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“No, Kim. He was a good, strong man, and he defended Islam. I am named after Umar, and I can’t accept that,” Farouq said. Umar had been given the honorary title of “the Farooq,” which in Arabic means “the one who distinguishes between right and wrong.” Farouq took this stuff seriously. “That’s not true,” he went on. “Take it back.”

But I insisted on my knowledge of Umar and Islam. Farouq narrowed his eyes. Nasir understood very little English, but he looked back and forth between us, hearing in our voices that we were upset. Nasir chewed a piece of mutton carefully, as if any sudden move would fuel our anger. Farouq, his voice loud but dismissive, went in for the kill.

“Well, I guess it’s understandable you would think that. A study just came out by scientists saying that women’s brains are smaller than men’s. American scientists. So you can’t help it.”

“Oh my God,” I said. “You believe that?”

“Believe me. Yes. Women aren’t as smart. There’s scientific proof.”

“I don’t know if I can work with someone who thinks that.”

“Fine. I don’t need to work for the Chicago Tribune. I don’t know if I can work with someone who says bad things about Umar.”

We stared at each other. And then I realized what I was doing—threatening to fire my lifeline in Afghanistan over a debate about a possible misogynist who lived almost fourteen centuries earlier. Maybe my brain was smaller. I gave in.

“Never mind. Let’s just not talk about Umar any more.”

But a certain amount of damage had been done. Like all Afghans, Farouq could not ignore such a slight to his honor. I was bumbling around like America, with little awareness of how I was coming across or how my so-called expertise translated on the ground. Farouq told me that I seemed different than when I came to Afghanistan the year before, when we had first met.

“Back then, you were sweet and gentle,” he said.

I rolled my eyes. I was never sweet and gentle.

So I left Afghanistan for a while, for Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, and my theoretical home in India. I returned for Afghanistan’s first-ever presidential election, planned for October 2004. By then, the fallout from my behavior was obvious. Farouq tried to book me in the Gandamack, only to find out that I was banned. The Afghan women in charge said I was too much trouble. And that could have been true. When I had stayed there during Farouq’s wedding, the laundry had washed my whites with my baggy green wedding shirt, turning all my clothes the color of dishwater. I had complained about the laundry, about the slow Internet, about the fact that all my clothes were misplaced for twenty-four hours. I had complained and complained, even though I was in one of the poorest countries in the world, wracked by decades of war, raising my voice to lecture. “This shirt cost me $70,” I explained loudly, holding up a newly tie-dyed Gap blouse. “You have to give me a free night.” In Pakistan, such complaints would have worked, maybe because of the hangover from British colonial times, maybe because Westerners were often still treated with deference. In Afghanistan, such complaints won me no friends. Afghanistan had never been successfully colonized, and Afghans tended to seethe quietly toward any uppity foreigner making foreigner-like demands. Especially an American.

“You have to be softer,” Farouq told me. “I know my people.”

So with the Gandamack, I was out of luck. For the election, I had to stay across the alley at its broken-down stepsister, the Kabul Lodge. I felt like the only kid not picked for a kickball team, close to the other journalists but not one of the other journalists, and I continued to feel like an outsider, continued to wear the wrong clothes.

Nasir, Farouq, and I drove south of Kabul to Logar Province to meet a tribal leader who had just been released from Guantánamo after being held for almost two years. The tribal leader was being welcomed by his tribesmen, but still, in what I interpreted as a gesture of kindness, he walked outside his mud-walled compound to greet us. A burly