Kabul Beauty School

by Deborah Rodriguez

  When the Taliban were driven out, Bahar was finally able to get out of the house. She fought with her husband and told him she was going to work because he couldn’t work. Her family finally had enough to eat again when she got the job as a kindergarten teacher.

  She started working at the salon after graduation. Her specialty was manicures and pedicures, and her light, gentle touch pleased the customers. They tipped her well, and her monthly income shot up from forty to nearly four hundred dollars. The only problem was still her husband. He used to call her cell phone all day long to demand that she explain what she was doing. Sometimes she had to rush out in the middle of the day because he was in the grip of one of his rages and was beating their children. She’d startle and flinch when her phone rang because she was still so afraid of him.

  But as she made more money, Bahar became stronger and more independent. There were several times when I heard her speak sharply to her husband when he called and tell him not to bother her. Finally, she stopped answering the phone if he called too many times. Even when he wasn’t calling, she expressed nothing but disdain for him.

  Then one day Bahar asked me if she could take a week off from work. She said she’d been saving her money to take someone in her family to an important doctor in Pakistan. I figured she was taking her child, so I didn’t ask further. But at the end of the day when Bahar was primping for rozi joma, I followed her outside to take a look at her husband. He stood waiting in his clean, dark shalwar kameez, his beard neatly trimmed, his face kind and proud. I didn’t even recognize him. Somehow the doctor in Pakistan had managed to return him to some version of the man he had been before the Taliban beat the decency out of him. I had never met this version, but clearly, Bahar was overjoyed to have him back.

  THE SATELLITE PHONE RANG in the middle of the night. On the third ring, I crawled across Sam’s body to answer it. It was some man speaking Dari, so I knew the call didn’t have anything to do with trouble in Michigan. But I had other worries when the phone rang at night, so I jostled Sam and laid the phone on top of his ear. “It’s not about Robina, is it?”

  He raised his head and listened. “Not about Robina. Nothing wrong.”

  Still, I had a hard time going back to sleep. I always worried about Robina and her sisters at night.

  I had met Robina a few months after we moved to the Oasis. She walked into the compound one morning as I was sitting outside drinking my coffee. None of my beauticians had arrived yet, and I thought she was a customer. She wore a stylish blue jacket and shoes that looked as if they had come from Italy. I thought she might have been one of the UN workers—maybe from France or Spain—who had dodged security precautions and braved the dust to get a manicure. But when I looked her over at a closer distance, I could see that she didn’t need a manicure. Everything about her was already impeccably groomed.

  “Good morning,” she said. “This is Oasis?” She held out a copy of the Afghan Scene, the local magazine that ran my ad for the salon.

  I nodded.

  “I am here for job?”

  Lots of Afghan women had asked for jobs in the salon, but I didn’t want to hire anyone who hadn’t been through some sort of beauty school. I made an exception, though, for Robina. I could tell just by looking at her that she would know how to cater to my Western clientele.

  Robina was thirty-three and had recently returned to Afghanistan from many years of refugee life in Iran. She came to me as an experienced hairdresser. She added a whole new look to the Oasis, with her heart-shaped face, high cheekbones, artfully highlighted red hair, and fashionable clothes. Although Topekai had a strong following by then, many of my customers weren’t always sure if my other two beauticians could fix their hair the way they wanted. In part, this was because Baseera and Bahar didn’t have a high-fashion look. My customers didn’t hesitate a second when I told them that Robina would handle their cuts or color. Customers like to see a beautician who has the sort of look about her that they want themselves.

  But it wasn’t just Robina’s look that made her different from my other beauticians. Everything about her was different—everything, that is, except the difficulty of being a woman in Afghanistan.

  Robina’s family had left Kabul when she was five years old, just before the war against the Russians started and long before anyone had even heard of the Taliban. They’d settled in Iran because her father was a great fan of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, a pro-Western ruler whose modernization efforts included suffrage for women. But the shah also generated huge resentment among both Islamic clerics and democrats. His overthrow in 1979 paved the way for Ayatollah Khomeini and the revolution that would wind up creating an Islamic republic in Iran. Robina’s father, however, saw the shah as a force of enlightenment in the Middle East. He even named one of his daughters after the shah’s third wife.

  Growing up in Iran, Robina had advantages that most of my girls couldn’t have imagined. She had loving parents who weren’t at all displeased to have three daughters; they doted on their daughters as much as they did their three sons. Her family was also fairly prosperous, so she and her sisters never went without food or other necessities. Her father was a wholesaler of clothes and perfume, and he’d bring home samples to his wife and daughters. The women of the family covered themselves with big scarves when they went out, especially as Iran became a harsher climate for women. But at home they wore slacks and short-sleeved shirts, just as if they were girls in Michigan.

  And unlike most parents of Afghan girls, Robina’s mother and father weren’t about to force her to marry anyone she didn’t like. Iranian boys asked for her hand; when she didn’t want them, her father sent them away. Afghans who lived in Iran asked for her hand; when she didn’t want them, her father sent them away, too. Afghans who lived back in Kabul asked for her hand. Her father begged her to say no, because he couldn’t stand the idea of her moving so far away. She did say no and continued to live at home. There, she and her sisters had a kind of social life that simply didn’t exist in their homeland. They were allowed to go out with groups of young men and women—together!—for picnics, hikes, and tame little parties.

