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By Root 468 0

south. Tom was British, tall, handsome, skinny, with a mop of brown hair, and he dressed in a dandy-like style of thrift store meets Fleet Street. In the winter, he wore hats and scarves. He seemed like he should smoke a pipe and wear corduroy jackets with elbow patches, but he didn’t. He seemed like he should be called dashing, but he wasn’t. Tom had been around in Afghanistan almost as long as I had, but we had only become friends in the spring, largely through our mutual friend Sean. Whenever they were both in town, Tom and Sean hung out most nights at L’Atmosphère, two wild-and-crazy guys always trying to outdo each other with self-deprecating dating stories in almost always successful attempts to meet women.

This was my first time traveling with Tom. A friend of Farouq, a Pashtun with a giant black beard, agreed to drive us in a beat-up Toyota Corolla taxi. The car made us look like everyone else. Now we needed disguises. Tom and Farouq grew out their beards, to the extent that they could. I packed a black abaya, which made me look like a graduating high-school senior with a matching headscarf, but Farouq said that wasn’t enough. I needed a burqa.

“It’s weird to have to ask you,” Farouq said. “But you and I know the situation here has gotten worse and worse. I feel more comfortable with you wearing a burqa than not.”

I shrugged. His call. “You’ll buy it for me, right? You can bring one?”

Farouq agreed to pick out a suitable burqa. On a Sunday morning, I put in brown contact lenses to cover my blue eyes and drew on heavy black eyeliner, to look more like an Afghan woman if I decided to pull my burqa back over my head in the car. Tom, meanwhile, dressed in Afghan clothes and put on an embroidered Kandahari-style cap.

“You look strange,” Tom told me, wrinkling his nose at my brown eyes.

“You look like a Kandahari dancing boy,” I said.

It was an old joke. Although Afghans virulently opposed homosexuality, the segregation of the sexes had led to certain practices, especially in the Pashtun areas. Kandahar was known for older men sexually using teenage boys, usually to show off prestige and power. At weddings, at festive occasions, at male-only parties, dancing boys would often perform, wearing eyeliner and swinging their hips suggestively, before pairing off for the night. The practice was known as bacha bazi, or “boy play.” A Pashto proverb maintained that women were for breeding, boys for pleasure, but melons for sheer delight. A popular Afghan joke involved the birds of Kandahar, who flew with one wing in circles and used the other to cover their rears.

Farouq soon showed up with a burqa. I could not avoid it—I would soon look like a giant blue badminton shuttlecock. Tom and I climbed in the backseat of the Corolla, and I put the burqa on the seat between us, knowing I didn’t need to wear it in Kabul. Near the edge of town, the car broke down. Car mechanics in Afghanistan never inspired trust, as they often worked out of shipping containers and owned only a screwdriver. But somehow, they usually fixed a car quickly. Afghans were geniuses with figuring out how things worked. Once, when our car battery died on a picnic, Farouq jumped the car by connecting a metal ladder and a cord to another car battery, killing no one.

So I assumed the mechanic would only take half an hour. We sat in the Corolla. As usual, everyone outside the car stared in at me. I had an idea: I slipped on the burqa. The top part grabbed tight around my head. A square of mesh covered my eyes. I was able to breathe through the fabric, so I didn’t hyperventilate on bad air. Oppressive, I thought. But oddly liberating. I stared at the old men in their turbans and the young boys shoving each other in the market, and they didn’t stare back. I was totally invisible.

We soon drove out of Kabul, and on safe stretches of the road, I pulled my burqa back over my head, as local women did, and with my eyeliner and brown contact lenses and the speed of highway traffic, fooled anyone driving past. We drove south to Kandahar on a highway that the Americans