Our first stop was a house in Logar Province; Mohammed wanted to show me normal family life in Afghanistan. A young child stood in the weeds in front of a clay compound built to house an entire Afghan family of forty or so. Mohammed sent for the man in charge. There were no telephones, and our visit was unannounced. Mohammed introduced me as a foreign journalist, interested in the state of Afghanistan and its people following twenty years of war, and soon the kettle for tea was lit.
The man of the house gave me permission to join him and the other men in their meal, and I was pleased to have the opportunity to partake in an experience off-limits to Afghan women. As a foreign journalist I was exempt from all the norms and rules that applied to the women here. I was androgynous, a third, undefined sex. We spent the first twenty minutes of lunch in tangible discomfort. Clearly no man in the room had ever eaten with a foreign woman present, save for the occasional four-year-old girl or elderly aunt.
I brought up the one subject everyone in Afghanistan could speak freely about: family.
“How many children do you have?” I said.
Most Afghan men prided themselves on having many children, and their faces gleamed as they rhapsodized about their eleven kids.
“How many children do you have?” they asked me, perhaps assuming that at twenty-six years of age I’d be well on my way to the double digits.
“None,” I answered.
There was silence. I ate my meal quietly. The question of how many children I had would plague me throughout this trip—and for years to come. I was too shy to ask to take a photo.
After lunch, Mohammed took me to a secret school for girls. The Taliban had banned girls’ schools, but some Afghans so desperately wanted to educate their daughters that they established makeshift pop-up classrooms in private basements. The father of the house greeted us at the door. Because there were young women inside, Mohammed was prohibited from entering, but the father led me through three rooms where young female teachers held classes in cavelike spaces for swarms of colorfully swaddled girls—in greens and purples and oranges—from the surrounding villages. One teacher, no more than twenty-five years old, held a baby in her arms as she conducted a lesson with one chalkboard and some handwritten posters. The children sat on a dirt floor. Only a handful had books.
The children seemed surprised by the sight of a foreigner; the teachers, I suspected, were stunned that a foreigner would take the risks I was taking. I was still afraid, too. I managed to take out the camera concealed in my bag but could barely get off a decent shot. Half of my pictures were out of focus.
Mohammed before prayer, 2000.
We headed out again through the countryside, then up a narrow road carved into rock-spattered mountains until we reached a small plateau between two peaks. There was a pond of oddly still water and a silence that beckoned prayer. Mohammed and our driver had forgone prayer all morning and had twitched anxiously as we drove. Before Mohammed began to pray, I dredged up the courage to ask if I could photograph him. He agreed. I was happy to watch them in the open air going through the graceful motions of their devotion. Mohammed looked so serene as he stood against the backdrop of sharp mountains and a crisp sky and began his prayer, raising his thumbs to his ears. We were far from the Taliban’s grip here. From then on, I knew to search for moments like that—more intimate, more private, when Afghans were so enveloped in thought that they forgot to worry about whether the Taliban might be lingering nearby. We drove again, and I watched the sandy brown mountains fold like rumpled bedsheets into layers of vegetation, and clay houses fade into the land.
On our fourth day we arrived at Mohammed’s home late in the afternoon, when the light was a velvety gold and the sun cast long shadows along the snaking road. I had been curious about his family. We entered his sparsely furnished home, and no one greeted me. The women lowered their eyes, and out of respect the men barely acknowledged my presence, except for the common polite greeting of placing the right hand on one’s chest with a slight bow forward. Mohammed walked me across the outdoor courtyard and up three stairs to my room, then disappeared. I knew it would have been improper for me to go out into his home and try to communicate with his family. Earlier he had made it clear that he didn’t feel comfortable with me photographing “his” women. It was as if he were scared to take me on a tour of the house, as if I would sneak photos anyway.