Kabul Beauty School

by Deborah Rodriguez

  Topekai and Baseera were sitting next to each other on green plastic lawn chairs, momentarily oblivious to the hour as well as to the crush of students around them. Topekai held both hands in front of her and turned them as if she were steering a large, unwieldy rocket ship through space. Her eyes widened with horror and then clamped shut as she described the scene to Baseera in rapid Dari. She squealed and shuddered with pretend impact, and the two of them laughed. The students stared, and I wondered for a second if they thought this demonstration had anything to do with spiral perms. Then I remembered that—unlike me—the students could actually understand everything being said, even if they weren’t yet familiar with the situation. Topekai and her husband had purchased a car. She was learning to drive and had smashed into something.

  I had asked Topekai and Baseera to come and teach class since one of my regular teachers was sick. I also thought it would be great for the students to get to know two successful Afghan hairdressers. “Tell them about giving your husband money,” I instructed Baseera, wanting to distract the students until Achmed Zia returned with the food. So she told them how she used to have to beg her husband for as little as twenty afghanis. Sometimes he wouldn’t give it to her, and sometimes he couldn’t. After she graduated from beauty school and started to work for me, she stopped asking him for money. Not only that, she realized that he sometimes had no money. So she had started to leave the equivalent of twenty dollars in his pocket every now and then. She never outright gave him the money, because that would shame him. Still, he knew she made more money than he did and he seemed to appreciate it. In fact, they were also pooling their money to buy a car. Both Baseera and Topekai had more freedom than most Afghan women. They worked as late as they had to every day and shared the chores of child rearing and housekeeping with their husbands. Topekai had always been a strong woman, but in the three years that I’d known Baseera, she’d also become strong.

  I wasn’t sure how much Baseera told the students about her new life, but they looked impressed. Some looked disbelieving as well. Three of them had just moved back to Afghanistan after spending most of their lives as refugees in Pakistan. They had grown up hearing stories about the wonders of Afghanistan from their parents, but they were finding their homeland harsh and unyielding. Back in Pakistan, there was electricity all day and all night long, as well as reliably running water, decent roads, and good schools. They didn’t have to cover their heads and account for their every move outside the home. But Pakistan had started to crack down on Afghan refugees and make it harder for them to find jobs, so their fathers and husbands had insisted that the girls accompany them back to Kabul. There was 40 percent unemployment in Kabul, but at least no one was telling the men that they couldn’t apply for jobs just because they were Afghan. For these girls, though, the move was a cruel step backward. They had told me that the beauty school was the one thing that gave them hope.

  Achmed Zia finally returned with the Kabul burgers. The girls rushed into the manicure-pedicure room, once again cheerful and chatty. As I trailed along after them, I saw that the floor in the lobby hadn’t been swept yet. Shaz hadn’t swept it yesterday, either, and there was already so much dust on the floor that I could see where the girls had disturbed it in their dash to lunch. “Where is Shaz?” I asked Topekai and Baseera. “I know she came in today, but why hasn’t she done anything with this floor?”

  I saw a look pass between them, and I groaned. “Not out meeting Farooq, is she?”

  “Nai, Debbie,” Baseera said quickly. “I think she works in your private rooms now.” She pointed to the house in the compound next to the beauty school, where Sam and I had moved our quarters. The beauty school and the salon took up all the space in the original house now.

  “Folding scarves again?” It seemed as though every time I went looking for Shaz these days, she was sitting on the floor of my closet folding my scarves or my underwear. “Why does she fuss so much with my damn scarves?”

  Again I saw a look pass between them. I set off to find Shaz, resolving to talk to her about Farooq one more time.

