I Am a Bacha Posh Read online

  I promised myself I would never give up being faithful to what I was in my heart. My mother needed me; I had to help and protect her. She needed a son and not a daughter. I have a brother and a sister, but my brother was too small to assume the tasks of a man, and my sister could fill the roles of a woman well.

  The speech of the mullah had at least made me understand that I was at great risk, but I was courageous, and nothing frightened me. Only my body could betray me, but still everything indicated that I was born to be a man. Unless . . . it was my mind that created this metamorphosis.

  At the time, I was tall, much taller than a majority of the girls. My stature was nothing for the boys to be envious of, though. My face is ugly enough to not draw attention to me. I would go out with a turban on my head, a piece of seven-meter long fabric that my father bought and that I wrapped around my skull. The men of the region generally wore a pakol—a large wool beret that looks like a cake on top of the head. The commander Massoud would go on to make this famous to the whole world a few years later. I opted for a gray turban with black stripes; it complemented my sand-colored shalwar kameez, which had replaced the blue one I wore as a child. This ensemble became the uniform under which I tied down my budding chest with a tight strip of fabric. Disguised, nobody ever imagined that I was a girl.

  My father left to go to the bazaar in Khost, the great city I dreamed of. As a child, it seemed so far away, inaccessible, but with my bike, I got there in less than thirty minutes! The city was dusty and noisy. I loved the liveliness of the streets; on them I saw horses, camels, and cars—until that moment, I had never seen cars before.

  To me, the bazaar always seemed to be the center of the world; everything converged there: men met there to chat and smoke some bidis (these thin cigarettes that smell like burned earth), anxious women scurried like shadows under their burqas, merchants pushed carts weighed down by mountains of appetizing fruits and vegetables, porters snuck into the crowd loaded with pieces of meat covered in swarms of flies. The disgusting smells mingled with the freshness of herbs; the powdered spices always stung my eyes and made me cough. When I was there, I was drunk with the colors, flavors, and noises, and I felt good.

  At my first bazaar, I was comforted that nobody knew me, and when I bought watermelons or grapes, they called me halaka, “the boy.” I was at the pinnacle of happiness because halaka means more than “boy” in Pashto—this literally means “he who is free and moves without restriction.” I bought men’s clothing for me and women’s clothing for my family acquaintances. The neighbors who had known me since my childhood trusted me with this task: they came into Khost only once a year because a man had to accompany them. So, when they needed a piece of fabric for a dress or whatnot, they asked me, the only woman who did not need anyone to take her into town and do the shopping at the bazaar. I was actually able to buy what I wanted; the merchants did not suspect anything. I was free, as free as a man!

  In the village, things were not so simple. There were those who officially knew that I was a woman, such as my relatives. There were those who had learned under the seal of confidence, but never talked about it, out of respect to my father. And there were those who listened to the rumors. These are the ones I worried about the most. One evening, when I returned from the pastures with my flock, I passed two girls from the neighboring village. They made fun of me: “You’re not a real man, you just changed your clothes!”

  I replied, “Stop, you don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  But they continued, and they laughed loudly. I thought they were ugly and stupid. My blood began to boil. I leapt, grabbed them by the hair, and dragged them up to the creek that runs close by. Then I pushed their heads under water. They got away from me and ran away, frightened.

  Through this experience, I discovered that violence can take my heart and make me lift mountains. I was stupefied by my reaction: I did not want them to pierce my secret; I certainly did not want them to take me for a half-man. And then I smiled: I had the strength of a man, but I fought like a woman by pulling hair! I still had a lot of progress to make. One day, I will have a weapon, I thought. I made this my new oath.

  This incident nevertheless changed my relationship with others. I avoided going out; I preferred to stay inside the close circle of those who knew. I became closer to my mother; I was the only one who took care of her, who helped and protected her. Especially against her husband, my father.

