Afghan Women Wait for Their Closed World to Open

The girl had been in the world just a few hours when they carried her out of the darkness, over the dirt yard and to the house where the hidden women of her clan awaited her arrival. They had been waiting all day, but they didn’t mind. These women have been waiting in these dim rooms for years, waiting so long that they have turned anticipation into a state of grace.

They have waited for the neighborhood schools to reopen, for permission to show their faces in public and for the right to walk out the front gate to the mud road. They have waited for decades of war to pass out of these valleys and farms, for one government after the next to swell and crumble, and for new men to rush forward to unleash new laws.

A few weeks back they learned from the BBC’s scratchy Pashto-language broadcasts that the Taliban regime had collapsed, and they were glad. But they aren’t celebrating yet. The new government is still arranging itself. They are waiting for their world to change.

This nation of war and waiting is on the cusp of new times. In European conference halls, in the monolithic palace here of Nangarhar province’s governor and on the hard snows of the mountains where the guerrillas and terrorists plot their clashes, the future is arranging itself.

And on this quiet street, a girl is brought home. Afghanistan is full of streets like this--house after house of women locked away, out of sight, growing older in relentless privacy.

“The baby is here,” said her aunt, Khaista Baigum, and the family spilled into the yard to regard the child in the buttery light from the sitting room window. “Come and see, she’s here.”

When the men withdrew to talk politics, the women clustered around the new mother. Pale and silent, Sediqa lay with blankets to her chin as her sister-in-law dribbled tea into the baby’s mouth.

These women have rarely been out of the house in recent years. Their husbands are trained doctors and merchants and engineers, but none of the wives has the equivalent of a middle school education.

“You knew English, and you never taught us,” Rina, who like many Afghans goes by one name, said to her uncle. She is 15, already promised in marriage to a cousin. “You should have taught us English.”

The women can’t remember the last time they shopped in the bazaar, or ate a picnic, or strolled in the park. They cook and sew, but for safety’s sake relinquish the purchase of vegetables, meat and fabrics to the men.

Afghan women have never had a golden era. The closest anybody can recall was the last years of the four-decade reign of the nation’s king, Mohammad Zaher Shah. Back then, people here boast, women wore Western clothes. Some of them even worked in offices. “The women were free,” said Naseer Ahmed, the baby’s 28-year-old father.

But Zaher Shah was ousted in 1973, and a string of governments and coups and military occupations ensued. Eventually, tribal warriors took over, and beat and robbed their way through the country. During the early 1990s, the soldiers closed most girls’ schools and frequently kidnapped stray children and took them into the mountains for ransom.

A Universe Shrunk to a String of Rooms

Those years were grim enough. But it took the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban movement to forbid women to attend school, work at outside jobs or show their faces in the street. It was also the Taliban that dictated the use of burkas, the opaque gowns that obscure the face and turn a feminine figure into a clumsy bundle.

“We knew they hated women, and we were afraid,” said Sediqa, 22. “They said we had to wear our burkas, so we wore them. But they beat us anyway. We knew it wasn’t safe to go out into the streets.”

So the women stay home, shrinking their universe to a barren string of rooms with a mud roof and a dirt floor. Sediqa and her husband live with his mother, his three brothers and their wives and children. The house is a series of layers leading inward from public to private. High walls face the street.

The yard inside is a shrieking cacophony of chickens and children and neighbors. Women swish socks in a tub, draw water at the well and scoop babies onto their hips. But at the footfall of an unknown man, a liquid change occurs: The women scurry into back rooms and are gone.

They have radios stashed in the house; they have learned politics and current events from the BBC broadcasts. They remember their history, their governments and the few people they have known. Their memories are not crowded.

Now, they are waiting for news.

Their hopes are relatively small. They aren’t worried about work or the vote, because there are no elections and few jobs. They are not protesting the tradition of selling daughters into arranged marriages. They want to walk in the streets again, to shop for radishes and chicken and to send their daughters to school for a few years before it’s time to get married.

