A human interest story from today's Post:
Looking 'Freedom' in Face
Afghan Man Holds Up Mirror in Search for Answers
By David Finkel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, October 16, 2001; Page A12
QUETTA, Pakistan
A few days ago, after looking in a mirror, a 38-year-old man named Namatullah decided to go to the barber.
He told no one. He went alone. In another time or place, the decision would hardly have been worth a second thought. For Namatullah, from a place where at the moment nothing seems normal, there was much more to it.
He walked up a skinny street, which fed into a wider one where traffic has been swollen by convoys of open-backed trucks carrying policemen to the riots in this Pakistani city, close to the border with Afghanistan. The barbershop was near the corner. There were two chairs, both filled, so Namatullah sat on a bench to wait and listened to the conversation, which was about the war.
Kabul, apparently, was being hit.
Kabul, the Afghan capital, where, before the war, and the war before that with the mujaheddin, and the war before that with the Soviets, Namatullah had once gone to watch an Alfred Hitchcock movie.
And Kandahar was being hit as well; Kandahar, a six-hour drive from Quetta, home of the Taliban and, until a few weeks before, Namatullah.
He is an Afghan, who says of Afghanistan, "It's my country." In other words, he has not known peace since he was 15. When the war years started, he had not finished school. He had not met the girl he would marry and with whom he would have four children. What is peace to his children, other than a guess? "Freedom?" asks his eldest, a boy of 14.
Namatullah's childhood, however, was in an Afghanistan before the decimated present. He can remember absolutely normal days listening to music and staying out late. He can remember growing taller, noticing girls, his voice changing, beginning to shave. Maybe he was 14 when that happened, maybe 15, but he can remember looking in a mirror one day and seeing a few whiskers. So he went to the store, bought a razor, came home, closed himself in the bathroom, soaped his chin, cut those whiskers away, and then went outside to show his friends.
"You have become a man," he can remember them saying, and laughing.
That was his identity then: a boy, a man, an Afghan.
This was his identity 23 years later, on Sept. 15, four days after the attacks on New York and Washington, when he decided to leave Kandahar:
A Hazara Afghan (as opposed to a Tajik, an Uzbek or a Pashtun).
A Shiite Muslim (as opposed to a Sunni).
A Farsi-speaking Afghan (as opposed to Pashto-speaking).
Religious, tribal and cultural distinctions have always been a part of Afghanistan. But the years between when Namatullah had a few whiskers and when he was a grown-up, years when the different groups started to kill one another wholesale, changed the distinctions into divisions and turned Afghanistan into a place, as one resident described it, of "everybody versus everybody."
And then came the Taliban.
"Life in a jail," said Namatullah of what happened then.
No music. No staying out late. No movies. No novels. No TV. The harshest rules were for female Afghans: No school for girls; women must be covered head-to-toe; women must not talk to anyone but a relative; women could go to the market, but never inside a store.
As for men, every time Namatullah went out, which usually meant nothing more than walking between his house and a stationery store he helped run, he would make sure he was wearing a cap, and that his shirt did not have a collar because the Taliban did not like collars, and that his clothing had at least a few smudges of dirt because the Taliban did not like clothing that was too clean.
And then there was his beard.
"I don't like beards," he said. "They don't become me."
But he grew one, the first of his life. The Taliban required beards. Untrimmed beards, beards so long they could be gripped in a fist. Or, better, in two.
These were the rules, and Namatullah's first lesson about what happens to violators came when he saw a woman, for whatever reason, go inside a store. Soon came the Taliban, swinging sticks, hitting her again and again, across the back and legs until she was crying. "If I had the power, I would have shot them," he said, but instead he turned so he couldn't see her, and walked until he couldn't hear her, and went home where he told his wife that he was sending her and the children to live in Pakistan.
They went, he stayed. He had his business. He needed money. "What else could I do?"
Then came lesson number two.
"I was walking in the market," he said. Suddenly a Taliban was next to him, rubbing his face. "You have trimmed your beard," the Taliban said, and just like that Namatullah was taken to jail, where he spent the night in a cell with 18 others, all of whom had been brought in for insufficient beards.
Six months later: same market, another hand on his face, another stint in jail.
A year later: again.
"I have been jailed three times," he said, "because I trimmed my beard."
Now it wasn't just having a beard that he disliked. "Now," he said, "I don't like Afghanistan."
Still he stayed. He wore his cap, smudged his clothing, ignored his beard, went to work. "I felt compelled to stay," he said. Business was good. There was no other option. He stayed through the exploding of the giant Buddha statues earlier this year, and night after night of the Taliban patrolling quiet streets in its pickup trucks, and the day that the stadium in Kandahar, fixed up by the United Nations years earlier for soccer matches, was filled with thousands of people who watched two kneeling women being shot dead for having sex with someone other than their husbands. Sticks across backs, bullets in heads, a widespread drought, a civil war, Tajiks vs. Pashtuns vs. Hazaras vs. Uzbeks vs. Tajiks.
Why did he stay? "My country," he said. "My people."
But then came Sept. 11, and this thought: "Afghanistan is a poor country. Afghanistan doesn't have the power to fight terrorism." Followed by the disturbing thought that to be an Afghan means that "you cannot rest. You're always thinking: Something bad is going to happen."
When he left Kandahar Sept. 15, it was with the idea of taking temporary refuge in Quetta. But then came the airstrikes, and then, a few days ago, came the hardest decision of all because of what it was going to mean.
The chair was leather, and it was set to face the mirror.
The haircut came first.
The shaving cream came out of a tube like toothpaste.
The straight razor had a red handle and a fresh blade.
The barber knew how to be funny. "Look at that," he said to another customer after shaving him bald, exposing a landscape of creases and hills. "I've turned your head into a map of Afghanistan."
To Namatullah, though, he simply said upon finishing, in all seriousness, "Your face is completely changed."
"Yes," Namatullah said, looking in the mirror.
"It is freedom," he was thinking.
He paid the equivalent of 40 cents for the haircut and 16 cents for the shave, and then he walked back to an apartment filled with four children, a wife and the sudden smell of a fresh shave.
"Aren't you going back to Kandahar?" his wife said, seeing what he had done.
"No," he said. "I'm not."
© 2001 The Washington Post Company |
