WE EDGED CLOSER TO THE INVASION. Ordinary Pakistanis, loyal to their Muslim brothers across the border, began sneering at us, the infidel journalists, and staging protests in the streets. Men doused effigies of President Bush in kerosene and ignited their lighters, screaming, “Down, down America.” I was caught up in the middle of these protests, cloaked in my tentlike chador, one of few women among the men.
One day I went to one of these demonstrations with a handful of my male colleagues. Though I was dressed as a Muslim—respectfully, with not a strand of hair showing—the Pakistanis knew I was a foreign woman simply because I was carrying a camera, working, trespassing in a man’s world. To them, that was enough to merit a quick feel on any part of my body. They perceived foreign women based on what they saw in movies, often porn movies: easy and available for sex. I tried not to make a scene in front of my peers. I didn’t want my gender to determine whether or not I could cover breaking news, so I continued photographing, ignoring the sweeping of hands on my butt, the occasional grab.
Once President Bush went up in flames, my colleagues were nowhere to be found. I tried to focus on shooting, but this time there were not a few hands on my butt but dozens. And this time it wasn’t a subtle feel but an aggressive, wide-handed clutch, butt to crotch, back to front. I kept shooting. A combative Western woman would elicit terrible anger from these men. I tried holding my camera with one hand and swatting them with the other. It didn’t work. I tried turning around, looking the men in the eye and saying “Haram,” which means “forbidden, sinful, shameful,” to show them I understood that their actions were unacceptable in Islam.
It didn’t work. Adrenaline was raging all around me, adrenaline of hundreds of unmarried, sexually frustrated men who had no work and little education. They hated the West for America’s policies in their region, even more so for the war that was about to happen. Effigies burned around me. The masses screamed, “Down with America!” I had fifteen hands on my butt. I paused, lowered my camera with its beast of a lens—about five pounds and twelve inches long—and waited for the next hand.
The second I felt something, I did a karate back-kick I’d learned in middle school.
I turned around, “Haram! Don’t you have sisters? Mothers? Aren’t you Pakistani men Muslim? Would you allow another man to treat your sister or mother like this?”
And I whacked the man directly behind me over the head with my lens. His eyes rolled back in their sockets, and he staggered.
The men around me suddenly stopped and stared.
I didn’t wait to find out what happened to him; instead I sprinted back to the car, where I found my male colleagues, lounging, all of them smitten with their afternoon’s work, checking the backs of their digital cameras for their prizewinning photographs, completely oblivious to what I had gone through to compose even one frame.
• • •
THE PAKISTANI GOVERNMENT BEGAN monitoring our movements closely. At Green’s Hotel the cluster of journalists sat around discussing the possibility of being attacked by fundamentalists or Taliban sympathizers in the middle of the night. It was terrifyingly thrilling. A few of us prowled the hotel looking for escape routes: back doors, the roof, our bedroom windows. I wondered about young, curious Mohammed from the embassy. Was he back in Afghanistan? Was he fighting?
Alyssa was wide-eyed and manic, convinced the Taliban were coming any minute. She chose the ledge outside our window as our escape route; if they came, she said, we would crawl along the narrow ledge and jump to the next building only a few feet over.
It wasn’t enough, we thought; we need a disguise. We enlisted the help of our female Pakistani interpreter and went to the market to buy blue burqas and the golden, rubbery shoes worn by Afghan refugees in the camps. Our interpreter explained that there was an art to walking in a burqa; we couldn’t just rely on the giant blue sheath to disguise us. She gave us a lesson in burqa walking. In our cramped hotel room we donned our burqas, tight netting concealing our eyes, and walked back and forth, from wall to wall.
“Not so confident,” she instructed. “Hunch your shoulders. Focus your eyes on the ground. You American women are too self-confident. Humble. Be humble.”
She tried to strip away the self-confidence we had spent years building up. We pretended to climb onto the backs of trucks by climbing on and off the bed, our burqas tangling around our ankles, tripping us as we crumbled to the floor in fits of anxious laughter.
• • •
ON OCTOBER 6, the night before the United States bombed Afghanistan, I got an e-mail from Uxval. “I want a girlfriend in flesh and blood,” it said, “not an Internet girlfriend.”