“We don’t expect to have freedom for women,” said Najla, who lives next door.

“It’s just that first we want peace and rehabilitation,” said her sister, Sima. “That doesn’t mean we like the burkas, but we have bigger problems.”

These households, like so many others in Afghanistan, have been weighed down by unemployment. The nongovernmental group that hired Naseer to design roads, bridges and irrigation canals was shut down near the end of the Taliban regime. The doctor in the family is peddling wheat. The medical student spends his days with the women, waiting for school to reopen.

Since the Taliban abandoned Jalalabad last month, a band of exiled tribal commanders has controlled the city. The moujahedeen are back: ragtag armies hauling their Kalashnikov assault rifles, smoking hash and terrorizing shoppers. They are enforcing the law, but the nature of that law remains a fluid and dangerous question.

In this wobbly new political climate, the women can’t guess what new laws will govern their movements. And they are not taking any chances. They still haven’t ventured into the streets. The last time, they learned the hard way.

Everybody remembers the day in 1996 when Najla’s grandmother left home to call on a daughter. There was no money for a taxi, so the 75-year-old went walking. She didn’t wear a burka, because she was frail and nearsighted and the netted face covering was too uncomfortable.

The Taliban had not been in power very long. Afghans were still learning the regime’s ways.

Nor far from home, Jawhar Nisa was halted by the religious police. They yelled at the old woman, said that her robes and veil were immodest, that she was violating the laws of Islam. They beat her with lead rods and bamboo sticks. Then they ushered her home, bruised and bloodied, and scolded the family for letting the old woman wander the streets without proper dress.

“I knew then that I hated the Taliban, and they were different,” said Anisgul, her 60-year-old daughter. “Other times, things had been bad. But nobody had beaten an old woman before.”

The warning was clear--and effective. It was then that the women of this street stopped going out.

Provocative Clothing the World Never Sees

In the yard, they split firewood and hoist water. Inside, they spritz perfume so the air smells sweet. When they talk, they pet one another’s arms and stroke the children’s hair. They are bawdy at times. “That’s my husband,” Rina giggled one day, pointing at an aunt’s pregnant belly.

They have pierced noses, brilliant eyes and dark hair woven into complicated braids. Their clothing is elaborate, colorful and even provocative: Embroidered scarves arranged over their braids, brilliant vines creeping up sleeves, a wink of bead, a glimmer of gold thread, and lace shawls.

The world never sees any of it. Sediqa ripped off her burka one afternoon with a sneer and threw it onto a bed.

“When we are not afraid of the government, I’ll put it away and never wear it again,” said Shirina, Sediqa’s 14-year-old niece, who can barely recall her school days. “There will be no shame for us.”

These are days of guarded hope. The girls’ schools are supposed to reopen soon. It’s too late for the women; their wishes are on their daughters’ behalf.

When the baby arrived at the home, one of the new father’s brothers shook his head and whispered: “This is not so good for Naseer, because it’s his firstborn. Everybody wants his firstborn to be a boy.”

But Naseer clicked his tongue and offered another view. “For me, they’re both good,” he said. “A boy is OK, a girl is OK.” He grinned, and offered one of his favorite platitudes: “This is a democratic house.”

Later at the bedside of the new mother, Rina slipped a cassette into a dusty tape player. Indian music wailed from the speakers. There was music here all along, even when the Taliban banned song and the men of the family had to smuggle cassettes from Pakistan.

In the cramped little room, the women were stomping, shaking their hips and drawing small pictures with their fingers, their arms arched overhead. Even the smallest girls, the ones who were babies when the Taliban came, know how to dance.

They learned from their mothers and aunts, even when it was illegal, even when the women were weary from chores, even when the government told them it was frivolous and wanton. The women didn’t care. They were sure dancing would come back one day.

If it does, they want their daughters to be ready.