WE EDGED CLOSER TO THE INVASION. Ordinary Pakistanis, loyal to their Muslim brothers across the border, began sneering at us, the infidel journalists, and staging protests in the streets. Men doused effigies of President Bush in kerosene and ignited their lighters, screaming, “Down, down America.” I was caught up in the middle of these protests, cloaked in my tentlike chador, one of few women among the men.
One day I went to one of these demonstrations with a handful of my male colleagues. Though I was dressed as a Muslim—respectfully, with not a strand of hair showing—the Pakistanis knew I was a foreign woman simply because I was carrying a camera, working, trespassing in a man’s world. To them, that was enough to merit a quick feel on any part of my body. They perceived foreign women based on what they saw in movies, often porn movies: easy and available for sex. I tried not to make a scene in front of my peers. I didn’t want my gender to determine whether or not I could cover breaking news, so I continued photographing, ignoring the sweeping of hands on my butt, the occasional grab.
Once President Bush went up in flames, my colleagues were nowhere to be found. I tried to focus on shooting, but this time there were not a few hands on my butt but dozens. And this time it wasn’t a subtle feel but an aggressive, wide-handed clutch, butt to crotch, back to front. I kept shooting. A combative Western woman would elicit terrible anger from these men. I tried holding my camera with one hand and swatting them with the other. It didn’t work. I tried turning around, looking the men in the eye and saying “Haram,” which means “forbidden, sinful, shameful,” to show them I understood that their actions were unacceptable in Islam.
It didn’t work. Adrenaline was raging all around me, adrenaline of hundreds of unmarried, sexually frustrated men who had no work and little education. They hated the West for America’s policies in their region, even more so for the war that was about to happen. Effigies burned around me. The masses screamed, “Down with America!” I had fifteen hands on my butt. I paused, lowered my camera with its beast of a lens—about five pounds and twelve inches long—and waited for the next hand.
The second I felt something, I did a karate back-kick I’d learned in middle school.
I turned around, “Haram! Don’t you have sisters? Mothers? Aren’t you Pakistani men Muslim? Would you allow another man to treat your sister or mother like this?”
And I whacked the man directly behind me over the head with my lens. His eyes rolled back in their sockets, and he staggered.
The men around me suddenly stopped and stared.
I didn’t wait to find out what happened to him; instead I sprinted back to the car, where I found my male colleagues, lounging, all of them smitten with their afternoon’s work, checking the backs of their digital cameras for their prizewinning photographs, completely oblivious to what I had gone through to compose even one frame.
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THE PAKISTANI GOVERNMENT BEGAN monitoring our movements closely. At Green’s Hotel the cluster of journalists sat around discussing the possibility of being attacked by fundamentalists or Taliban sympathizers in the middle of the night. It was terrifyingly thrilling. A few of us prowled the hotel looking for escape routes: back doors, the roof, our bedroom windows. I wondered about young, curious Mohammed from the embassy. Was he back in Afghanistan? Was he fighting?
Alyssa was wide-eyed and manic, convinced the Taliban were coming any minute. She chose the ledge outside our window as our escape route; if they came, she said, we would crawl along the narrow ledge and jump to the next building only a few feet over.
It wasn’t enough, we thought; we need a disguise. We enlisted the help of our female Pakistani interpreter and went to the market to buy blue burqas and the golden, rubbery shoes worn by Afghan refugees in the camps. Our interpreter explained that there was an art to walking in a burqa; we couldn’t just rely on the giant blue sheath to disguise us. She gave us a lesson in burqa walking. In our cramped hotel room we donned our burqas, tight netting concealing our eyes, and walked back and forth, from wall to wall.
“Not so confident,” she instructed. “Hunch your shoulders. Focus your eyes on the ground. You American women are too self-confident. Humble. Be humble.”
She tried to strip away the self-confidence we had spent years building up. We pretended to climb onto the backs of trucks by climbing on and off the bed, our burqas tangling around our ankles, tripping us as we crumbled to the floor in fits of anxious laughter.
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ON OCTOBER 6, the night before the United States bombed Afghanistan, I got an e-mail from Uxval. “I want a girlfriend in flesh and blood,” it said, “not an Internet girlfriend.”
My professional high crashed. I called him immediately.
“Please, Uxval,” I begged in my mediocre Spanish, which failed me whenever I was upset. “I love you. I need to stay here just a few more weeks. The war is about to begin, and I will be home soon.”
“No. No quiero esperar más.” (I don’t want to wait anymore.) He had waited for three weeks. His voice was cold.