It’s my second day as a bacha posh, and it’s setting out to be a lonely one. My sisters have all gone to school and my mother won’t let me help her with the housework. My father wants to be alone, since that’s his thing now. I’m left to figure out how to be a boy.
Music starts to stream over the courtyard wall. Our neighbor is playing the radio loudly. The sounds of the drumbeats, the keyboard, and the strumming of a rubab carry into our yard. I tap my foot to the rhythm and think about what else I might be able to do.
Boys my age, when not in school, would be out in the street. I’ve seen them play pickup games of soccer or catch. What would I say? Would they spot me as the girl from down the road? I don’t think I can walk out there and join them. I stand up. Maybe being on my feet will help me think.
I could ask for a bicycle. Girls aren’t really supposed to ride bicycles, but a boy could. And I’m a boy. I wonder if I could keep it upright like the boys do or if I would topple over.
“Obayd!” my mother yells.
I’m brought back by her sharp tone. I spin around to face her; a basket of dry clothes rests on her hip.
“Yes, Mother?” The look on her face tells me I’ve done something. “What is it?”
“What is it? I haven’t asked much of you, Obayd. I am only asking you not to do things that a boy shouldn’t be doing. Do you know any boy who would dance around like that?”
I hadn’t even realized. I look at my feet and it occurs to me that I was swinging my hips to the tempo of the song as I crossed the courtyard. Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure I was bopping my shoulders too. The music just takes me sometimes.
My mother makes a pot of stew with steaming white rice. We sit around the tablecloth spread on the living room floor. Neela asks my father to join us. We all hear him say what he says every day.
“Maybe tomorrow, sweet girl.”
My mother piles hot mounds of rice on plates for each of us. Then she stirs the pot of stew with a metal ladle. She pours the saucy mix of chicken and vegetables onto my plate first and then onto my sisters’ plates.
“Mother!” Neela cries out in protest when she looks at her dish. “I just have potatoes and onions. I thought you said you made chicken for dinner tonight?”
This is a big deal because it’s not too often that we get to eat chicken. My uncle sent some over because of the three-day Eid holiday that marks Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son for God. I’ve heard the story before and was really glad to hear God didn’t actually take his son. Now it’s just a holiday where we pray, visit family, and get to eat really well. We’ve been looking forward to this meal all day.
“Neela,” my mother explains in a low voice. “There wasn’t much meat to cook. Your father is still healing and needs the nutrition more than any of us.”
My sisters all stare at the plate in front of me. Their eyes narrow in accusation.
“But Obayda—I mean, Obayd’s got two big pieces of chicken right there. Even a drumstick!”
I do have more than my fair share. There’s nothing left in the pot but sauce and a few chunks of uninteresting vegetables.
“I can give you some of my—”
“No, you will not.” My mother keeps her head down and tears off a piece of bread. She’s about to take a bite when she pauses and decides to set some ground rules.
“Obayd is a boy. He needs the meat if he’s going to get stronger. I don’t want to hear any more about it.”
Her tone shuts down the conversation. We eat in silence, Neela’s jaw clamping down angrily on her dinner. I know she’s got no real reason to be angry with me, but I’m pretty sure she is.
My mother calls me into the kitchen. She reaches into the pocket of her dress and slips me a few afghanis, more money than I’ve ever had in my hands.
“Take this dough to the baker and come back with bread.”
It sounds simple enough. I’ve been to the market plenty of times with my mother. I used to go to the market in Kabul with my father, too, but that was when he had two legs. I walk slowly, watching the people around me to see if anyone notices that I’m in pants for the first time ever. No one seems to realize.
I’m carrying a metal tray with five mounds of dough. I know where the baker is. Stores run down the length of the dirt road that is our main market. The baker’s shop is the fifth one on the block of shops, which are really clay-walled cubbies, some bigger than others. Most have carpets covering an earth floor. One is full of beans, flour, spices, and oil. Another contains fabric and a few sets of children’s clothes. They don’t have doors, though two of them have curtains drawn to the side so the shopkeeper can watch the passersby in the street.
The baker is the busiest of them all. His store is easy to spot even from a distance because it has a red awning over the entrance. The store is a square space big enough for only him and his helper. They have trays of dough on the floor between them, right next to the big open mouth of the oven, a deep clay pot buried in the ground. The baker stares at me with one eye narrowed.
I don’t know what to say.
“Which is the dough and which is the boy?” he asks his friend, with a laugh. “Hard to tell when neither one is talking.”
I clear my throat. He called me a boy.
“Can you bake these for us?” I hold my arms out a few inches, but I’m still too far for the baker to reach.
“Are your feet stuck? Bring the dough over to me!”
I move because he’s loud and abrupt. My arms thrust the tray in front of his face. He shakes his head and takes it. His friend is chuckling when their eyes meet. My face is hotter than the oven. I turn to the side so they can see only a sliver of me. I can’t face them, and turning my back to them feels so much worse. I’m not used to being alone around men I don’t know.
The roar of an engine makes me turn around. Two black jeeps with tinted windows drive by. I stare at them until I feel a whack on the back of my shoulder. I spin around, not sure what just happened.
