by Anand Gopal
* * *
Afghanistan’s second presidential election was scheduled for the late summer of 2009. For Heela, it was impossible not to relive that autumn week five years earlier. Sometimes she spoke to Hajji Akhund about it, but mostly she kept her thoughts to herself.
That summer, Hajji Akhund found temporary work for her at an aid agency whose focus was raising election awareness among women. It felt like Khas Uruzgan all over again. She and the team would travel to outlying villages where a sympathetic malek might allow her to visit house to house. Most women took her pamphlets, but she knew that few would actually vote.
A month into the job, she was flown to Kabul for an elections workshop. She spent two days cloistered in an office with no chance to explore the city of her birth, just as if the Taliban were still running affairs. On returning to the airport, she took leave of her mahrem and slipped into the bathroom to exchange her hijab for an Uruzgani burqa. As she walked out, she noticed that she’d forgotten to change her heels for flats, but she was running late so she told herself she’d do it later.
The waiting room was packed with farmers and businessmen who looked like farmers, with crying children and clutches of burqa-clad women. The place smelled like a stable. Heela closed her eyes and waited for the flight announcement. Suddenly a group of men burst in, shouting, and people seated on the ground scattered away. The men kicked boys who did not move fast enough and put their hands on women to clear space. They pushed whole rows of plastic chairs to one side.
“What’s happening?” Heela asked her mahrem.
He walked over to take a look and returned. “The meshr is coming.”
“Here? He’s coming here?”
“He’s flying back to Uruzgan today. He was visiting Kabul.”
The door swung open again and more men streamed in. They wore rich gray and silver turbans, and some had walkie-talkies. Then they parted to reveal Matiullah Khan. Some people ran up and clasped his hand. Others simply stared. Suddenly, to Heela’s horror, he walked right toward the chairs where she was seated.
He exchanged greetings with the men nearby and then peered into Heela’s burqa-shrouded face. “Who’s this?”
“That’s hajjanay,” one of them said. There were only a few females in all of Uruzgan who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and only one likely to be in Kabul. Matiullah laughed and pointed to her shoes. “Great to meet you. I didn’t know you were such a fashionable woman!”
Heela couldn’t make a sound. In a life vulnerable to the whims of strongmen, every word had to be chosen with the utmost care.
“You do speak, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she said quietly. He was taller than she expected, and simpler, too. He wasn’t carrying a weapon. His clothes were old and dirty. He slouched, his arms close to his sides. This was the king of Uruzgan? She began to feel a little better, more sure of herself. The two started talking. Heela explained the work she had done in the previous elections, pinning Musqinyar’s murder on the Taliban just to be safe.
It was then that he asked, “Do you want to work for me?”
“Doing what?”
“We’re setting up a campaign office for President Karzai in Uruzgan. I want you to run the women’s section.”
Heela wondered if this was why Matiullah had taken an interest in her over the months, why he had been so quick to come to her rescue. She wasn’t sure how to respond.
He smiled and said, “You have to be a brave woman doing the work you do in Uruzgan. That’s why I want you.”
* * *
The campaign office was situated on the ground floor of a large house in central Tirin Kot. Photographs of Karzai with various tribal elders adorned the walls, and an American flag hung in one corner. Heela’s days became a blur of appointments with election workers and Karzai boosters and government officials checking on the work. The goal was to ensure that women cast ballots, or, even better, that their husbands did so on their behalf. The men in the office performed the valuable work of liaising with the village elders and maleks, for whom a vote was not an exercise of democracy but a down payment on access, an effort to ensure that the right people were in power when the time came to call in a favor. So votes typically came in blocks, and it wasn’t unusual for a village to report 90 percent support for a single candidate.
The real problem, as Heela and her colleagues quickly realized, was that with so little of the countryside under government control, only a few villages would vote on election day. A Taliban campaign to intimidate potential voters was already in full swing, which meant the campaign staff would need to get creative to avoid the embarrassment of a minuscule turnout. Arrangements were made with maleks province-wide to return full ballot boxes by whatever means they saw fit. Heela knew that there was no other option, and so as long as she got to travel, she was content. An adviser from Kabul had provided her with thousands of new pamphlets for housewives, which she took on escorted trips to the few villages outside Tirin Kot where it was still safe to visit. She would speak to housewives about President Karzai. Usually they would listen politely until she finished and then ask her about life in Kabul. They found her stories of streets and markets open to women hard to fathom and while some of them admired such a lifestyle, most condemned it.
When she wasn’t traveling, work was slow, and Heela found herself drifting from meeting to meeting. Things picked up only when a new team arrived from Kabul that included Hanifi, an old friend of Musqinyar’s. He had been serving on the provincial council, an elected body of a dozen members that was supposed to advise the governor. Each province designated two of its councilors to serve as senators in the upper house of parliament in Kabul. When one of Uruzgan’s members bowed out before his term was up, Hanifi, a well-regarded tribal elder, had been chosen as his temporary replacement. Now, returning to Uruzgan for the campaign season, he served as Heela’s guardian as they visited neighborhoods across Tirin Kot.
