The Underground Girls of Kabul Read Online Free PDF Page B

Or else. To avoid the threats and the inconvenience, she regularly buys new SIM cards for her mobile phone to get a new number, but they keep calling. Her transgressions are clear: She is a woman who dares to serve in parliament and she is a prominent symbol of a controversial, Western-supported government. The threats have become routine. Sometimes she argues with the caller, lecturing him on how the Koran does not condone murder. And it is always a he. “We know you don’t care about your own life, but think of your children,” they once said. That time, the threat was accompanied by the sound of gunfire. The one time Azita attempted to report threats to the police, they advised her “not to worry.” After all, they added, there is little they can do.
    There have been direct attempts on her life: A year earlier, two men on a motorbike attempted to throw a hand grenade into the yard of her Badghis house. It exploded against the outside stone wall. When Azita ran out from the kitchen, she found her daughters hiding in a corner of the small garden.
    Wealthier politicians travel by armored car, surrounded bygunmen with shortwave radios. Those with investments in the illegal yet flourishing poppy trade—Afghanistan is the world’s largest producer of opium—usually have a follow car as well, to better the odds in case of a kidnap attempt. Azita cannot afford much more than her Toyota Corolla with a driver, who has taped a small glass bottle onto the dashboard—holy water from Mecca. It helps him focus; not even those who make sudden U-turns or drive toward him in the wrong direction merit a honk of his horn.
    Azita did employ a bodyguard when she first started, as several colleagues told her it would look unseemly to always arrive without a male escort. But the bodyguard had a tendency to fall asleep as soon as he sat down, so she fired him. Along with all the other members of parliament, Azita has been issued a handgun for her own protection. With no intention of ever using it, she hid it somewhere in her apartment. She often reminds herself that she must find it before the children do.
    In the car, she takes out her phone and attempts to bring up CNN’s website on the small display, but she does not get far on the spotty Afghan networks.
    She looks out the window instead, on the merchants who slowly push their carts toward the marketplace and the motorbikes with at least two and often three or four people clinging on, their faces protected against Kabul’s beige-colored air with wraparound scarves. Pairs of Afghan ladies, wearing sandals with socks, hold hands and jump over open sewers. Not much is really white here, and few things are crisp, except for brand-new Land Rovers shipped in for foreigners and rich Afghans. Sooner rather than later, most things turn a shade of mud or khaki. Khaki and cement are the primary colors of Kabul, the monotony broken only by the poppy-funded houses that are painted a cream-infused red, a warm pink, or even green, with glimpses of tasseled pastel curtains—the deceptively cheery narcotecture of Kabul.
    Chlorophyll is in short supply here; most trees have either died from pollution or have been burned for fuel by the indigent. A splashof matte red sometimes also filters through the Kabul gray, in an old mural or another Cold War–reminder of those who tried to control the capital before both the Taliban and the Americans.
    T O A ZITA , “ THE Russian time,” as she refers to it, was not the protracted and brutal struggle painted by English-language memoirs of what Afghans call “the Soviet war” of the 1980s. To her, it was the backdrop of a reasonably charmed childhood.
    Her father had been a member of a large but not wealthy clan, and was the first man from Badghis said to have pursued a master’s degree in Kabul. He carried that distinction when he returned to his province to marry. He had first met Azita’s mother, Siddiqua, when she was only twelve, and according to