“Don’t stare,” says the baker’s helper.
“I wasn’t staring,” I reply. He’s right, though. Cars like the ones that just passed by are not even common in Kabul, where there are way more vehicles than here. Naturally, they caught my attention.
“You’ll regret it. Those are Abdul Khaliq’s cars, and you don’t want to be caught gawking at them.”
“Abdul Khaliq— isn’t he a warlord?” I remember Khala Aziza mentioning his name.
The baker laughs.
“Well, his twenty bodyguards seem to think so.” His voice grows a bit serious. “Just stay out of his way, kid. There’s nothing else to know.”
He stretches the dough out and lowers it into the oven. Just a few minutes later, he brings it out on a paddle. I can feel their eyes on me. I kick at the ground with my feet and wonder what a real boy would do in my place.
“Take it.” The five lumps have been transformed into piping-hot flatbreads, each longer than my arm. I stack them on the tray and hand him the money. I breathe a sigh of relief that my mission was a success.
My mother is waiting at the door when I come home. She exhales deeply and cups my face in her hands.
“I think you’re ready to go to school,” she declares. It’s not just bread I’ve brought back from the market—it’s a sign that I can play the part of a boy in the real world.
Five
“Obayd! Obayd!”
My sisters think it’s funny to call me by my boy name. If I answer, they laugh, and if I don’t, they raise their eyebrows and threaten to tell Madar.
“Cut it out,” I bite back. My stomach is churning. I’m finally starting school. My sisters started a couple of weeks ago and have had a lot of catching up to do, since the school year begins in spring and we’re starting in the fall. I’ve watched them pack their notebooks and pencils and head out of the house while I’ve been home getting used to being a girl-boy so I won’t be so awkward about it when I join my classmates, who are alr
eady thinking about the winter break that starts in a few weeks. This just means that everyone in my class will be staring at me even harder since I’m new to this school and starting even later than my sisters.
“As you wish, Obayd-jan!” Alia says as if she’s curtsying before a king. She’s dramatic. That’s her thing.
At the end of the main road, Neela stops and gives me a hug. She heads down a smaller road to the left to make her way to the girls’ high school. It’s much narrower than the one in Kabul, but Neela is happy to be out of the house and with girls her age.
I’m glad and not glad when we reach our school.
“It looks so different from our school in Kabul, doesn’t it?”
Sometimes Alia can read my mind.
“It looks so old!”
“It’s not that old, but it took a beating during the war. My teacher told me they’ve fixed it up a lot. It was worse before,” Meena says, shaking her head.
My sisters adjust their head scarves, making sure the knots are perfectly centered under their chins.
“I liked our school in Kabul,” I say. “And I was supposed to move into the third-grade girls’ class there. Now we’re here and I’m going into the boys’ class. I don’t know if I’m going to know what to do.”
“A classroom is a classroom wherever it is—which is why we should go in. The teachers here are just as strict as the Kabul teachers about being on time. We’ll meet here when they let us out. Don’t be late,” Meena warns. Her voice softens when she sees the look on my face. “And Obayd . . . you’ll be fine, okay?”
I blink quickly so my tears won’t get very far.
We go into our different classes, since boys and girls are separated. My sisters go to the left and I go to the right, where I find my classroom. There’s a woman standing at the door. She’s tall and thin and watches me closely as I try to slip in unnoticed. I keep my head down and hope she won’t spy my big ears and the body hidden inside these pants.
She stops me with a hand on my shoulder.
“It’s your first day, isn’t it?”
“Yes, teacher.” I stare at my feet. My face is hot.
“Your name?”
I take a deep breath.
“Obayd.”
“Obayd,” she repeats and tilts my head up with a finger under my chin. “You are Obayd?”
I nod slowly. Other boys file in, walking around me to get to their places on the carpets that are laid out on the ground. It feels like we stand there for about an hour, her staring at my face and me refusing to meet her eyes.
“Obayd,” she says once more.
“Yes.”
She lets out a breath so big her whole chest moves with it. She knows what I am. She points into the classroom.
“Find a place to sit. You’ve missed too much already. You have lots of catching up to do if you want to get a decent grade this year.”
There are two windows that look out on the schoolyard. I find a place in the third row of students and sit next to the wall.
I take out a notebook and pencil and keep my head down as if I’m about to write something. There are boys all around me, but I don’t want to talk to them. I know they’ll see right through me and be even worse than my sisters.
The hours are long. We study math, religion, and reading. My teacher, Seema-jan, makes us recite verses from our holy book, the Qur’an, which is the toughest subject for me. Reading is a little easier. Most of what we’re doing is stuff I learned last year in my school in Kabul. I fidget a lot. The boy next to me notices. He leans in and whispers: “Stop moving around. You’re going to get in trouble.”
Sitting still was never this hard.
I loved school in Kabul. In the summer, the classrooms were so hot I could barely breathe, but I never complained. We had smooth desks and real chairs. There were blackboards as big as the wall. I had friends who looked like me and a teacher who called me by my real name.