  About four months earlier, I had noticed what seemed like a positive change in Shaz. She came into work one morning wearing lipstick, a touch of kohl, and a pretty new green paisley scarf. When she removed it, I saw that her short, dark hair had been brushed carefully and arranged with two sparkly combs. I called all the beauticians over to exclaim about how nice she looked. She didn’t exactly look pretty—her skin was pitted from hardships I couldn’t even imagine, her eyes and mouth were too small for the fullness of her face, and she had the body of a rugby player. Still, there is something alluring about the care that a woman takes to make herself look nicer. Maybe it’s the attention to detail, or maybe it’s the hopefulness implied by the act of enhancing what you already have. In any case, I was touched and charmed by Shaz’s new look. I thought it showed that she cared a little bit more about herself. Foolishly, I congratulated myself for having had something to do with it.

  Usually all the staff left together at the end of the day, and Achmed Zia would drive them home in our van. A few months later, I went into the salon one day after I thought everyone had gone home and found Shaz still working on her hair. “Did Achmed Zia leave without you?”

  I was ready to fly into battle on her account. I thought I’d seen the other girls act a little snippy toward her in the last few weeks. Sometimes hostilities among the girls were expressed beneath the threshold of my limited Dari; sometimes all I caught was a haughty look or a mean tone of voice that somehow made it through the clamor. Sometimes I’d talk one of the girls into telling me what was going on. More often, they kept these rivalries and tensions to themselves. They never complained to me about one another, even if the grievance was legitimate. Even if it somehow affected me or the beauty school.

  “Why didn’t they wait for you?” I demanded.

  “No problem, Debbie,” she said, blushing. She put on her coat and scarf, patted me on the arm, and walked out to the gate. Something about the way she patted my arm—as if she were telling me to stay behind—made me suspicious, so I followed her. She heard me kick a pebble across the driveway and rushed back to pat me on the arm again. “No problem,” she repeated anxiously. She backed toward the gate smiling and waving at me, but I kept following her. “What’s going on?” I asked. “What don’t you want me to see?”

  Finally, she turned and dashed through the gate. Outside the compound walls, a battered black sedan was shuddering into gear. She climbed into the backseat and pulled her scarf over her face. Before the car drove off, the driver turned to look at me in a familiar way and gave me a little wave. He was as battered as his car, with a broken nose and a heavy mustache made crooked by a scar on his lip. He nodded his head and then sped away.

  The next morning, I grabbed Laila as soon as she walked in the gate. “Who was that man picking up Shaz last night?”

  Laila was still scowling from her walk past the bad neighbors’ house. She pulled off her head scarf and regarded me coolly. “He is her boyfriend, Debbie. His name is Farooq.”

  I remembered having heard the name. “I thought he was her cousin!”

  “Cousin can be boyfriend, too,” she reminded me. “But he is not even cousin.”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “I don’t know. Long time, maybe.”

  “Why didn’t you guys tell me?”

  She just shrugged as she folded her scarf into a neat, tightly pinched little rectangle.

  Since Shaz was married, this was a serious breach of decorum—the kind that could get her killed. If her husband found out, he could bring charges against her and have her stoned to death. I was furious at Shaz for being so stupid. I planted myself near the gate so I could talk with her as soon as she arrived. I was planning to tell her that she had to choose between Farooq and her job. But when she slipped in the gate, I felt so bad for her that I burst out crying. She was still wearing her jaunty little bit of makeup
, but it couldn’t disguise her sadness. I knew how it felt to be trapped in a bad marriage; I knew how one can yearn so terribly for love.

  I could see a few of the other girls watching us from the window, so I pulled Shaz to the back of the compound. I didn’t want to shame her any more by having them watch or Laila translate for me. Laila and the others were sometimes very uncompromising in their judgment of women who stepped outside the sexual boundaries, no matter how much they liked to joke about sex. If this weren’t Afghanistan, I would probably have been happy that poor, homely Shaz—stuck with a grasping, old husband in another city—had found a boyfriend. But it was Afghanistan, and I didn’t want to risk losing her to a mob. “No Farooq!” I whispered to her. I picked up a stone from the ground and pantomimed it bashing my head in. “No car with Farooq, no phone with Farooq. Too dangerous!”