For Heela, Hanifi’s arrival was both a breath of fresh air and a painful pull at the heart. No one at the office understood her ordeal; most of her coworkers, in fact, didn’t even know her story. But Hanifi was a Khas Uruzgan native, and Heela felt that she could confide in him. At the same time, he was fresh from Kabul, and it was impossible not to wonder what life might have been like had she never left her home city. Where would they be now? Musqinyar would be working for the health ministry. She would be teaching schoolchildren, maybe girls. Omaid would be at university. Almost nightly she dreamed that she was wandering through Kabul’s streets, searching for Musqinyar and the children. She would hear their voices around every corner, but when she looked it would be empty. The Kabul of her dreams was not the place of her childhood, but the modern version that Hanifi told her about, a chaotic metropolis of luxury hotels and blast walls and unbearable traffic. It was not any city she could identify, yet even so she felt that Kabul was hers.
In fact, Heela was known in the neighborhood as “the Kabul woman,” and Hanifi could see why. She spoke with a certain city-bred confidence that set her apart from the few other women he’d met in Uruzgan. Her mind worked like that of a Kabuli. She even walked like one. So one day, in the midst of a long conversation about work, he asked her, “Do you really want to go to Kabul?”
She told him she did.
“Then you should run for the provincial council.”
By law, two of the twelve council seats were reserved for women. And council members did often travel to Kabul for training and meetings with officials. Heela laughed and jokingly said she’d do it. But she saw that Hanifi was dead serious. He looked at her thoughtfully, and then the conversation turned elsewhere. Back at home, Heela sent out the boys to buy cooking oil and vegetables and naan. As she set about making dinner, she found her thoughts wandering back to their discussion. Could a housewife really run for the council? What would people say?
Weeks passed and Hanifi never mentioned it again, and Heela began to feel foolish for having even considered it.
What she did not know, however, was that Hanifi had already broached the subject with Matiullah Khan. The meshr, of course, had had his eye on Heela for quite some time. She was a rare and potentially useful commodity, for only educated women could work in government. Various forces were trying to block Matiullah’s ascent to absolute power—the Dutch, for instance, who (unlike the Americans) worried about his human rights record, and local officials such as the Uruzgan chief of police, who bristled at his informal authority. Matiullah needed to stack the local government with allies. Now it appeared that his stars—and Heela’s—were about to align.
* * *
Hanifi arrived at the office one morning and handed Heela a few hundred dollars. “For registration,” he said.
They found a boy to act as her guardian during the registration process. By that afternoon, Heela was officially running for a seat on the provincial council.
Matiullah Khan provided her with a car and a staff, and that summer she went almost daily from house to house around Tirin Kot and a few select villages nearby. She sat across from maleks in her burqa, her guardian by her side, and discussed village needs, a careful political dance that involved making promises and offering favors in the guise of polite generalities. It was the subtle give-and-take that Musqinyar had been so adept at, the sort of honor-conscious repartee where the quick-witted and gracious thrived—and she turned out to be a natural. She distributed fertilizer and seeds to farmers, chickens to poor widows, and notebooks to schoolchildren. She played up her credentials as a potential access broker, touting her ability to arrange visits from Kabul officials and reminding people of her own time in that city.
Around town, Matiullah’s men put up campaign posters—with her face exposed, following regulations—and printed ten thousand leaflets with her image. It wasn’t long before Heela became a household name in Tirin Kot. It was true that the population of Tirin Kot represented a tiny percentage of the electorate, but this would matter little. Rather, her presence around town was a clear signal to elders and power brokers that the forces that mattered stood behind her.
For the international community, however, numbers were everything. Their claims of legitimacy hinged on Afghanistan being an unfolding democracy, and a low turnout would be disastrous. So Western officials pushed ahead, insisting that the vote would go off without a hitch, even though holding polls in an embattled country with a nearly nonexistent state was like building a dam where there was no water, a project only for show. The UN and other agencies covered up growing evidence of fraud, and the charade continued up to election day, despite overwhelming evidence of ballot-stuffing on Karzai’s behalf. In most of Uruzgan, there had hardly been anything resembling an election at all.
Still, “votes” were tallied and winners declared. Heela sat at the campaign headquarters with the rest of the team as merchants and wealthy farmers periodically stopped by to check on the results. Outside, she could hear occasional gunfire and the deep thuds of rocket explosions.
Late in the afternoon, Hanifi burst into the room, beaming. “Hello wakil,” he said.
It took a moment for the word to register. Lawmaker.
With the quota system, Heela effectively had run only against other female candidates, all of them Hazaras. Without a ballot-stuffing operation of her own, she had received just seven hundred votes—2 percent of the total—but it was enough for victory. She immediately dialed one of Matiullah’s wives, with whom she had become friendly, to share the news. For the rest of the afternoon, government officials, tribal elders, maleks, and even local farmers came to congratulate her. Matiullah sent a car for her, and when she went looking for her mahrem, the driver told her: “You’re a wakil now, you don’t need anyone.” Not quite a man, but no longer just a woman, in victory she had become a category unto herself.