My professional high crashed. I called him immediately.
“Please, Uxval,” I begged in my mediocre Spanish, which failed me whenever I was upset. “I love you. I need to stay here just a few more weeks. The war is about to begin, and I will be home soon.”
“No. No quiero esperar más.” (I don’t want to wait anymore.) He had waited for three weeks. His voice was cold.
The telephone line crackled. Alyssa was sleeping, and I burrowed myself in the tiny bathroom with the stained toilet, pleading with him to wait for me.
“Please, my love. I am working for the New York Times! It is so important for my career to be here. A few weeks is nothing. Just give me a little more time.”
He was resolute. “I want a girlfriend who is here with me every day. Not on e-mail or on the phone.” He hung up.
I cried out loud, waking Alyssa with my sobs. “What happened?” she asked. “Is everything OK, baby?”
“Uxval just broke up with me.” I felt stupid even uttering the words. We were about to go to war.
“Oh, baby, I am sorry. But don’t worry about him …” she trailed off, half-asleep. “There will be others. If he can’t understand your life now, it will only get worse.”
• • •
THE UNITED STATES BEGAN its aerial bombing campaign in Afghanistan. None of the journalists in Peshawar tried to cross into Afghanistan at that point; as far as we knew, the Taliban still controlled the country. It would be suicide to go in until the Taliban fell. But we knew the fall of the Taliban was imminent.
The morning after the campaign started, I returned to the mosque where I had routinely visited and photographed Pakistan’s women fundamentalists. From the moment I entered, I felt uneasy. As a journalist, I assumed I would be viewed as a neutral observer, not as a propagator of American actions overseas. But in the doorway of the mosque one of the women I had photographed said, “Please. The bombing has started. The Americans are killing our Muslim brothers. You, American, are not welcome here anymore.”
I soon went off my long-sought-after assignment for the New York Times, claiming I needed a break, and flew almost nine thousand miles back to Mexico City. My roommate Michael greeted me at the door of our apartment with a confused look.
“What are you doing here? Isn’t the Taliban about to fall?”
“Uxval dumped me last week.”
“So? You came home for that?”
I wanted to board the next flight back to Pakistan. I felt like an idiot. “Yes. I need to see him face-to-face.”
I put my camera bag and luggage down in my room, put on my gym clothes, trudged over to my dismal, smelly gym, and got on the cheap stair-climber. I was so confused by what I had done. I was no longer heartbroken, no longer crying. For the first twenty-four hours after arriving in Mexico, I didn’t even call Uxval.
He heard through friends that I was back and showed up at my door as if nothing had ever happened and picked me up and carried me directly to the bedroom.
Uxval had no idea what I had sacrificed professionally to fly home to win him back. His life was exactly as I had left it: working during the day, riding bikes in the afternoon, drinking icy beers at night. I wanted to hate him, but I was deeply in love with him. Less than a month later, on the morning of my twenty-eighth birthday, we watched the fall of Kabul on television in Mexico City,
and I imagined all the journalists I had met in Peshawar scrambling over the border to get the story. I couldn’t have been farther from the action. I wasn’t sure whether I had made the right decision in flying back to Mexico—whether I wanted my personal life or my career to dictate the decisions I made, where I lived, and how I lived. But I knew that I felt unsettled, watching Kabul fall on the small TV we’d bought after the attacks of September 11. I was in the wrong place.
The Taliban’s only remaining Afghan stronghold was in the southern part of the country, in Kandahar. As they had in Peshawar, journalists were now camping out in Quetta, the Pakistani city closest to Kandahar, so they could rush in after the Americans attacked. I called Marcel in New York and let him know I wanted to go back. The New York Times Magazine put me on assignment. I promised Uxval I wouldn’t be gone long.
• • •
IN QUETTA a whole new group of about a hundred journalists was holed up in the incongruously luxurious five-star Serena Hotel, one of several hotels in South Asia built by the Aga Khan, the billionaire leader of an Islamic sect. We indulged in long breakfasts, visited the horrific Afghan refugee camps, and waited for the border to open.
