But I insisted on my knowledge of Umar and Islam. Farouq narrowed his eyes. Nasir understood very little English, but he looked back and forth between us, hearing in our voices that we were upset. Nasir chewed a piece of mutton carefully, as if any sudden move would fuel our anger. Farouq, his voice loud but dismissive, went in for the kill.
“Well, I guess it’s understandable you would think that. A study just came out by scientists saying that women’s brains are smaller than men’s. American scientists. So you can’t help it.”
“Oh my God,” I said. “You believe that?”
“Believe me. Yes. Women aren’t as smart. There’s scientific proof.”
“I don’t know if I can work with someone who thinks that.”
“Fine. I don’t need to work for the Chicago Tribune. I don’t know if I can work with someone who says bad things about Umar.”
We stared at each other. And then I realized what I was doing—threatening to fire my lifeline in Afghanistan over a debate about a possible misogynist who lived almost fourteen centuries earlier. Maybe my brain was smaller. I gave in.
“Never mind. Let’s just not talk about Umar any more.”
But a certain amount of damage had been done. Like all Afghans, Farouq could not ignore such a slight to his honor. I was bumbling around like America, with little awareness of how I was coming across or how my so-called expertise translated on the ground. Farouq told me that I seemed different than when I came to Afghanistan the year before, when we had first met.
“Back then, you were sweet and gentle,” he said.
I rolled my eyes. I was never sweet and gentle.
So I left Afghanistan for a while, for Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, and my theoretical home in India. I returned for Afghanistan’s first-ever presidential election, planned for October 2004. By then, the fallout from my behavior was obvious. Farouq tried to book me in the Gandamack, only to find out that I was banned. The Afghan women in charge said I was too much trouble. And that could have been true. When I had stayed there during Farouq’s wedding, the laundry had washed my whites with my baggy green wedding shirt, turning all my clothes the color of dishwater. I had complained about the laundry, about the slow Internet, about the fact that all my clothes were misplaced for twenty-four hours. I had complained and complained, even though I was in one of the poorest countries in the world, wracked by decades of war, raising my voice to lecture. “This shirt cost me $70,” I explained loudly, holding up a newly tie-dyed Gap blouse. “You have to give me a free night.” In Pakistan, such complaints would have worked, maybe because of the hangover from British colonial times, maybe because Westerners were often still treated with deference. In Afghanistan, such complaints won me no friends. Afghanistan had never been successfully colonized, and Afghans tended to seethe quietly toward any uppity foreigner making foreigner-like demands. Especially an American.
“You have to be softer,” Farouq told me. “I know my people.”
So with the Gandamack, I was out of luck. For the election, I had to stay across the alley at its broken-down stepsister, the Kabul Lodge. I felt like the only kid not picked for a kickball team, close to the other journalists but not one of the other journalists, and I continued to feel like an outsider, continued to wear the wrong clothes.
Nasir, Farouq, and I drove south of Kabul to Logar Province to meet a tribal leader who had just been released from Guantánamo after being held for almost two years. The tribal leader was being welcomed by his tribesmen, but still, in what I interpreted as a gesture of kindness, he walked outside his mud-walled compound to greet us. A burly man with a long gray beard and a turban, he looked at me in the car, shoved a large blue headscarf that matched his eyes through the window, smiled kindly, said something in Pashto, and walked away. (How many headscarves would I accumulate as gifts over the years? Enough to wrap up every female ever born in my family, enough to smother us all.)
“So is he going to talk to us?” I asked Farouq. “What did he say?”
“Don’t be offended,” Farouq said. “‘Fuck off, farter.’”
Swearing and shoving a scarf through a window was a novel interpretation of the Pashtun code, which required Pashtuns to treat their guests with hospitality, even if their guests were their enemies. But considering how this tribal leader was hustled off by the U.S. military to Guantánamo, I guess he felt the code no longer applied to Americans.
The adversity continued. Interim president Hamid Karzai’s people soon invited me on a campaign trip masquerading as a road opening—while there, I had to move nimbly to avoid a bludgeoning from his American DynCorp security guards, who destroyed pictures snapped by a New York Times photographer and knocked the turban off the transportation minister in their attempts to protect Karzai. DynCorp International was one of the burgeoning U.S.-based private military contractors now supplementing our all-volunteer military, which was fracturing with the stress of two wars. In Afghanistan, DynCorp employees guarded Karzai, lived in a makeshift trailer court at the presidential palace, and trained a new presidential guard. I had encountered DynCorp before, kind of, when I was invited to a party thrown at their palace compound. I showed up on the wrong night, the only woman there, except for the half-naked one on a poster inside their makeshift bar and the two Chinese women in miniskirts holding hands with DynCorp contractors as they walked toward their trailers.
Farouq and I also went to a Karzai rally at the Kabul soccer stadium—the same stadium where the Taliban once beheaded alleged criminals and cut off the hands of thieves. The press was funneled into a taped-off pen in the middle of the soccer field, surrounded by Karzai’s Afghan security team, who had been trained, of course, by DynCorp. Leaning against the tape, Farouq interviewed an Afghan, who said he was supporting all the candidates, hedging his bets. It was a typical Afghan survival strategy, and Farouq started laughing.
“Why are you laughing?” interrupted a hepped-up, sunglassed Afghan security guard, stepping in front of Farouq. “I will call someone and have you taken away.”
Farouq, never one to step down from a confrontation, looked at the man.
“I’m just doing my job.”
The Afghan guard swatted my notebook and shoved Farouq.
“I will kill you,” he said.
This was how Afghans interpreted DynCorp protocol for dealing with laughing. The guard told us to go away, but we couldn’t move. Finally Karzai walked out into the bleachers, talking on his cell phone, and everyone grew quiet, even the Afghan security guard. (In another example of how complicated Afghanistan is, this violent exchange caused Farouq and the security guard to become lifelong friends.) Karzai urged the crowd not to participate in fraud.
“If somebody comes to you and tells you I will give you money to vote for me, if someone uses force to tell you to vote for me, if someone uses power to get you to vote for me, don’t vote for me,” Karzai announced. “Please.”
Over the years, as corruption turned into a cancer around Karzai, I would often think about that comment, but over the years, I would also realize that people rarely paid attention to Karzai.
On the way out of the stadium, a car of Afghans passed us. “Dog washers!” one yelled. That was a favorite epithet for foreigners because, well, a true Afghan would never keep a dog as a pet let alone wash one. Most Afghans, like many conservative Muslims, were suspicious of dogs, believing that angels would not visit a house when dogs were inside.
But regardless of being a stranger in a strange land, a dog washer in a land of cat lovers, for the first time in Kabul, I started to have a social life, largely because of the influx of election workers, do-gooders, and journalists. A new restaurant opened called L’Atmosphère, where foie gras ran $9 and red wine flowed, where there was a pool, a large garden, cats, and rabbits. On some nights, I ate mystery meat at L’Atmosphère. On others, I crept across the alley from the Kabul Lodge to the Gandamack for dinner, braiding my hair to try to look like someone else, slouching to appear shorter, always worried I would be kicked out.