At Matiullah’s compound she met yet more dignitaries. It occurred to her that she had no idea what to do next, how to actually be a provincial council member. But she wasn’t bothered, not when she was standing there talking and laughing with the governor and the police chief and other men she’d only heard about until this day. It was not long before the meshr himself arrived to congratulate the victors, then promptly left. His aide announced that he would be returning that evening.
The group sat down to discuss the coming senate selections: each provincial council was to pick two of its members for the senate in Kabul. Everyone knew that whoever was anointed would function as a de facto representative of Matiullah, whether they wanted to or not, since you could not get selected without his approval. And the meshr, under pressure from the interior minister to rein in his militia, needed allies in the capital at least as much as he needed them in local government.
The discussion lasted an hour. Abdul Ali insisted that he deserved to go because his Hazaras had made up the bulk of the actual turnout. After much wrangling, Uruzgan governor Asadullah Hamdam threw his support behind Ali and the mood began to tilt in his favor.
That was when Heela spoke up. “I think I should go.” Everyone turned and stared at her. She regretted the words as soon as they came out of her mouth.
“What?” said Hamdam. “A woman senator?”
Whatever thoughts Heela had of dropping the matter instantly dissolved. “There are other women senators,” she said calmly. “I have a lot of support from the people. And besides, I’m from Kabul. I know the culture well.”
“This is Uruzgan,” Hamdam reminded her. “We don’t send women.” The others concurred.
After the meeting, she worked up the courage to call Matiullah directly. He sounded annoyed by her open campaigning and curtly informed her that she would have to “allow the system to do its work.”
Heela went back to the provincial council office feeling slightly ridiculous. She had overreached, letting the first taste of power go to her head. Governor Hamdam and the others knew better than she—they’d been doing this for years.
After dinner, a call came from the Independent Election Commission in Kabul. The first senatorial seat for Uruzgan was going to Hajji Azmi, a newly elected councilor and tribal elder.
The second seat was awarded to Heela.
* * *
In Heela’s dream, a deep purple covered the nighttime sky, so deep that she couldn’t see the stars. She was standing on the roof, colder than she had felt in years. All around her mountains rose from the earth, blue and dark and jagged, stretching as far as the eye could see. There were houses built right into the mountainside—hundreds of them, lit up like candles, like some votive offering from the earth itself. All around her, thousands of women, in all manner of clothing, were standing and watching, waiting for her. “I was giving a speech,” she recalled. “Everyone was listening to every word.” And there were those mountains, unlike any in Uruzgan, yet so strangely familiar—the mountains of her childhood.
When she awoke, she dressed quickly and stepped out into the crowded streets of Microrayon, her old Kabul neighborhood. Hailing a taxi, she watched the passing scenes as if she had stumbled onto a lost world. A new city had sprung up during her fifteen-year absence, leaving hardly a trace of the civil war that had devoured its predecessor. She saw steel glass buildings and foreign banks and supermarkets. She saw women in headscarves and girls in school uniforms, men in suits and boys in jeans.
Within city limits the ongoing insurgency had been largely kept at bay, but traffic conquered all. The car worked its way slowly to the western edge of town, turning through a roundabout onto a broad, busy road. It was here that, during the civil war, militiamen had ordered a pregnant woman out of her taxi to give birth in full view of everyone. In that spot now stood a traffic policeman’s stand. Farther on she passed the street corner where, during her Taliban-sanctioned nurse training trip, she had witnessed a whip-wielding religious officer chasing boys through the rubble. In place of that rubble there now stood a gaudy glass structure, its enormous sign announcing the Kabul Dubai Wedding Hall. Blinking neon lights and
large plastic flowers adorned the front entrance.
Farther on down the road, the traffic ground to a complete halt, so Heela paid the driver and walked. She turned down a side street leading into a maze of blast walls. Armed men stood near a driveway checking credentials. Journalists loitered nearby, some setting up cameras. It was the inaugural day for the new parliament. Other members of the senate were pulling up in tinted SUVs. Heela approached the gate on foot. Seeing that she was a woman, the guards waved her on. She entered a wide parking lot and made her way toward a registration table. A man was slouching behind it.
“What do you need?” he said.
“I’m a new senator from Uruzgan,” she replied.
He sat up. “I’m sorry, Senator sahiba.” He ruffled through his papers. “Welcome. We’ll take care of everything.” He pulled out some documents and proceeded to take down her information. Another man in a three-piece suit appeared and escorted Heela to a waiting room, where she was photographed and processed.
“So you are Heela,” he said. “Senator Heela. But what’s your full name? Your father or your husband?”
Heela didn’t know what to say. She thought for a moment about Musqinyar, about her long-gone life in Khas Uruzgan. Was she Heela Musqinyar? That was the tradition, to take your husband’s name, even as a widow. What would Musqinyar have wanted?
No, she decided. She had done this on her own. She was there to represent the people of Uruzgan, and her tribe, the Achekzais. It was a new beginning, and whatever hope had drained from her country, she still believed in a future that could be reclaimed.