Quetta was even creepier than Peshawar; there were no shops or places to walk around, and two cinemas showing American movies were attacked after the bombing started. Alcohol was banned, so we drank a lot of tea, occasionally swigging some smuggled whiskey out of water bottles. World-renowned photojournalists—everyone from Gilles Peress to Alexandra Boulat to Jerome Delay—stayed in rooms just down the hall from mine. I walked around starstruck and giddy.
One morning I was having breakfast and my phone rang. It was Uxval. My eyes lit up, and I stepped away from the table to spew my daily Te quieros (I love you’s) before heading out to work. When I sat back down at the table, Gilles Peress, who had covered Iran and Bosnia, among many other conflicts, looked at me, expressionless, and said, “Was that your boyfriend?”
Yes.
“Do you love him a lot?”
Yes.
“He will cheat on you one day.” And he walked away.
I didn’t believe him. I was still naïve then. Someday I would know what Gilles meant: that in this profession relationships ended in either infidelity or estrangement. A dual life was unsustainable.
• • •
EVERY JOURNALIST at the Serena wanted to be the first to get the news of the final fall of the Taliban in Kandahar. The competition put an extraordinary amount of pressure on all of us to take risks, and it was important to be cautious, to avoid running into heavily armed Taliban fighters as they fled or getting blown away by American air strikes that might mistake us for those Taliban fighters.
Our interpreters and drivers, who had sources inside Kandahar, kept us updated on the progress of the fighting; some journalists got intel from Washington. The camaraderie at the Serena disappeared. Photographers who had been sharing the next day’s itinerary became cagey and private. Everyone thought he had some exclusive details that would get him to Kandahar first.
One night the Pakistani government locked the front gates of the hotel to keep the journalists from leaving for Afghanistan. In order to ensure we wouldn’t get locked inside the hotel, a group of us from the New York Times sneaked over the fence and into cars awaiting us outside and drove toward a house belonging to one of our fixers inside Pakistan, but closer to the Afghan border. After what seemed like fifty phone calls to the Times’s New York and Washington bureaus, and the Pentagon, we made the decision to drive to Afghanistan.
Our mini convoy of cars passed through the same endless brown flatness I knew from my previous trips. I shared a car with another female photographer, Ruth Fremson, and two male correspondents, but most of the ride was silent with the anxiety of the unknown. We didn’t see any Afghans, any U.S. military. None of us knew whether the Taliban had fled or remained in the city. We hoped we would arrive in a liberated city, but it was hard to tell what had taken place: Afghanistan looks bombed out even when it hasn’t been bombed.
Inside Kandahar it was anarchy. Teenage boys walked through unpaved streets with rocket launchers and Kalashnikovs hanging from their necks like giant rock candy. The men—anti-Taliban or former Talibs who had switched sides—wore stacked turbans, dark kohl around their eyes, and Kalashnikovs and necklaces of ammunition strung around their necks and backs. Everyone strutted around aimlessly, milling around boxy, low-hanging storefronts with dirty awnings flapping out front. I was familiar with Afghanistan—how it looked both biblical and lifeless—but somehow the destruction and the armed men all seemed more ominous now.
The New York Times crew found several floors’ worth of rooms in a shady hotel above a bakery that dutifully churned out fresh bread several times a day. In war zones most journalists lived like nomads on a college campus: We shared rooms, meals, satellite phones, cables—anything and everything—and often moved around if a better room in a better location opened up. I had been sharing a room with Ruth, also on assignment for the Times, and I was grateful to have her as a role model: She was wise but not patronizing, started working before dawn and finished long past dusk. Every night she helped me file my pictures to New York on the satellite phone she set up in our room. Besides one other journalist who was staying at the same guesthouse, I don’t remember any other women in Kandahar at all.
The Times Magazine correspondent I had been paired with decided to profile Gul Agha Shirzai, an anti-Taliban warlord helping the Americans, who had appointed himself the new governor of Kandahar. But he, too, had killed a lot of people in his time. I assumed that the writer and I would work as a team and that the writer would help secure access for me, because writers generally want to have good pictures for their story.
On the first morning we were slated to go out together, I bounded up to him with a huge smile. “Hi!”
The fall of the Taliban in Kandahar, December 2001. Afghan men sit around outside self-appointed governor Gul Agha’s mansion.