  Iran had welcomed Afghan immigrants at first, but the welcome ran out as more and more Afghans poured across the border during the wars. Soon the Iranian government began slapping restrictions on the Afghans living within its borders. It became difficult for them to find jobs, own homes or cars, or even have telephones. Robina told me that many Iranians became hostile to the Afghans in their midst, complaining that Afghans were taking all the good jobs and making the schools too crowded.

  Robina’s younger sisters wound up getting pieces of a university education, but Robina went instead to special courses run by the United Nations to teach dressmaking to Afghan women. While she was there, Robina got a reputation as someone who was outspoken about the ill treatment of Afghans in Iran. She was warned that she could be killed for talking like that. She continued to have strong opinions and express them but finally gave up dressmaking. Her father was afraid she would ruin her eyes, and besides, she found a beauty salon near her home that was willing to train her as a hairdresser.

  This caused problems within the Afghan immigrant community, because many there thought beauty salons—especially Iranian beauty salons—were fronts for brothels. So Robina became less connected to the Afghan community and more connected to her new profession. Even though the government was cracking down on Iranians who gave jobs to Afghans, the woman who ran the salon looked out for Robina. If a government official sniffed around the neighborhood to see if there were any Afghans employed there, the salon owner would swear that Robina was either a friend or a customer.

  But things continued to become harder for Robina and other Afghans in Iran. Her father lost his job as a wholesaler. He went into an industrial business with an Iranian but was robbed by his partner and had no legal redress. Two of her brothers became tailors, but they had a hard time getting enough work to support the whole family. Robina
was just starting in the salon business but hadn’t built up enough of a clientele to help the family much. Then both of her younger sisters found jobs in one of the only areas open to Afghan girls: they worked as babysitters to a British family doing business in Iran.

  After two years the British family told Robina’s sisters that they were being transferred to the United States. The sisters were distraught about losing both their jobs and their kind foreign friends, but the Brits said that they’d love to have the girls follow them to America and continue working as their nannies. They told them that Robina could even come along as a chaperone. The Brits would try to find sponsors for the girls, and then they would all have to get visas. The big drawback to this plan was that there wasn’t an American embassy in Iran. It had been closed since the hostage crisis following the shah’s overthrow. If they wanted to get visas, the girls would have to go back to Afghanistan and work through the American Embassy there.

  Since it was only getting harder to be an Afghan in Iran anyway, the three sisters decided to seize this opportunity for a better life in America, even if it meant a brief stopover in Kabul. They had heard only bad things about Kabul—about how dirty and crowded it was, about all the destruction from the wars, about the poverty. They had heard it was the worst place in the world for women, but they decided to take a chance. Their mother wept and begged them to stay in Iran, but their father trusted that they were strong and smart enough to make their way. He figured it was just for a few months, until they got their visas for America.

  So Robina and her sisters did what just about no Afghan women ever do: they traveled on their own, without a male escort. They were met at the airport by relatives and stayed with them for a few weeks. Then they found their own apartment and moved into it, only the three of them.

  It’s hard for Westerners to understand just how revolutionary this was. It’s almost a rite of passage in America for girls to move to another city and get an apartment with friends as young adults. But in Afghanistan, this sort of independence was unheard of—it was an abrupt departure from the way things have been done for thousands of years. It was the kind of thing that sent out shock waves around the sisters wherever they went. Just about everyone assumed that they had to be prostitutes if they were living on their own. When they interviewed for jobs and people found out that they lived on their own, they got phone calls from the men at the companies wanting to take them out to dinner, out to parties. This is the kind of behavior Afghans associate with prostitutes.

  I’ll bet ten thousand dollars there was not another group of girls living on their own like this anywhere in Afghanistan. I’ll bet there still is not. Western girls, maybe. Afghans who had been living in the West for most of their lives, possibly. But not Afghan girls who had never left the East. In a way, Robina and her sisters had been made more vulnerable because they had been raised by parents with progressive ideas about women. The problem was that these ideas didn’t match the culture to which they were returning.

  Ultimately, their plan didn’t work. The Brits lost their jobs in America and moved back home, so Robina and her sisters had nowhere to go. They couldn’t go back to live in Iran because they had given up their identification cards when they moved to Kabul, and it was so expensive for Afghans to get visas for Iran that the sisters even had a hard time visiting their parents. Basically, Iran just didn’t want them anymore. The sisters were forced to stay in Kabul and continue to live on their own. They knew it was dangerous, so with the help of foreign friends they raised enough money to send the youngest sister to college in India. Robina didn’t want to leave until there was enough money to send her other sister away, too.

  You would think that other Afghan women would be full of sympathy for Robina and her sisters, but you’d be wrong. Even my girls, who were themselves breaking so many barriers by going to school and becoming breadwinners, even they looked coldly at Robina when they heard that she and her sisters lived alone. Then Robina made it worse by breaking another taboo: she went out on a couple of dates with a Western man. That was enough to make all the rest of my girls shun her as if she had the avian flu.