  I remember one day when I dared, for the first time, to fight him. It was in the middle of the day—he had come home from the fields where he was working for lunch. He knocked at the door so my mother would open it for him. Once, twice: my mother did not hear it; she was cooking. With the third knock, she rushed to the door and was met by my father, whose fists raged across her face. Then he continued his vengeful job with a stick, taking it down on her. She was silent, like a corpse. I arrived then and discovered my father shouting at and beating my mother. I told him to stop, but he didn’t listen. So, I grabbed the stick, slapped my father in the face, and grabbed him by the beard. He left his prey and turned toward me, continuing his rage. But I ran faster than him and escaped. I was fifteen years old, and I had just fought my father.

  Would a son defend his mother like this? Impossible! His father would never forgive him; he would be covered in shame. A son takes the side of the father; he may even help to correct his father’s wife, his own mother. Never the reverse. But because I am a girl, my father forgave me. It’s quite normal: after all, I have the weak heart of a woman. For my mother, I was, on the other hand, the ideal child: I was close with her as a daughter is to her mother, and I had the strength of a boy to help with domestic tasks. The heart of a woman in the body of a man. My mother told me often, “It breaks my heart, but you must marry, so that you have children, a beautiful life.” I don’t know what a “beautiful life” meant. To have a husband, children, and be part of these invisible people, these groups of wrapped-up women, hidden, concealed, subtracted, and beaten? Is this what she meant?

  I preferred to stay as I was. I did not want to sacrifice a part of myself and be alone only to become a bakri, an old lady.

  I had a secret. When I was afraid of the consequences of my choice, I would dream of Badgai. Since my childhood, I had heard of this woman in the mountains who defied the laws and imposed her will. She was very well known in our district. Even my father spoke of her to me with admiration. Badgai became famous in the time of King Amanullah Khan, the founder of the kingdom of Afghanistan. I loved to make my father tell the story; he even took pleasure in telling the epic story on winter evenings. We sat around him and the wood-burning stove, and my brother and I listened to him with our full attention:

  “The Amir Amanullah Khan had led the kingdom since the twenties. He wanted to continue the policy of his father, the King Habibullah, to modernize the country so that he could live like a Westerner. He founded schools in Kabul to teach foreign languages, but he wanted to change too much too quickly and came too close to our traditions: with him, we no longer had the right to several wives, we had to ask permission to marry a girl, and he also wanted our women to be able to leave without a veil! What a lack of respect for them! The Shinwaris, the Pashtuns of the east, led an uprising. Badgai’s family belonged to the Shinwaris tribe. Two of her brothers went to Kabul to join the Amanullah army; they never returned. They were captured and executed in Kabul. And do you know what she did? She went to Kabul to ask for the bodies of her assassinated brothers!”

  “But how, Father?” I asked him, wide-eyed, the first time he told me this story. “Badgai is a woman!”

  “Because Badgai dressed like a man! She wore her brothers’ clothes, covered her head with a turban, and took weapons and two horses with her. She went to look for her two nephews, the two sons of her deceased brothers, the children. She traveled through the mountains and deserts with them, day and night, without stopping. At dawn of the third day, she arrived at the king’s palace. Only to fi
nd that King Amanullah had abdicated. He had fled to Europe! But she was not discouraged; she asked to meet with his successor, Mohammad Nadir Shah, a true king, a defender of our values! He allowed her to speak with him, believe it or not! And he handed over the bodies of her two brothers.”

  The first time I listened to this story, I was petrified. I believed that I was Badgai. I envisioned myself straddling a white qategani horse to go ask for accounts from the king. I would have liked to have her courage, her determination, and to live during this time. My father continued; the respect he had for Badgai was clear. His face, usually so severe, shone.

  “She brought home the deceased and bloodied remains strapped on the horses. When she arrived, her clothes were covered in blood, and her hands in gold. The king not only gave her the bodies, but also gave her land near Khost.”