  She nodded and walked to my house wearily. She removed her pretty green paisley scarf and wrapped a gray rag over her hair to protect it from the dust that she would raise shaking out carpets. The other girls looked at me as I entered the salon but knew enough not to say anything critical of her.

  Of course, my pantomime with the stone didn’t change things. Although I made sure that Shaz joined the others in the van for a few days, I didn’t have time to do this every day. Besides, she managed to see Farooq even when she did ride in the van. Achmed Zia came to tell me one day that she had asked him to let her off at a new location. When he looked in his rearview mirror, he saw her getting into Farooq’s car. And she talked to Farooq on her cell phone whenever she could. I’d often catch her hiding in an empty corner of the house talking to him, her face lit with guilty pleasure. I even caught her once using my cell phone to talk to him because the battery on hers was dead. “No Farooq!” I shouted, but I saved the number so that I would know if she ever tried to call him again on my phone.

  As I walked upstairs to my closet, I expected to find Shaz talking to Farooq. But she was sitting on the floor with a dreamy look on her face. She had emptied out the contents of my scarf box and my underwear drawer and was folding everything up into neat little piles. “Didn’t you just do that yesterday?” I asked.

  She stared at me as if she was trying to remember who I was. “Nai.”

  “Are you feeling okay?”

  She still looked confused.

  “Do you need some tea?”

  “Nai.”

  “Come downstairs and sweep the floor when you’re finished here.” I pantomimed this, and she nodded. She started to get up, then sank back down again. Then she picked up a red sheer scarf and stretched it out languidly. She held it up in the sunlight, then fluttered it down to the floor and stroked it with her fingers. “Shaz, hurry up. I’d rather have you sweep the floor.”

  I walked downstairs feeling as though I were missing something and nearly collided with Maryam as I walked into the lobby of the beauty school and salon. She looked as if she were in mourning. Her eyes were puffy and raw, and she was tightly wrapped in a big, black shawl. Maryam was always the most lighthearted, sweet-tempered person in either compound. She sang when she peeled vegetables. She sang when she plucked chickens. She sang when she washed dishes. She had a good marriage, a good family, a good job. The only time I’d ever seen her unhappy was once when everyone left the houses for one reason or another, leaving her alone in the kitchen. She panicked when she discovered that she was alone and cried when we returned. Now she looked as though she had been crying for the last two days. “Where’s Laila?” I shouted at the closed door to the salon. I knew that I needed help to understand this, whatever it was.

  Maryam sat down on the stairs to sob, and Baseera and Mina came running out of the salon. Laila walked in from the porch. “Something is terribly wrong,” I told her. “Find out what it is.”

  Laila bent down over Maryam, who spoke rapidly from behind clenched fists. Then Laila straightened up again. She and the beauticians talked back and forth for a few seconds. “We know part of the story already,” she said.

  It seemed that, two days before, Achmed Zia had been driving Shaz and Maryam home when one of the van’s tires blew out. The spare was also flat, so he was going to leave the girls in the car while he went to get the spare repaired. Then Shaz offered to call Farooq and see if he could give the two of them a ride. She asked to use Maryam’s phone to make the call, claiming that she was out of minutes. So Farooq came, and soon they were hurtling along one of the dirt roads that led to the neighborhood where both Shaz and Maryam lived. All of a sudden, Farooq slowed down at a corner, and Shaz opened her door and jumped out. Farooq sped up again, driving down the streets so fast that Maryam couldn’t get out of the car. As he drove, he looked up at the frantic Maryam in the rearview mirror and told her that he was in love with her. He told her he had seen her when he was picking up Shaz outside the compound, and he knew he had to have her for himself. He wanted her to leave her husband and go off with him.

  I interrupted. “Why would Shaz jump out of the car to let him be with another woman?”

  “Farooq told her she must do this to prove that she loves him,” Laila asserted. “He tells her he is attracted to Maryam and asks Shaz to let them be together just this once.”

  “Why would she go along with that?”

