AN STYLE="font-size: 75%; color:#990000; font-weight:bold">Saturday, November 17, 2001
In Mazar-i-Sharif, the end of the Taliban rule means many things: music can be
played again, people can walk in the streets, men can shave their beards, and
women can throw off their head-to-toe burqas. But for the men, the departure of
the strict Sunni Muslim militia has also gripped the city for a much more
personal reason: girls.
Najib, 20, is waiting for his one great love, Shabnam, to return from Uzbekistan
to the north where her family fled in 1997 when the Taliban first attempted to
take the city. At the time Najib was 16 and Shabnam was 15. She's not from a
very good family; in fact Najib considers most of them pretty scurrilous types.
But with Shabnam it was love at first sight. "I went to her house and because I
came from an important family, her mother told me that she would be happy to
have me as her son-in-law," he says. "I laughed, and they took me inside and
there were all the unmarried women in the family just sitting around topless.
(In Afghanistan, "topless" means the very top of the dress is missing.) They
were very impolite people and I did not like any of them. But my girl was
wearing a very nice dress, she was all covered, and I liked her right away."
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The pair used to meet regularly, sometimes holding hands, and once just before
the Taliban came Shabnam spent the night with Najib at his home. "She wanted to
have extremist relations," he explains. "But I controlled myself. I told her I
was not ready. She was very upset, but then I pampered her and she began to
smile again. In the end, we just embraced." He muses over Shabnam's voracious
sexual appetite. "Women are very strange -- you cannot understand them." When
they meet, Najib says, they would just look at each other and shake hands.
"Islam does not permit kissing," he pauses, "but maybe I won't be so holy one
day." Najib claims such relationships, however chaste, went a long way to
satisfy men's needs. After the Taliban arrived, he says Mazar became a city of
serial masturbators. "All the men do that. It is a very serious problem. They
cannot walk properly. It is very bad for you. It makes you very weak."
The trouble is, the Taliban left just a week before the start of Ramadan. All
the men are busy shaving to look younger, but this is a time when no one is even
supposed to think about anything so wicked as courting a woman. Any reunions are
destined to be somewhat stifled as both sides try to contain their frustrations
for one more month. Najib keeps thinking about all the weddings he has been to.
"At weddings, women wear very sexy dresses," he says. "They want to show off
their bodies, to show how attractive they are." The ideal figure, he says, is
"fairly fat." "Not thin legs, and big breasts, like pomegranates, that stand
out." Others have altogether more exotic fantasies. "I would like to kiss
negros," says Wasiq, 37. "That would be very interesting for me." Mohamad Naim,
a burly bearded pilot who is repairing two helicopters abandoned by the Taliban,
has a burning question: "I have a strange request," he says, giggling and
beckoning. "We have heard Japanese girls have no hair, you know, on their
(whispers behind cupped hands, the other pointing to his crotch) vulva. Is it
true? Can it be true? That would be amazing."
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