The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan by Jenny Nordberg

Author:Jenny Nordberg [Nordberg, Jenny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307952516
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2014-09-15T22:00:00+00:00

IN HER NEW domestic life, the sudden restrictions on movement bothered Shukria—as a newlywed, it took time to grasp the fact that she could not leave the house when she wanted to. Several times, she just walked right out the door on her own, only to be quickly brought back inside and reprimanded. Her husband’s family told her she was a little “silly in the head,” and she agreed something was not right with her. Several times, she promised to listen better and remember things.

Even more disturbing, to herself and the family, was her inability to perform the most basic female tasks. She was told such skills came naturally to women. But she seemed to lack any innate female gift for creating order, beauty, and peace around her. Yes, something was clearly wrong with her, Shukria concluded. Dinner was served raw or burned. Laundered clothes were not clean, even though her hands itched after soaking in water for hours. When she tried to mend a lapel on her husband’s jacket, her fingers seemed too large, and the needle would escape. When her mother-in-law tried to teach her how to clean floors, Shukria knocked over the buckets of water and created such a mess that she was sent to her room.

She worked on her exterior, trying to arrange her hair in ways that would look more feminine. With much time and effort in front of a mirror, she found that at least sometimes her curly hair could be flattened and made to behave. As it grew longer, it would hang down her back instead of stand straight out from her head, the way she had always liked it. But when she met other women, they still told her she looked odd.

But these were her new friends, with whom she was mostly confined to the dark indoors, with curtains drawn and windows painted black. When she did brave Kabul’s thick dust outside, always with the required male escort, she could never go exactly where she wanted. She could hardly see anything through the burka’s small grid, either. Taliban rule was perhaps the worst time to become a woman, and Shukria’s life came to consist of a lot more sitting quietly in dimly lit rooms. But an invitation to take tea with other women in the neighborhood or even her husband’s female relatives always made her extremely nervous.

Trouble would begin at the greeting.

The three cheek kisses exchanged between women seemed overly intimate. Shukria had never been that close to another woman and it was strange to feel their skin against hers and to smell them. It made her embarrassed. Their skin was softer, too. Some had offered to share their face cream but Shukria decided she could not stand its sweet smell.

The all-female gatherings presented more challenges: Proper women sit on their feet, with their legs neatly tucked underneath them, having been taught to do so since childhood. Shukria, who was used to spreading her legs wide as soon as she sat down, tried hard to endure the pain that invariably ensued in the new position.

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