A Face From The Past

A Face From the Past: Redefining Femininity

"Her skin is weathered; there are wrinkles now, but she is as striking as she was 17 years ago."

These are the words with which a 2002 entry in Steve McCurry’s journal begins, words which signal the end of a story which began a long time ago in a country far away from the place he calls home.

Place: Afghan refugee camp, Peshawar, Pakistan. Year: 1984. Steve McCurry, an American photographer, is far from home, wandering among hundreds of Afghan refugees who’ve fled to Pakistan after Russia’s invasion of their country. He’s almost overwhelmed by the bewilderment and uncertainty he can sense all around him, tumultuous emotions looking for release. Steve is a photographer for National Geographic, and he’s just about to take the photograph of his career.

Improvised classrooms have been set up in tents, perhaps a sign that the Afghans are resigned to spending a long time in their makeshift homes. Steve enters the girls’ school tent after asking the teacher for permission to photograph her students. The most withdrawn of the students is a girl around twelve, with striking green eyes. Is she just shy? He isn’t sure. But she allows him to photograph her, and he is grateful.

When he sees the developed film, he’s struck by the sense of stillness it contains – like time has stopped in the midst of the chaos around the Afghan girl. The photograph appears on the cover of the June 1985 issue of National Geographic, accompanying an article by Debra Denker. Almost instantly, the evocative portrait catapults into the world’s imagination like a modern-day Mona Lisa. But for Steve, fame is superseded by the awareness that he knows nothing about his model. The only thing he can find out about her is that her parents were killed during the Russian invasion. She disappears with the finality of an elusive dream, leaving only his unfulfilled yearning to find out who she is.

2002, Peshawar. Seventeen years have passed. Steve is back in Pakistan, driven back to the now-abandoned refugee camp by the alarming news that the space is going to be cleared to make room for a housing complex. He’s painfully aware that with the demolition of the space, his last hope of finding his Afghan girl will be crushed into rubble as well. When the news spreads that an American photographer is searching for a woman who could well be the most famous Afghan in living memory, imposters crawl out of the woodwork in scores. Steve begins to despair after several run-ins with hopeful imposters and men who claimed to be married to her. And then his long-overdue break shows up, in the form of a man who tells Steve and his team that the girl in the photograph had been his neighbour a decade ago. He introduces them to a man he says is the girl’s brother. Steve looks at the colour of the man’s eyes and knows his quest is at an end. He remembers that intense green all too well.

And so, one would think, the story ended. Steve finally knew Sharbat Gula’s name, after years of being haunted by her face. It was a while before Sharbat’s conservative family – a woman in her position isn’t allowed even to tell a male stranger her name – allowed him to meet and photograph her again. He says she remembers him, perhaps only because he is the only person to ever have photographed her.

Shortly after ‘rediscovering’ the captivating Afghan Girl, the National Geographic Society found itself overwhelmed by inquiries from people who had read about her life and wanted to know how they could help her and other women in her war-torn country. Subsequently, the Society has established a fund in association with The Asia Foundation to give Afghan girls financial assistance and opportunities to study abroad. People enraptured with Sharbat Gula’s image for years have been pouring in contributions to the fund.

Year: 2003. Place: An Afghan village, exact location undisclosed. Sharbat Gula, the uncommonly grown-up little girl who entered the world’s imagination like an apparition, hadn’t heard of Steve McCurry or National Geographic until she met the photographer, and she hasn’t let her celebrity status disrupt her daily schedule. She’s married and has given birth to five children, two of whom have not survived. Maybe there aren’t such things as happy endings after all, because maybe stories don’t end after all. Maybe they go on forever. And, as a wise postmodernist says: never again will a story be told as if it’s the only one.