“Where did you stay? A hotel? Where do you stay in Islamabad?”
I skirted around the answers to his questions about where I was sleeping with a demure smile. It didn’t feel right to divulge such information to a young Talib.
Mohammed suddenly leaned forward, glancing through the window to the inside of the main embassy, looking for anyone who might have been listening. There was no one.
“Can I ask you a question?” he whispered.
“Sure, ask me anything, sir,” I said, “as long as my answers do not inhibit my getting a visa.”
He smiled nervously. “Is it true . . . ,” he started. “I mean . . . I hear that men and women in America go out in public together without being married.” He paused again, leaning in to look out the window until he was reassured no one was listening. “That men and women can live together without being married?”
I knew he was taking a chance with the question. The Taliban insists its members renounce sexual curiosity; his anxiety flooded the room.
“Are you sure my answers will not affect whether I get my visa?” I asked.
“I promise you they will not.”
“Unmarried men and women in America spend a lot of time together,” I said. “They go on something called ‘dates’ to movies, to the theater, to restaurants. Men and women sometimes even live together before they marry, and”—unlike in Afghanistan, where most marriages were arranged by and among relatives—“Americans marry for love.”
Why was I saying this to a Talib at the Afghan Embassy? Given the cultural and language barriers between us, I felt certain that he understood no more than 10 percent of what I was saying. But he was enthralled.
“Do men and women . . . Is it true that men and women touch? And have children before they are married?”
“Yes,” I replied gently. “Men and women touch before they are married.”
“You are married, right?” he asked.
I smiled, finally comfortable enough to tell him the truth. I don’t know why I felt comfortable enough to tell him anything. Maybe because he felt comfortable enough to ask such racy questions? To admit that his mind went to a place forbidden to an unmarried man by the Taliban’s severe interpretation of the Koran? “No, Mohammed. I am not married. I lived with a man for a long time—like we were married.”
He interrupted me. “What happened? Why did you leave? Why are you not married?”
Mohammed was no longer a Talib to me. We were simply two people in our twenties, getting to know each other.
“In America women work,” I said. “And right now I am traveling and working.”
He smiled. “America is a good place,” he said.
“It is.”
Five days later I picked up my visa.
? ? ?
DRIVING THROUGH THE KHYBER PASS, along a road as rocky as the terrain, I watched the jagged Spin Ghar mountains slice into the cobalt sky. Some male employees of the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, had agreed to drive me from the Pakistan border to Jalalabad and then Kabul. We rode in silence through the stunning, otherworldly landscape. Every few miles an old Russian tank sat, poised in its death and ridden with bullets—a stark reminder that Afghanistan’s beauty could not hide its bleak, troubled history. Afghanistan was one of the poorest countries in the world. Carcasses of bombed-out buildings lined long stretches of barren road. Ghostlike women shrouded head to toe in the traditional blue burqas wove in and out of the dust. Young boys filled potholes with shovels, and drivers pelted them with coins.
Scenes of Afghanistan while it was under Taliban rule, May and July 2000.
I stayed at the United Nations guesthouse in the decrepit clay city of Jalalabad for $50 a night—a sum that did not pass through most Afghans’ hands in a year. A laminated sheet listed the UN’s rules and regulations: “Curfew at 7 p.m. No interaction with the locals. Must be escorted at all times by a United Nations driver. This is an active war zone. In the case of shelling, the bomb shelter is located behind the house, and equipped with bottles of water, food, and supplies.”