A Door in the Earth

by Amy Waldman

  It fell to their father to broker a compromise. His strong preference was that she not go, but he wasn’t the kind of parent who would forbid it, and for this Parveen was grateful. Her cousin Fawad would escort her to the village, where she’d be safely settled with its women. That her father would make this arrangement despite his opposition moved Parveen. He also agreed to let her put the money she would get for graduation toward her ticket.

  She bought the ticket, then made an appointment with her favorite professor to tell her about her plan. Parveen had taken three anthropology courses with Nandita Banerjee, whose groundbreaking work on how cultural attitudes around disease, death, and medical care migrated across borders had earned her a named chair by the age of forty. Parveen, like many students, coveted Professor Banerjee’s brains, her confidence, and her style. She had a diamond nose piercing, kept her dark hair short and spiky, and often wore a black leather jacket that, when she grew exercised by her subject, as she frequently did, she took off, revealing arms exquisitely toned by her capoeira workouts. (Students traded tidbits about these workouts, about her yellow Vespa, about her romantic life—her partner was a Senegalese-French philosopher who commuted between Berkeley and Paris.) That she was brown-skinned and India-born only enhanced her credibility. Uncompromised by any American history of her own, she was free to speak the truth, and the lilting Bengali accent in which she spoke it didn’t hurt.

  Early on in Parveen’s tutelage, Professor Banerjee had quoted someone saying that anthropology, while purportedly allowing one to understand other cultures, was really a tool to understand one’s own. This idea seized hold of Parveen. She wanted to get far enough outside the forces, historical and cultural, that had made her examine them. During her first class with Professor Banerjee, an introduction to fieldwork, Parveen turned her lens on her peers, examining the cultural suppression of Afghan-American girls’ sexuality and the clandestine outlets it found, comparing the dutiful public faces of her friends and acquaintances with their wilder private selves. With the promise that their identities would be completely disguised, per the protocols of anthropology, she cajoled them past their nervousness and into revelations of their intimate secrets. They might as well have been confessing to crimes, they were so skittish. Parveen would conduct peculiar interviews where girls would talk about themselves in the third person, describing, for instance, extra phones they used, as if they were drug dealers on The Wire, to deceive parents who might check their photos and texts.

  In those girls’ bind, she saw her own: any action she took was either conforming to or rebelling against communal expectations about the proper way to behave. She was paranoid about keeping her own sexual history secret because she worried that her parents would be judged for her actions. When the first boy she slept with, a Nebraska biology major named Jim, called out at climax, “Par—uh, Par,” she was actually relieved that he’d forgotten her name. (The second boy, unfortunately, remembered it, which was how the news, in a very long game of Telephone, reached Parveen’s sister.) Professor Banerjee suggested that her community’s conservative attitudes toward female sexuality were not as anomalous as they appeared but of a piece with Americans’ gendered notions about how their teenagers should behave. Parveen loved her for this: It helped place Parveen’s culture in context, and so it made her feel less strange. Less foreign.

  This was during her first year at Berkeley, a time when her mother was weakening. Was it surprising that Parveen attached herself to her professor’s strength? When she went back to school in the fall of her sophomore year, her mother had passed away. Before long, she developed a fantasy of following in Professor Banerjee’s footsteps and becoming a medical anthropologist. As she would later try to explain to Waheed, she wanted to study health and illness—who gets sick and why, who gets care and why, and the ways in which culture affects these distributions. Parveen was convinced that the lack of gynecological screening among Afghan-American women was why her mother’s cervical cancer had not been diagnosed in time, a theory she confided only to Professor Banerjee.

  Now Parveen sat in a chair next to her professor’s desk, catching faint whiffs of her sandalwood perfume. On the computer monitor, new message notifications materialized and faded in silence; unlike Parveen, Professor Banerjee had the self-control not to look. Her research was stacked neatly on long metal shelves with labels that Parveen, during a work-study stint, had helped to affix. Posters of Franz Boas, Frantz Fanon, and Zora Neale Hurston were framed on the wall.

