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This was absolutely not true. I showed up that night at the massive wedding hall, where women sat in one large room, men in another, segregated even during a wedding ceremony. None of the Afghan women spoke English. We said hello to one another about fifty times, nodded and smiled, and then said hello some more. They all looked like fairy-tale princesses, with sequin-and-velvet gowns, heavy makeup, and three-tiered hair. My problematic hair had been mashed under a scarf all day. I wore no makeup. Another American woman joined me at a long table—Farouq’s former English teacher, who spoke Dari and dressed appropriately. Farouq and his bride came in and sat on a couch in the front of the room of women. She sobbed. He looked grim. No one is supposed to be happy at an Afghan wedding, especially the bride, because she is leaving her family to move in with the groom and his family.

Farouq looked around the room, spotted me, and called me to the stage. Self-conscious in green, I sat with the new couple. I posed for pictures, wondering how the marriage would affect Farouq’s plans.

He had wanted to go to medical school in America, and for years friends had tried to help him. But his hoped-for scholarship never panned out. Farouq had stopped talking so much about leaving Afghanistan to study. In one way, this marriage was great—Farouq had a wife, and after twenty-eight years, he deserved something to focus on besides working for everyone else. But I also worried that this marriage could mean the end of Farouq’s surgical aspirations, and that he would become like some of the guys I had dated, talking wistfully about plans and goals while working as a waiter to pay the rent.

After dozens of photographs, Farouq and his wife left the stage and the dancing resumed. A few men, the only ones allowed in the women’s room besides Farouq and the musicians, videotaped the dancing. Wedding videos are often used by Afghan families to pick prospective brides for single men because, for once, they can actually see what Afghan women look like out of their drab baggy clothes, headscarves, and burqas.

One of the bride’s friends adopted me, even though we couldn’t understand each other. She had a brown ponytail and wore a man’s suit. She touched my knee, grabbed my hand, carefully peeled and cut me pieces of an apple and fed them to me with her fingers, and at one point pulled me toward the dance floor. It felt like a first date with a mime. I did not want to do this, but I relented and started to sway to the Afghan music and its polka-like beat. Then my date left me on the dance floor. Everyone left me on the dance floor. It was like a practical joke, and I was the only person standing, with all the Afghan women clapping and cheering me on, and the few men on bended knee pointing video cameras at me. Just groovy. I was left with a choice: I could sit down, or I could dance like an idiot. I chose the idiot route, jumping up and down like a teenager at a punk-rock concert. By myself. For ten minutes.

And that was how I decided to approach this region. I decided to go all in, for as long as I stayed. I didn’t know how long—maybe two years, maybe three, depending on Chris and what happened. My indecision mirrored that of the foreign community, already trying to figure out an exit strategy for Afghanistan and a way out of the quagmire in Iraq.

CHAPTER 3

AMERICAN IDIOT

I soon learned that I rarely had the right clothes, and I rarely knew the right things to say or do. After Farouq finished his wedding duties—no honeymoon, just a lot of traditional family obligations—we ate lunch at the Marco Polo restaurant, a gloomy, fly-spattered hole-in-the-wall with decent meat but no running water in the bathrooms. I launched into a serious conversation, prompted by a book about Islam I had just read and my annoyance with the segregation of the sexes here. Over kebabs, bread, beans, and rice, I lectured Farouq about women in Islam.

“It’s all Umar’s fault,” I said, blaming Islam’s second caliph, who lived in the seventh century,