  Laila grimaced. “Because she is crazy, Debbie. Crazy with love and crazy with the drugs.”

  I grabbed the railing of the stairs and sat down next to Maryam. “What are you talking about? She smokes hash out there with the men?”

  “She is an opium addict. She takes a little pill under her tongue every day, then she goes off by herself to fold your scarves. Farooq is the one who gets her the drugs.”

  “But she’s such a hard worker! How could she be a drug addict and still work so hard?” I couldn’t make sense out of this.

  Maryam lifted her head and spoke again to Laila. I would have never recognized her voice if I had heard her speaking on the phone. All the lightness and warmth was gone. Laila and the girls listened with looks of horror, then fixed their eyes on me expectantly. “There’s more? What else?” I asked.

  Farooq had finally let the hysterical Maryam out of his car, and she’d walked home. She was late but told her husband that the van had broken down and that she hadn’t wanted to wait there alone while Achmed Zia got the spare fixed. She said she hadn’t been able to get a cab because she didn’t have enough money, and she hadn’t been able to call her husband because her cell phone couldn’t get a signal. The cell phone systems in the city were down so often that he didn’t bother to question this. He also didn’t wonder about his wife’s agitation, because he knew how easily she became frightened and that she didn’t like walking through the streets alone. But later that night he checked her cell phone to see if it was working again. There he found a long, lurid text message from Farooq saying how he wanted Maryam more than ever after their brief time together. Farooq said that he knew now she wanted him in the same way. Then Maryam’s husband threw her phone across the room and left the house, shouting that he would divorce her if she was spending time with another man.

  Right about then, Shaz opened the lobby door. She was still looking a little bit dreamy, but she shrank back against the outside wall when she saw Maryam. Laila and Baseera shouted at her a few times, but she refused to come inside. Then Mina shrieked. She had been looking at Maryam’s cell phone and recognized Farooq’s number. She had been getting a lot of harassing calls on her own phone, and they were all from this same number. The last thing Mina’s husband needed was another reason to beat up on her, and she started to cry at the thought that Farooq could leave an incriminating text message on her phone. Laila and Baseera also pulled out their cell phones. They found the same number in their own phones, in the logs for both incoming and outgoing calls. Each remembered that Shaz had asked to use her phone in the last few days. It seemed that Shaz was delivering all the girls over to Farooq, so desperate to please him that she’d play the pimp. The lobby echoed with screaming
and crying, and the few customers who were in the salon that day tiptoed past us warily. Achmed Zia finally came to the door and poked a worried head in.

  Two days later I fired Shaz. I had tried to get her to take us to Farooq. Sam was ready to pay him a visit and threaten to kill him if he harassed any of my girls again. But Shaz wouldn’t do it. Her face closed up and she shook her head; she wouldn’t meet my eye. She sent piles of dust flying as she swept and beat carpets, trying so hard to show me that she was indispensable. She was nearly indispensable, and I loved her, but I couldn’t let her hungers endanger the rest of my girls. When she left, I felt as if a part of me went walking out the door.

  I wanted to talk to someone about this, someone who could help me make sense of it. The first person who came to mind was Roshanna, of course—she had been my friend ever since I came to Afghanistan. She had helped me decipher each mystery that arose from my conflict with the culture and from my ignorance of what the Afghan women had been through. But I couldn’t ask Roshanna, because she was gone.

  After the traumatic night of her engagement party and consummation, I had gone home and spent the day crying. Sam was out of town and hadn’t been able to come to the party with me, but I called him and told him what had happened. “She will be fine,” he assured me. “She marry nice Afghan man this time, go to country where there never was Taliban.”

  So I told myself to stop worrying. The consummation had been a nightmare, but she would walk off into a new day with her husband. I cried a little more, though, knowing how much I would miss Roshanna.

  Her husband left for Amsterdam three days after the engagement party, as planned. Within two months, Roshanna had a visa and was preparing to follow him there. Her family and I took her to the airport and sobbed amid the potholes as she disappeared inside.