  In a rush of words, Parveen recounted finding Crane’s book, hearing his talk, and deciding to go help in his clinic. Her professor paid close attention, nodding occasionally, which gave Parveen the impression that she approved. But when Parveen finished, the first thing Professor Banerjee said was that she didn’t need to read Mother Afghanistan to know it was meretricious.

  Parveen’s mouth fell open a bit in surprise. The book had been subjected to “withering postcolonial critique” in the anthropology community and beyond, her professor said. Parveen’s own Google searches about Crane had turned up mostly encomiums to his achievement and reports on the sort of appearances that had become the stations of fame. Along with his TED Talk, he’d been to Davos and had been championed by the usual prominent white men (Charlie Rose, Tom Friedman, Tom Brokaw, David Brooks). The more sophisticated debates took place on academic listservs, like mushrooms hidden in the shade for only the knowing to find.

  Professor Banerjee objected to a white male American, however well intentioned, ventriloquizing for that most powerless of females, an Afghan village woman, thus reinforcing the very power relations he claimed to challenge. Memoirs by oppressed subjects, native people, or voiceless women were righteous, legitimate, and worthy of both pedagogy and embrace. Those by privileged Westerners—especially if they were about the oppressed, native, or voiceless—were problematic at best.

  “I would read Fereshta’s story told by Fereshta,” Professor Banerjee said, her tongue tap-dancing off that last ah.

  Parveen found enough gumption to remind her professor that Fereshta was dead, but she knew that wasn’t the point. It was as if her professor had caught her reading Us Weekly in the supermarket checkout line. When Parveen argued, politely, that Crane was critical of the way America was waging war in Afghanistan—he bluntly condemned the U.S. military’s night raids on villages, its drone strikes, its accidental bombings of wedding parties, its backing of warlords with egregious human-rights records—Professor Banerjee smiled.

  “Isn’t it interesting, then, that the military has so fervently embraced the book?” she said. “Are they in the midst of a sudden and unexpected paroxysm of self-criticism?” She paused for a beat, as if expecting Parveen to answer, then said: “I think not.” They celebrated the book, she said, because it offered a path to victory, to “winning hearts and minds,” that beloved catchphrase of theirs. The book was not against the war itself, not at all. It was simply arguing for a kinder version of it.

  She was referencing Crane’s signature coinage, “kind power.” If the Afghans think we’re here only to drop bombs and raid their homes, he wrote, we can’t blame them for wanting us out. We need to practice kind power. Rather than continuing as the hectoring yet distant father, America should act more like a loving mother. The book’s title evoked both Fereshta herself and this new role. Love came up a lot in Mother Afghanistan: the love of Afghan men for their wives, the love Americans needed to show the Afghans. Sentiment, Crane was suggesting, had a place in war and politics. That, Professor Banerjee grimly noted, was an argument a woman could never get away with making.

  “Why kind power?” she said. “Why not just kindness?” Because power, she insisted, was what it was truly all about. Power meant continued military intervention. Power meant you could revert to weapons and bombs when your kindness failed to persuade. Surely it wasn’t a coincidence that just as public support for the war was dropping, Gideon Crane came along to remind Americans why they needed to be
in Afghanistan—to save the women, of course. “Parveen, beware feminism that serves imperial or colonial interests or that, in my friend Gayatri’s perfect phrase, involves ‘white men saving brown women from brown men.’ We tell stories in order to occupy.”

  From the hallway came muffled laughter and the sound of steps dying away. It was gray and drizzling outside the office windows. Back then, it always seemed to be drizzling. Even with the lecture she was enduring, Parveen dreaded having to leave this bright cozy space. Within it, she could believe that someday she would be as successful and secure as her professor. Outside, it was harder to pretend.