And we knew that we were lucky to be able to go to school at all. Some kids have to work instead. I’ve seen kids collecting scrap metal from dumps or swinging hammers onto red hot pieces of metal in a blacksmith’s shop. Some kids wash cars, shine shoes, or sell pens and sticks of gum. A lot of kids who aren’t in school don’t get to be kids at all. That made us all really eager to go to class, even if our teachers were strict or assigned lots of hard homework.
We are finally released into the school’s playground, which is really nothing more than a big open space with one soccer ball in desperate need of air and a baseball bat that must have been a gift from an American soldier because we don’t play baseball in Afghanistan.
Boys play with boys, and girls play with girls. That’s always been fine by me. It’s not so much that girls and boys want to do different things, but more that we do things in different ways. The girls run a bit on the playground, but without shoving one another or poking fun. The boys are louder and run like they’re not afraid of what they might crash into. Their arms swing out and legs stretch forward, crossing as much ground as they can in each bound.
I stare at the girls out of the corner of my eye. I hear them chanting and hopping to the song about pomegranate seeds, the stones in the river, and taking bread to the baker. The words echo in my head as I fight back the urge to join my voice with theirs. My sisters are not in the yard. Their classes will be out later, and I know Meena and Alia will be part of the circles of girls, blending in perfectly.
I watch the boys drift one way and the girls another. I am now in the weird place between both worlds.
I pick up a stick and start walking, hoping no one notices the boy in blue corduroys—the one who is all alone. Three boys are chasing one another. As the first boy flies past me, his sneakers kick up puffs of dust. I take a quick step back so I won’t be plowed over by the others. They’re on his heels.
“Come, catch him!”
Without slowing their stride, they call out for me to join them.
One boy pauses. He turns around and stares at me. My stomach drops. His face is mostly hidden by the rim of a navy blue American-style cap with W-I-Z-A-R-D-S embroidered across the front in red thread. He is looking at me hard, like I’ve taken something of his.
“Hey, you! Where are you going?”
I turn to walk in a different direction but he is approaching. I pick up my pace and move closer to the school building.
“Stop!”
I make a quick left and dart into the building, dashing into the hallway and ducking behind a column wide enough to hide me. I’m panting, and my breaths are loud in the quiet of the empty school. I wait to hear the sound of the door opening, to hear the boy’s footsteps in the hallway and for him to find me.
Today he doesn’t, but tomorrow—a nervous girl’s voice in my head warns me—he will.
Six
By the following day, I am all nerves. I’ve been a boy for less than three weeks and still haven’t fully gotten used to it.
“Obayd. O-BAYD!”
I haven’t heard the teacher. My eyes have been on the window, staring at the playground, where I know we’ll be heading in just a few moments. I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen today, but I am certain that boy will be looking for me. Thankfully, he’s not in my class.
“Yes, Moallim-sahib,” I say, startled. That’s how we address our teachers, by calling them esteemed teacher, since it’s not proper to use their real names.
“If you’re not going to pay attention, do you see any purpose in sitting in my classroom?” I hang my head, knowing a classroom full of eyeballs are on me.
“Forgive me, Moallim-sahib.”
“Can you give the answer to the problem?”
I cannot. She has both hands on her hips, her mouth turned in a deep frown.
“You will have an additional homework assignment today, and tomorrow you will stand before the class and answer the questions I ask of you. I’m sure you’ll have an easier time hearing me when you stand up here.”
 
; “Yes, teacher,” I mumble.
When it’s time for recess my stomach churns.
In a burst, we’re outside and the boys line up for a game of ghursai. Ghursai is a tricky game that girls don’t ever play but boys love. I’ve watched the boys in my neighborhood play lots of times and know the rules. The game involves two teams. Each team has a leader, a king who needs to be protected from opponents. The goal is to get the king from one side of the field to the target on the other side. Along the way, everyone is trying to knock over their challengers. Anyone who falls is instantly out of the game.
If that were it, the game wouldn’t be so bad. But here’s the catch: In ghursai, players have to reach their right hands behind their backs and grab their left feet in a tight grip. That makes for a field of hopping, one-armed bandits trying to keep their balance, defend their king from attackers, and get to the other side. And if an opponent unlocks a player’s finger-foot grasp, that unlucky player is out of the game.
“What’s wrong with you? Come and play.”
The boy from yesterday watches to see what I will do. He is wearing pantaloons with a khaki tunic and the same cap he had on yesterday. I know I will attract more attention if I try to hide behind the boys playing marbles, so I nod, as cool as I can, and wander over to join the second huddle, the one with fewer people. The boy is on the other team. He gives a half smirk.
“Hey, giiiiiirls,” the tallest boy on my team calls out. I look over in a panic only to realize he is talking to our challengers. “Hey, girls, have you chosen your king yet? The sooner we start, the sooner we can knock you over, so hurry up!”
There are chuckles.
“Are you any good?” asks the boy standing next to me.
I start to shrug my shoulders, but it turns into shaking my head. Ghursai is one of those boy things that I know about, but if I try to do it . . . well, I remember what it feels like to have a warm puddle of urine in my shoe.