  This wasn’t the only time there had been divisions among the girls, although I was often clueless about these tensions as they were going on. In a way, I had deliberately worsened these divisions by making sure each class was diverse. Back when I was struggling just to keep the beauty school running, I hadn’t even known that it wasn’t diverse. Then Sam walked in one day when the third class was in session, looked around, and scowled. “Why is everyone in the school Hazara?” he asked. I didn’t realize that they were, but it turned out that two of my teachers were Hazara, and they had helped me select a class that was all Hazara. From that point on, Sam sat in on all the interviews and helped me make sure that I wasn’t inadvertently favoring one ethnic group over another. We balanced each class not only by ethnicity but also by religion and region. But the ancient conflicts among these groups sometimes spilled over into the school and salon. Then I’d have to stand in front of the students and give them a Rodney King lecture.

  “Can’t we all just get along?” I would plead with them. “How is Afghanistan going to prosper if those of us in this one little place can’t put our differences aside?”

  I didn’t notice how the others slighted Robina until Laila pointed it out to me. How they would suddenly dart into the lunchroom and leave her behind. How they would be whispering in another room while Robina was reading a book, trying to ignore them. Sometimes I didn’t even need Laila to tell me when things were amiss. I’d find Robina sobbing in the back room. Things had to be pretty bad for her to drop her highly polished, professional demeanor.

  The tension inside the salon finally eased for Robina, at least a little. Maybe it was because Laila decided to throw her bantamweight ferocity in Robina’s corner. Laila was the only other unmarried woman working for me. She also had progressive parents, who wanted her to continue her studies and weren’t going to force her to marry anyone she didn’t want. But unlike Robina, Laila hadn’t grown up in comfort. During the wars, her family had fled to Pakistan, where life was tooth-and-nail tough. There Laila was a wage earner even as a tiny child. She spent five hours a day weaving carpets that paid the family’s monthly rent. Now Laila was living with her parents in Kabul, but she knew how tough it was to be a single woman out on the streets every day. To keep the men from bothering her, she fixed a glare on her face as she headed out her parents’ door every morning and maintained it until she got to my compound. Sometimes it took a while for her face to relax into a smile. She was a formidable ally for Robina.

  Still, Robina needed bigger guns to protect her and her sister outside the salon. They had chosen what seemed to be a perfect apartment. It was in a secure location—right next to the Ministry of Agriculture—with a locked entrance and a nice landlord. But the landlord became less and less nice as he realized that no father or brother or husband was coming to take his rightful place in their household.

  Robina had been telling me every day of the landlord’s escalating unfriendliness. Then the phone rang one morning when the salon was closed and school was getting ready to start. I was clamping mannequin heads to the countertops, and I didn’t even recognize the voice at the other end of the phone. “They push me,” the voice gasped. “They push me down the stairs!”

  “Robina?”

  She had woken up that morning to find that there was no water coming into the house. Robina was famously clean—she came to the salon every day with her own mug wrapped in foil—so the thought of not being able to wash was intolerable to her. She knocked on one of her neighbors’ doors to ask if they had water, which they did. She went to see the landlord to ask why the neighbors had water and she did not. He shrugged in a sullen way. She asked if the water valve to their apartment had somehow been shut off, because this is often what landlords do when they want to harass a tenant. Then he exploded with rage, calling her and her sisters whores and donkeys—th
e latter because he was Pashtun and they were Hazaras. His whole family poured out of their apartment and pushed her until she fell down the stairs.

  Sam and I went right over. I took some bandages and ointment and a package of Wet Ones that I saved for emergencies. Sam went to yell at the landlord. We had brought Zilgai along with us, and he turned the water back on. Sam later went back to see the landlord with a friend who is a general, who told the landlord that Robina was a distant cousin and that he wanted the landlord to look out for her. Generals carry a lot of weight around here. Better to come with a general than to come with a policeman.

  Things were better for a while, but the fact was that Robina and her sister were in mortal danger. They didn’t belong in Afghanistan, even though it should have been their country as much as anyone else’s. There are many kinds of terrorism, and Robina and her sister had to brave the persistent daily kind aimed at women who break away from the social order. Maybe all the different kinds of terrorism are, in their essence, the same. I don’t know. All I know is that every time the phone rang when Robina wasn’t in the salon, I was afraid someone had come after her and her sister again. I was afraid they’d been raped or murdered or both.

  Maryam the cook hadn’t come to work for the second day in a row. As lunchtime drew near, I could see some of the students looking longingly at the door of the manicure-pedicure room, where Maryam usually set out their food. They’d been doing spiral perms on our long-haired mannequin heads for a good two hours now, winding twenty-inch strands of hair in hundreds of small lavender perm rods, taking care not to twist or crimp the ends of the hair, making sure that each curled strand had the exact same tension and angle. Some of the students were so tired that they looked as if they needed to put their arms in slings. I knew they had to take a lunch break, so I gave up on Maryam once again. I called Achmed Zia and told him to go out and buy Kabul burgers—nan wrapped around salad, fried potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, and some kind of meat—for all of us.