  Professor Banerjee continued. Surely Parveen understood—didn’t she?—that the military’s humanitarianism was nothing more than contemporary imperialism. Worse, because Crane claimed to have been “saved” after his fraud was exposed, evangelicals believed that when he spoke of love, he was talking about Christian love for the Afghans. “You are, forgive me, naive. But all young people are, especially idealistic ones,” she consoled Parveen, who was listening while also trying to determine whether her professor threaded or sugared her brows.

  The subtexts might elude Parveen, Professor Banerjee was saying, but she hoped that her student would consider the class discussions about the historical relationships between conquistadores and missionaries or priests. Remember the East India Company and British evangelicals? “Might opens the door for mission, which in turn justifies might. Controlling land and bodies paves the way for saving souls, and saving souls solidifies control over land,” Professor Banerjee had said in her class lecture. She repeated it now.

  Crane didn’t strike Parveen as much of a missionary, although she wasn’t brave enough to say so. She wondered if her professor—and she felt disloyal even thinking this—was jealous of the four million books Crane had sold. His work had entered the national conversation in a way that Nandita Banerjee’s erudite, provocative writing had not. Academics, Parveen had observed, often mistrusted mainstream popularity, seeing in it a lack of seriousness or intellectual discernment. But was there envy beneath that contempt?

  The question felt especially uncharitable when her professor ducked out to the department refrigerator and returned with two plates of curried potatoes, bitter gourd, and rice that she’d cooked herself. Yet Parveen was unwilling to relinquish her admiration for Crane, and between mouthfuls of the food, which was delicious, she defended his work. “But women are dying in Afghanistan,” she said. “I mean, the numbers on maternal mortality, in the rural areas especially, it’s like four out of every ten women dying. They do need help, and if men are keeping them from getting it…” Her eyes watered as the memory of her parents weeping in front of the television returned. Had it been wrong for America to depose the Taliban? Wasn’t that military intervention justified, even righteous? Many of her non-Afghan friends were reflexively anti-war and anti-military, and they believed America had done far more harm than good abroad. But wasn’t that attitude just an excuse for staying home and doing nothing? America had provided her family with refuge and her with opportunity; she wanted to offer something to Afghans who hadn’t been fortunate. This wasn’t an abstract issue for her, but nor did these feel like intellectual arguments, and she didn’t want to get emotional with her professor. She despaired at this sliver of daylight between them, and it was even worse when Professor Banerjee seemed to read her mind.

  “I understand this is a sensitive question for you, Parveen,” she said. Of course the conditions for women in Afghanistan were abysmal, she went on. But she cautioned against those conditions being used as a pretext for more years of intervention, however “kind”—and here she made air quotes, in case Parveen missed her sarcasm—its nature might be. Then their conversation was interrupted by a package delivery, and when Professor Banerjee resumed talking, she seemed distracted or maybe worn out by demolishing Parveen’s naïveté. She turned to her other concern about Parveen’s plan: What sort of help was Parveen going to provide? Did she imagine herself as a community health worker? If so, what were her qualifications? How would she turn this experience to good account and convince master’s programs that she was serious?

  Parveen summoned up the courage to remind Professor Banerjee of her own history. As an undergraduate at Cambridge, she had taken a leave of absence to return to India and support tribal people resisting a dam there. Parveen pointed to a picture on the office wall, a black-and-white photograph, almost like a movie still, that showed a young Professor Banerjee with her black hair down to her butt standing hip-deep in water.

  Ah, Professor Banerjee said, but that was before she had decided on a career in academia. In fact, the experience itself had decided it for her. She’d realized that, given her education, offering physical solidarity was an empty act, whereas anthropology—done not as extraction, in which knowledge was hoarded in university halls, but in concert with native participants—could be an effective form of resistance. It could help communities see the structural forces that kept them oppressed.

  Then the professor turned unexpectedly motherly—Parveen was having trouble keeping up with her moods—and encouraged Parveen to apply for an exploratory grant from the department with the idea of doing future fieldwork in the village. It would help cover her travel expenses. And, she added, Parveen should get an IUD or bring the morning-after pill with her in case she had intercourse, “desired or, God forfend, not,” and while they were on the subject, Parveen should concoct a fiancé to deter unwanted suitors. Her professor also recommended that for the duration of her stay in the village, Parveen ought to consider becoming vegan if she wasn’t already. It was an ethical practice, of course, but the vegan diet was also less likely to result in intestinal distress.

