He used to criticize even the Taliban, Shaheen says, as a journalist covering the mujahedin uprising against the Soviets, and the days afterwards when he was editor of the Kabul Times. What kind of criticism? Like money laundering, he says. Like the time electricity poured through a Taliban official's house even though the other houses in the neighborhood were dark. He wrote an exposé that prompted the Ministry of Water and Power to yank the electricity from the official's house.
We sit here now as his second wife, about 22 years old, maybe 23 (I ask him, he's not sure) pours Afghan green tea in clear glass mugs for my cousin and me, her dupatta pulled forward so far that it hangs like Little Red Riding Hood's cape, shielding her from the eyes of Big Bad Wolves. When she is finished she sits elegantly between us with her back to the men.
Shaheen's mobile phone rings. I tell the second wife that when she left the room, my cousin had said she had the bearing of a princess. I say it loud enough for her husband to hear. He smiles with mischief on his lips. Off the phone now, he pleads for us not to tell her such things.
"Her power will only increase?" I ask, as his wife leans forward with a smile, mischievous also, and tweaks the top of his right hand.
On my first visit, I noticed that she seemed feisty with her husband, never disrespectful, just alert, like when she admitted freely that she learned Urdu watching Bollywood movies. And like everyone else, I'm deeply interested in the Taliban, and the stories of their oppression of women. Their relationship intrigues me.
She's both feisty and girlish. She knows all about India's Brad Pitt, an actor named Salman Khan. Her husband knows nothing about Salman Khan.
She has power, her husband answers. "She has power of voice," he says. "Her mouth power is stronger than mine. For every one thing I have to say, she has seven things to say."
He smiles. She smiles. He calls her his student, someone with whom he discusses politics. She clearly has a strong opinion about many things -- including the fact that she is a second wife.
His first wife filters into the room, but I'm not sure she is his wife until later. She is older, perhaps his age, and weak from years of being ill, he explains. And she is very frail-looking, with bluish tattoo tribal markings on her "third eye," between her eyebrows, and a spot on her chin below her lips. He writes into my notebook the province from which she comes: Paktya Province. He explains to me that when she grew sick, she could no longer take care of her household duties. So some six years ago, the marriage proposal went out to another young girl.
"They are happy among themselves," he says, his two wives sitting beside each other on the carpet, each with one knee pulled up, almost like two mismatching bookends, leaning forward to comfort a little girl crying at their feet. "In America you may have one wife, but husbands and wives, they have many relations with others," he says, trying to explain. "I have no relation with other women than my wife. In our view, this is better."
Delicately, I ask: Why not just get a maid?
"It is not in Islam to have another lady in your house other than your wife," he says. "Even if you do not have relations, the wife will suspect you."
His second wife says in Pashto, with her husband translating, that he is committed to his wives. It's an arrangement, of course, difficult to understand. But she slips into Urdu to tell me, "Mujkho bahoth acha lugtha hay." I like it very much.
"Amrika acha kam nahee kurtha hay." America does not do good work, is the literal translation. Work is deeds. It is about infidelity, adultery and premarital bed-hopping that she is talking about. I'm a single woman of the West exhausted by going in and out of relationships. I've got to say they have a point. Is "Sex in the City" really our model for civilized living?
"The thing I don't like," he says, "is this free sexuality. This indecency. This one-parent families. Women living with men without marriage. Pro-choice. This I don't like." He pauses, remembering one more vice. "Sharab," alcohol, banned in Islam.