Gul Agha after iftar dinner with supporters.
Young Afghans listen to music publicly for the first time since the fall of the Taliban.
“I think that, as a woman, you are going to ruin our access,” he said, “so it’s probably best if we do this story separately.” And he walked away. I was dumbfounded.
My survival instinct kicked in. I asked one of the interpreters from the Times team to help me get into Gul Agha’s mansion. He smiled. He knew the new governor well.
I was soon seated beside the burly Gul Agha and sharing iftar—the evening meal breaking the day’s fast during Ramadan—with a bunch of male villagers who had definitively never shared a meal with a woman outside of their family. The whole mansion was carpeted and without furniture, and rows and rows of men from surrounding areas had come to break their fast with their new leader. They looked as if they had walked out of the tenth century, cloaked in turbans and capes, their kohl-laden eyes fixed on me as they ate. I stayed close to Gul Agha, unsure of my boundaries. He encouraged me to take pictures. I lifted my camera tentatively at first and photographed the sprawling table laid out on the tattered carpet as the men feasted.
When the correspondent entered, I was still seated beside the governor. He gave me a faint nod, and I felt triumphant. His presence also emboldened me to move around the room, to photograph Gul Agha surrounded by villagers in various states of postprandial repose. The photographs were intimate, a new window into the lives of the conquering warlords who declared themselves in charge and whom the Americans would eventually prop up. My editor was pleased with the candor of the images, knowing I was working under difficult conditions.
Several days later, as the city celebrated, dozens of men and boys gathered around speakers screaming Bollywood tunes that had been banned under the Taliban. It was Christmas, and I told my editors I wouldn’t be able to stay on. It was time to go home to Uxval, my other life.
• • •
UXVAL PLANNED OUR CHRISTMAS
VACATION in a beach village on the Oaxacan coast. Within seventy-two hours of leaving Afghanistan, where I had been swaddled in scarves and couldn’t look men in the eye, I was wearing a bikini and kissing Uxval on the beach. After three weeks surrounded by thousands of refugees living in squalor in Pakistan and Afghanistan, I struggled to acclimate to the vapid world of partying Mexicans and Americans who smoked pot and drank beer all day and all night. Uxval had signed us up for surfing lessons. I was exhausted and weak from giardia, a nasty stomach ailment caused by unhygienic foods and water most probably tainted with feces, which caused constant diarrhea, burps of sulfur, weight loss, and days and nights of little sleep. But I had to step up and be a real girlfriend—an exciting, attentive, normal girlfriend—to make up for the weeks away.
I couldn’t do it. I was unable to switch off my brain. I admired the lithe, smiling women, surfing effortlessly. They seemed so happy. At night I drank a few glasses of wine, and by eleven I went home to sleep. Uxval stayed out partying until dawn. I couldn’t muster up the strength or desire to go out with people with whom I had little in common. By then most of my friends were photographers and journalists who shared my obsession with international politics, world events, and breaking news.
We started fighting. I was jealous of the women flitting around him. He was jealous of my job. We established a pattern of incredible romantic highs and tormented lows, where I saw an insecure side in myself I hadn’t even known existed. I knew I could never be the woman he needed. I feared this would be true for every man. My work would always come before everything else, because that was the nature of the work: When news broke, I had to go, and I wanted to. I knew that if I wasn’t there when the story broke, another photographer would be.
My friends and family sometimes asked why photographers didn’t just take fewer assignments to preserve their marriages or relationships, why they didn’t simply become a different type of photographer, one who worked in some sunny studio adjacent to her home. The truth was, the difference between a studio photographer and a photojournalist was the same as the difference between a political cartoonist and an abstract painter; the only thing the two had in common was the blank page. The jobs entailed different talents and different desires. Leaving at the last minute, jumping on planes, feeling a responsibility to cover wars and famines and human rights crises was my job. Not doing those things was the same as a surgeon ducking out of an emergency operation or a waitress refusing to bring a customer’s plates to the table. But I didn’t have a boss who would glare at my inadequacies—who would fire me when the patient died or the customer complained. Neglecting any aspect of my job was like firing myself.
It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War Page 8