  Upon her return, Badgai became a hero, for men as well as women. The King Nadir Shah made her one of his interlocutors in the province. She met with the governors and powerful authority figures. The villagers came to speak with her, to ask for help in obtaining admission into an administration or school in the capital. She was a symbolic figure because she was the first woman who dared wear men’s clothing and sustain herself for the needs of her family following the murders of her two loving brothers.

  I found a photo of her: I can guess she had the stature and strength of a man. She was wearing a turban, like me, and a shalwar kameez. Without knowing, I imitated her. When I was a child, she was still living in her village in the mountains, and I promised myself that I would go there one day. If only I could meet her! I thought. She could help me with the decision that I was going to make.

  In the Pashtun community, Badgai, who was very conservative, demanded respect. It was all a paradox. On horseback, she went and defied the king, and in doing so, she acquired a freedom no other woman ever had before. I understood that, to be free, I had to follow this path: not to clash with the code of beliefs of our tribes, but fight with the weapons of the other sex—bee like a man to escape my destiny as a woman. There was no other choice.

  The traditions of Islam ensure that it is not so. We can dress our daughter as a boy and make her do work in the fields like a man, and the religious authorities do not care. Puberty marks the time of separation of the sexes; when the blood flows from our bellies, it draws an impassable red line between childhood and adulthood, between women and men. We must return to our respective roles and travel the path put out for us by Allah.

  Allah. I had many conversations with him. Because I was a woman, I could not enter the mosque in the village. I addressed my prayers to Him from the small carpet in my room turned toward the window that, by chance, faced the direction of Mecca. I watched the faraway mountains awaken under the heat of the first rays of sunlight. I could not cheat Him, and I wanted to show myself as I was. Only in this moment, face-to-face with Him, I put a white veil on my turban. My head was covered like a woman. But I did not press my hands to my chest; I put them on my belly. I did not put my feet together, but let them separate gently, like a man. “I do not commit sin,” I told Him, “I am honest with You.” These little arrangements with religion were not suitable for my father, and even less so with the mullah of the village, who now came every week to speak with him. My father had planned his pilgrimage to Mecca. He wanted the situation resolved before his departure, so that he would not have to suffer the divine judgment. But this was no longer possible for me; it was too late. I had tasted the freedom of men; I saw the other girls my age disappear from the streets, become invisible. I did not want to give up. I would be ashamed to abandon this, to not have the courage to say no. Having lived fifteen years in the flesh of a boy had given me the strength of character to carry on. I did not integrate from my childhood the codes of our Pashtun community as the other girls had; I saw the limits and injustices in them, and I could not accept them. I said to my father: “You chose to make me your son; now it is my choice to stay this way.” Fighting erupted, and at the same time, my father felt guilty. Everything was his fault, after all.

  We did not speak to each other for a few days. On the eve of his departure to Mecca, he tried one last time: “You are committing a sin, and Iam responsible for it. I am going to leave, and I cannot go before God this way. You must go back to your original sex.” He went on: “You must dress yourself as a woman, get married, and have children—it cannot be any other way. It is my responsibility; I must tell you this and advise you.”

  Calmly, I responded, “No thank you, Father. That’s very nice on your part. I prefer not to have a husband or children and choose my own life.”

  He understood then that there was nothing else he could do.

  “Then promise me that one day you, too, will go to Mecca to wash away our sins.”

  I promised. Sincerely. One day I would go to Mecca. I think that, in fact, my father wouldn’t have liked that I became his true daughter. He made this decision with my mother, after all. They were in need of a son, and I had supported my family more than anyone else: I became the best son.

  I was finally at peace. This woman’s body was more than a triviality; I knew that I had the determination of a man. I managed to stop my father, after all! From the window in my bedroom, I saw the rammed earth houses of the village, the almond trees drooping, weighed down by their pale pink flowers, the green and golden fields of wheat swept away by a gentle springtime breeze. It was my birth season. My father left for Mecca, and it seemed as though I’d been born again. I was no longer an infant whose fate was decided for her. I was a human being who would build her own destiny.

