A Flavor of Kabul in Cambridge

Fozia Karzai strides forcefully into the spacious main dining room of Helmand, the restaurant she and her family founded after fleeing Afghanistan nearly two decades ago.

The dark dining room is elegant—the walls are a pale yellow with dark blue trim and Persian carpets line the floor.

Karzai’s cuisine at Helmand has long been well-regarded.

But her personal relationship to Afghanistan’s ongoing struggle for democracy—her brother, Hamid Karzai, was named head of the Afghan interim government in December—has added new mystique to the five year-old Cambridge restaurant.

The Political Dimension

Sitting in a couch at the front of the dining room, Karzai describes her childhood in a family of dedicated Afghan politicians. She speaks frankly in her heavily-accented English.

Karzai’s father, Abdul Ahad Karzai, was the speaker of the Afghan parliament when she was growing up in Kabul.

According to Fozia, her father held enormous power as the leader of the Populzai clan until three years ago—when he was assassinated by the Taliban in Pakistan.

After her father’s death, Karzai’s brother became the leader of the Populzai clan.

She tells stories of her brother’s near encounters with death as a rebel leader fighting the Taliban.

At one point, Karzai says, Hamid was surrounded by Taliban and al Qaeda forces who were about to execute him. He only escaped, she says, because a bomb happened to go off nearby, scattering the soldiers. Although he was injured by the bomb, Karzai says, he was able to escape.

“His heart was with his people,” she says. “He had a very strong feeling for how much his people were suffering.”

Since December, Hamid has served as the interim leader of Afghanistan. Karzai says she continues to speak with her brother on the phone regularly and trusts his ability to bring peace to Afghanistan.

“I have confidence in him, because I know he’s working from his heart, even if it’s a hard job,” she says.

Unexpected Support

Fozia Karzai’s life has also changed in the days since Sept. 11.

Immediately after the attack, Karzai says, her storefront was defaced and passers-by often yelled insults. But Massachusetts police officers spoke with Karzai and her family and advised her on measures to retain her anonymity.

“Massachusetts police?––excellent,” she pronounces.

Karzai says she has been heartened overall, by America’s response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attack.

“People attacked us before they knew what we were,” she says. “Now that in the news they have explained that we are for democracy, they offer support.”

She says Helmand’s clientele has become much more knowledgeable about Afghan culture due to the media coverage in the past months.

“Before Sept. 11, a lot of people didn’t even know where Afghanistan is,” she says, rolling her eyes in exasperation.

Since then, she says, many loyal clients have come to the restaurant even more often.

“Most of our customers, if they came once a week, they’ll come twice a week, if they came once a month, they’ll come twice a month, to show their support,” she says.

A Family Enterprise

Although the Cambridge location has only been around for five years, the Karzais began the restaurant business soon after their flight from Afghanistan in the early 1980s.

Shortly after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the Karzais fled first to Pakistan and then on to Washington, D.C.

“We left because many of our friends and family members were put in jail, many of them were killed,” says Zaki Royan, Karzai’s husband and the restaurant’s manager.

Royan, who had been Afghanistan’s director general of government and economic statistics, says the family’s exodus forced him to abandon his political career.

But despite the family’s pleas, Karzai says, her father and brother Hamid remained behind, unwilling to leave the country.

When the rest of the family came to America, Fozia says it was the business-minded Mahmoud—the only one of her seven brothers not interested in politics—to get the family on its feet.

“I don’t know where he got the idea of starting restaurants,” says Karzai, “but he’s the business man in the family, and that’s what he thought we should do.”

The first “Helmand” restaurant—named after a river in Afghanistan—opened in Baltimore around 15 years ago. Since then, the family’s restaurant holdings have come to include locations from San Francisco to Cambridge.

But despite her successful acclimation to America, Karzai says she is looking forward to returning permanently to Afghanistan with her husband and three daughters.

She says the country’s delicate political situation will not allow the whole family to move back to Afghanistan together.

“First my husband wants to go, then I will,” Karzai says. “We can’t both go back at the same time, because it’s dangerous and for the kids, it’s very difficult.”

Karzai says she returned to Afghanistan for a single night last year to visit her father’s grave.

She describes the brief visit as a painful experience.

“I’d see the people walking as a ghost,” she says. “They have no joy.”

But as she talks, Karzai is interrupted by a restaurant employee who comes up behind her to ask if he is free to leave for the day. Karzai looks at him sternly before agreeing to let him go.

These days, the restaurant and its employees are her main concern.

“I don’t do any of the cooking, so I have to come in and taste the food every afternoon,” she says of her restaurant duties.

“That’s a nice job,” she says.

—Staff writer Eugenia B. Schraa can be reached at schraa@fas.harvard.edu.