My survival instinct kicked in. I asked one of the interpreters from the Times team to help me get into Gul Agha’s mansion. He smiled. He knew the new governor well.
I was soon seated beside the burly Gul Agha and sharing iftar—the evening meal breaking the day’s fast during Ramadan—with a bunch of male villagers who had definitively never shared a meal with a woman outside of their family. The whole mansion was carpeted and without furniture, and rows and rows of men from surrounding areas had come to break their fast with their new leader. They looked as if they had walked out of the tenth century, cloaked in turbans and capes, their kohl-laden eyes fixed on me as they ate. I stayed close to Gul Agha, unsure of my boundaries. He encouraged me to take pictures. I lifted my camera tentatively at first and photographed the sprawling table laid out on the tattered carpet as the men feasted.
When the correspondent entered, I was still seated beside the governor. He gave me a faint nod, and I felt triumphant. His presence also emboldened me to move around the room, to photograph Gul Agha surrounded by villagers in various states of postprandial repose. The photographs were intimate, a new window into the lives of the conquering warlords who declared themselves in charge and whom the Americans would eventually prop up. My editor was pleased with the candor of the images, knowing I was working under difficult conditions.
Several days later, as the city celebrated, dozens of men and boys gathered around speakers screaming Bollywood tunes that had been banned under the Taliban. It was Christmas, and I told my editors I wouldn’t be able to stay on. It was time to go home to Uxval, my other life.
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UXVAL PLANNED OUR CHRISTMAS VACATION in a beach village on the Oaxacan coast. Within seventy-two hours of leaving Afghanistan, where I had been swaddled in scarves and couldn’t look men in the eye, I was wearing a bikini and kissing Uxval on the beach. After three weeks surrounded by thousands of refugees living in squalor in Pakistan and Afghanistan, I struggled to acclimate to the vapid world of partying Mexicans and Americans who smoked pot and drank beer all day and all night. Uxval had signed us up for surfing lessons. I was exhausted and weak from giardia, a nasty stomach ailment caused by unhygienic foods and water most probably tainted with feces, which caused constant diarrhea, burps of sulfur, weight loss, and days and nights of little sleep. But I had to step up and be a real girlfriend—an exciting, attentive, normal girlfriend—to make up for the weeks away.
I couldn’t do it. I was unable to switch off my brain. I admired the lithe, smiling women, surfing effortlessly. They seemed so happy. At night I drank a few glasses of wine, and by eleven I went home to sleep. Uxval stayed out partying until dawn. I couldn’t muster up the strength or desire to go out with people with whom I had little in common. By then most of my friends were photographers and journalists who shared my obsession with international politics, world events, and breaking news.
We started fighting. I was jealous of the women flitting around him. He was jealous of my job. We established a pattern of incredible romantic highs and tormented lows, where I saw an insecure side in myself I hadn’t even known existed. I knew I could never be the woman he needed. I feared this would be true for every man. My work would always come before everything else, because that was the nature of the work: When news broke, I had to go, and I wanted to. I knew that if I wasn’t there when the story broke, another photographer would be.
My friends and family sometimes asked why photographers didn’t just take fewer assignments to preserve their marriages or relationships, why they didn’t simply become a different type of photographer, one who worked in some sunny studio adjacent to her home. The truth was, the difference between a studio photographer and a photojournalist was the same as the difference between a political cartoonist and an abstract painter; the only thing the two had in common was the blank page. The jobs entailed different talents and different desires. Leaving at the last minute, jumping on planes, feeling a responsibility to cover wars and famines and human rights crises was my job. Not doing those things was the same as a surgeon ducking out of an emergency operation or a waitress refusing to bring a customer’s plates to the table. But I didn’t have a boss who would glare at my inadequacies—who would fire me when the patient died or the customer complained. Neglecting any aspect of my job was like firing myself.