  Professor Banerjee walked Parveen the few steps to her office door, then paused before the photo of her younger, glorious self. “Look at that girl,” she said, without a trace of wistfulness. “So jejune.”

  The word, Parveen learned when she consulted a dictionary that afternoon, was commonly used to mean “immature.” But it came from the Latin jejunus, for “hungry.”

  Chapter Four

  The Distant Fire

  PARVEEN SPENT THAT WHOLE FIRST AFTERNOON IN HER STALL, as she’d taken to thinking of her room. She swept the straw out with a handmade twig broom, then scrubbed the walls and the floor. The children watched until they lost interest. She napped a bit, wrote in her journal, and compulsively picked up her useless phone. When, toward evening, her stomach grumbled, she wandered outside. No one was in the yard. She went upstairs and found the whole family assembled for dinner, with Bina and the girls setting food out. They all looked slightly surprised to see her, as if they hadn’t counted on her joining them for meals. The boy with one hand shifted over to make room, and Waheed motioned that she should serve herself. She felt too ill at ease to eat much.

  Except for the food being served—stew, rice, spinach, beans—the scene wasn’t much different from breakfast. But for Parveen, everything had changed. Now that she knew that Shokoh was not Waheed’s daughter but his wife, all kinds of submerged currents were visible. When Waheed looked at Shokoh, Parveen saw lasciviousness in his face. Even the way he shoved rice into his mouth seemed obscene. There was a pattern in his dealings with women, she thought, a depravity even. Had he wanted Fereshta to die so he could replace her with someone younger and prettier? This made no sense, she knew, since it was Bina he’d married first. She pondered the question anyway.

  Shokoh appeared newly powerful, although she had changed only in Parveen’s eyes. There was a lushness to her that made the rest of the family look arid. Her sexual energy seemed only partly in her control, as she shifted between petulance and charm. In what was apparently a running joke, she told Waheed in a bantering tone that he should leave more food for his children. He smiled and Bina scowled. The teenager Jamshid, meanwhile, seemed unsettled by Shokoh’s proximity. She appeared to enjoy unsettling him. Seeing him looking at her, she gave a demure smile
, as if to say, Caught you again. She was barely older than he was.

  Shokoh reserved most of her attention for Parveen, plying her with questions that, while routine, seemed designed to show that she knew more about the world than the rest of the family. Had Parveen brought a computer? Did she like to read? How many books had she read? Parveen tried to address the whole family as she answered, not wanting to ally with Shokoh over the others. But she suspected that in Bina’s eyes, she already had.

  “Are you from New York?” Shokoh asked.

  “I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never been there,” Parveen said, then explained that she’d grown up on the other side of the country.

  Waheed’s oldest daughter, Hamdiya, who appeared to be a couple of years younger than Shokoh, laughed at this. Shokoh gave her a cool stare, as if to say she couldn’t possibly have gotten what was funny about it. Hamdiya looked down at her lap and didn’t speak for the rest of the meal.

  When dinner was over, Parveen hesitated, unsure whether to go help the women or stay with the men. If she went with the women, she might be expected always to be with the women, which she didn’t want, because their world was so confined. If she stayed with the men, she was implying that she was better than the women. She was overthinking it, but she had no instinct to guide her. She chose the women and for a few glorious minutes felt her choice to be correct. She could’ve been back home with her sister and her aunts cleaning up after an engagement party, laughing and chattering in the kitchen, although the kitchen here had no sink, stove, or refrigerator. It was merely a raised platform that contained a cooking fire big enough for a huge pot, a small propane tank onto which another pot could be placed, an oven dug into the ground for baking bread, and space for food preparation and washing. Any leftover food was fed to the animals, and the water with which the dishes were washed was poured into the garden. Nothing went to waste.