Heborah Rodriguez is a reluctant hairdresser in Michigan who has had enough of her husband and decides to travel around the world to work on humanitarian projects.
Heborah Rodriguez is a reluctant hairdresser in Michigan who has had enough of her husband and decides to travel around the world to work on humanitarian projects. The first stop is India, where she travels from village to village with a friend helping people put in new wells that could sustain them through a drought. The second and the last stop is Afghanistan. “Crazy Deb”, as she is called by her friends, undergoes emergency and disaster relief training quite coincidentally two months before 9/11 with a non-profit organisation and pleads for a place on the first team sent to Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban in May 2002. She arrives in Kabul where everything seems broken — buildings, roads, homes and families — and all she is good at is doing spiral perms! While accompanying a team of doctors and nurses, the group leader introduces her as the hairdresser from Michigan to a group of Westerners living in Kabul and before he can finish his sentence there is the “wildest applause” and she is “mobbed” by those who haven’t had a decent haircut in months and those who have “risked” lives for “highlights”. Rodriguez, who first heard of Afghanistan barely months before she arrived there, was surprised to hear that the Talibs had bombed beauty schools much like everything else. For the rest of her stay, she helped with a bit of trauma counselling, but mostly kept herself busy giving haircuts to “journalists, diplomats, missionaries, aid workers” and also some Afghanistani men — sometimes wondering if a “videotape would show up on Al-Jazeera television someday, as evidence that American hairdressers are torturing Afghan men”! Rodriguez returns to resume her life in Michigan a few weeks later giving haircuts to her clients and in between making phone calls to cosmetic giants requesting for donations for women in Afghanistan. Right after the first truck load of shampoos and hair colour lands at her doorstep, Rodriguez hears of another American woman based in Afghanistan for decades and trying to resurrect the lives of local women by starting a beauty school to make them financially independent. Rodriguez joins forces with the upcoming Beauty Without Borders Kabul Beauty School and arrives in Kabul, with her own consignment in March 2003. Rodriguez’ book, The Kabul Beauty School, first released in 2007, is as much about the hardships she faced in setting up the school as about the lives of the women whom she trained and helped establish. The stories of Roshanna, a young bride terrified that her in-laws will discover she is not a virgin; Nahida, her prize pupil who bears the scars of her Taliban husband’s disapproval; and Mina, forcibly married to a man to repay a family debt. The blurb instantly reminded me of Khalid Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns, which was also released in 2007. So when I started reading how beaten and grey the streets of Kabul were, it was difficult to hold on. I was wrong. The similarities with Hosseini’s book ended there, and once I was past the first few chapters the book was absolutely unputdownable. Rodriguez’ stories are real and she is like a talisman for the scores of women whose lives she touched. At one point when she sees that Roshanna’s wedding is almost over because the family cannot prove that she is a virgin, Rodriguez in desperation digs the clippers under her nails till blood spurts out: “I wipe my finger back and forth on the handkerchief, then hand it to her. “Here’s your virginity,” I tell her.” However, a few chapters later when Roshanna vanishes from the Kabul landscape to be supposedly happy in the arms of her engineer husband in Amsterdam, Rodriguez wonders if she really did save a life! Then there are other lives such as that of little Hama, whom she tries to save from becoming a prostitute, but she cannot because Hama starts enjoying the male gaze. The author brings forth the contradictions in these women’s lives, whom we see as suffering and in need of guardian angels to save them from this big bad world. Rodriguez’ own marriage to an Afghan, whom she had barely met 20 days before, and the two didn’t even speak the same language, is also difficult to digest. She claims she married Sam — who was already married with seven children — on the advice of a journalist couple so that she would be safe in Kabul. Sam goes and has the eighth child after marrying Rodriguez and there is little that she can do about it. Though the relationship became sour while she was in Kabul, Rodriguez writes on her website that she is not in touch with Sam, who now works for an Afghan warlord. The book was a bestseller and there was talk of making it into a movie with Sandra Bullock playing the lead, but it ran into a controversy with women’s groups claiming that the beauty school was not Rodriguez’ baby alone. She has also been charged with financial irregularities too. A charge she had to face even before she left Kabul. Her eventual exit, after spending five glorious years and training 200 students, happened when she picked up a kidnap threat to her son who was visiting her. She left the country within hours, leaving behind her scissors, shampoos and soul.