  My nostrils quivered from the fragrance of the garden, taste buds aroused by the smell of the bread my mother was cooling. And so I dreamt. I had plenty of dreams. The first was to learn how to read and write. I wanted to be educated. My father had withdrawn me from school; well . . . I would learn another time! Then, I prayed to have the chance to go to Mecca. And unrelentingly, as a pigeon returning to its master, I thought of Badgai. I promised myself I would be good like her and serve the people and my country.

  Filled with my innocence and arrogance, I did not hear in the distance the Russian bombers that would destroy our land, kill us, and end my dream.

  4

  BEING SIXTEEN YEARS OLD IN THE JIHAD

  The soldier peered at me with distrust. His blue eyes, small and cold, moved from my turban to my body, like sharpened blades. He wanted to scare me, but if I grimaced, it was because I was sick; my chest burned, I was suffocating.

  Content with his effect, he delivered the final blow: “You cannot pass, Mujahideen!” he said before turning on his heel.

  I had just lost my chance to go to Kabul by airplane to be treated at the hospital. I’d just met my first Russian soldier and felt, for the first time, the feeling of hatred. He hated me for what I was—an Afghan; I hated him for what he represented—the invader. To the village, the war was but a wind of rumors. We did not know anything other than that the Soviet army occupied the country. Even in Khost, there was not a shadow of a red battalion.

  The doctor in Khost could not do anything more for me: “You need to go to Kabul, Hukomkhan. You have a serious lung infection. In Khost, the hospital has nothing. With the war, the medicine comes in dropper bottles up until here.”

  I was sixteen years old. The war didn’t mean anything to me. All I knew was that the other men had pulled out their weapons, and I still had not! The road to Kabul was too dangerous; the Russians were constantly bombing it.

  My father had resigned himself to take the plane with me, but I did not pass through the security check. The soldier blocked my turban. “Mujahideen . . .”

  The warriors of the holy war—I saw them. My former comrades, with whom I would play khusay and mardokay, paraded with their rifles and prepared themselves to join the resistance fighters in the mountains. I envied them.

  They would join the troops of commander Hekmatyra, a hero in the region. Before opposing the Russians
, he had fought the communist regime of the Afghan prince Daoud Khan with the commander Massoud. They were both Islamists and refused the secular republic of Daoud. “Daoud is a puppet at the hands of the Russians,” my father repeated. “He is going to corrupt the country!”

  This was not what Mohammed Daoud Khan wanted us to think of him: he kept a distance from the Soviets, and they made him pay for it. A military unit directed by Moscow overthrew Daoud, and he lost his life. A few months later, the Red Army invaded Afghanistan one night in December. The year 1980 began poorly: the winter was one of the most unforgiving in the last decade, but it was nothing in comparison to what awaited us.

  So we had to take the road. We were not on horses like Badgai but rather in an old bus that threatened to lose a wheel every time we hit a rut. The frozen earth cracked beneath us and was exposed in holes larger than tombs. Around us, a strange silence hung over the desert plains, imprisoned by the winter. Inside the bus, the atmosphere was heavy with unspoken words and glances lost in the foggy windows. For the first time in my life, I smelled fear. This would not be the last time. Sometimes, from afar, it sounded like a buzzing fly. My hands tensed on the fake leather seats. Nothing happened, but my brain was functioning at full speed, capturing every sound, every smell, every movement, recording, analyzing, and inevitably perceiving every piece of information into a potential danger. And then there was no more doubt. Thirty kilometers from Kabul, we came across a tank with the hammer and sickle on a flag. We feared a random search and anything arbitrary. It passed, a menacing shadow, without stopping. This was even more disturbing.

  In Kabul, they were everywhere. The Russian soldiers marched in the streets in groups or by twos; they were at home.

  My father said, “Kafir!” Infidels, the enemies of Islam.

  This feeling would not cease to spread through the country and to me, as well.