal a big sheet of plywood. When the men pried that aside, there were all the boxes of our beauty products. Two thousand cubic feet of them.

  I went to reach for one of the uppermost boxes, and the men rushed forward with outstretched arms and shocked looks on their faces. Roshanna started to laugh. “They’re not used to seeing a woman work this way,” she said.

  “We’re all going to have to work this way.” I tipped the box, and it suddenly slid out of my arms, spilling bottles of shampoo all over the ground. The men started picking up the bottles, then addressed a question to Roshanna. They talked back and forth for a few minutes, and she laughed again. “They want to know why you didn’t just wash your hair back in the United States!”

  Then Roshanna had to leave, and the men and I were on our own. Since I had to look inside every box because they weren’t marked, I tried to do as much sorting inside the shipping container as I could so we’d have less to move back in later. I kept digging my way toward the back of the container. When I’d find hair color or makeup, I’d toss it to the man in back of me, and he’d toss it to the man in back of him—the chain extended to the ground outside, where one of the men made an orderly arrangement of boxes. The first time I threw a box, it hit the man behind me in the chest and almost knocked him over. I think he figured that a woman wouldn’t really be able to toss it that far.

  Soon, though, the men got used to working side by side with me. By then they were tossing boxes to me from the top of the load, up near the roof, and I was doing my best not to fall over. We finally finished sorting and repacked the container, with the boxes that had to be moved to Mary’s near the door. At the end of the day, I gave each of the men some samples of shampoo and conditioner. They must have compared products after they left, because when they came back the next day it seemed they all had developed preferences for one scent or another and wanted new samples. Then friends from an NGO loaned me their cars and drivers. It was about a forty-five-minute drive from the shipping container to Mary’s house, and we had to make fifteen trips, but we managed to move all the boxes of hair color and makeup to her third floor in one day. It was a good thing, too, because that evening it began to rain.

  When it first started, everyone in Kabul was thrilled. There had been
a drought for seven years, and it had baked the city streets into hard clay, which the thousands of cars and water buffalo and walkers ground into fine grit. Early in those first few rainless mornings of this trip, the skies had been clear. But after just a few hours of traffic, the dust and diesel fumes drifted upward like a yellow fog, hiding the sun, the mountains, even the highest buildings. I was as happy as anyone about the rain, because I had developed the worst cough of my life thanks to the dust. I hacked and hacked all night long, waking people on the other side of the wooden partitions in our bedroom on Mary’s second floor. But the rain only seemed to make things more miserable. The streets turned into mud, and the sewers alongside them overflowed with fecal matter. It was impossible to go anywhere without becoming covered with mud. Whenever it stopped raining for a day, the streets dried out, and the dust was a bigger problem than before. My cough became worse and worse.

  And I worried that the rain was going to postpone the biggest item on our agenda: a meeting with prospective students for the school. We had decided that the first women we wanted to reach out to were hairdressers who were already in business. We wanted to help them become more successful. Since there wasn’t yet a reliable mail system in the city, Noor had spent several days before I arrived wandering around, looking for beauty salons. He knocked on the door of every salon and delivered hundreds of invitations to a meeting at Mary’s house. Since public transportation was unreliable even on dry days, we weren’t sure how many women would be able to make it through the mud and the rain. And we didn’t know if the women we sought would be able to break away from their husbands and fathers for this unusual and thus suspicious occasion: a gathering of hairdressers.