Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

I had the fortune to meet Afghanistan’s most distinguished classical musicians, who have been brought together by the enterprising director of music for Afghan television, Aziz Ghaznavi, himself a popular singer of the pre-mujahideen period who has toured in the United States. “Of course, practice makes perfect,” Ghaznavi said, “and during the Taliban period none of us could practice. We lost so much. After five years of not singing at all, I was afraid to hear my own voice, and it was a very scary moment, to sing again for the first time.”

To an untrained ear, classical Afghan music sounds somewhat like Indian classical music, but it uses instruments that are indigenous to Afghanistan—the sarinda, the rabab, and the richak—as well as the tabla and sitar and harmonium. The Taliban insisted that musical instruments be destroyed, so only those that people managed to hide have survived. One man I met had kept his sarinda in the middle of his woodpile, where it passed for fuel, throughout the Taliban period, knowing that any neighbor who spotted it could betray him, should he so wish. “In recent months, we have been starting over with these warped, broken instruments,” Ghaznavi explained. “There is only one instrument maker in Afghanistan, and he is now fixing all the broken instruments; he has no time yet for new ones.”

For family reasons, Ghaznavi could not flee Afghanistan during the Taliban rule. Life was incredibly difficult for anyone whose whole life was music, and he became depressed because of unsatisfied yearnings. He went to a doctor and said he would go crazy without music in his life. The doctor suggested that he listen to the one kind of song that even the Taliban couldn’t make illegal. So he bought his first birds and fell in love with them. He now has more than fifty pigeons in a coop behind his house. When I called on him one afternoon, I was ushered into his light-purple living room to sit cross-legged on the floor and eat candy while Ghaznavi and a friend tried out some new harmoniums they had just acquired. The sound of the multiple harmoniums playing in this lavender room in which many pigeons were flying around was surreal, and the weirdness was not mitigated by the presence of Ghaznavi’s son, the all-Afghanistan weight-lifting champion, who sat in his shalwar kameez, traditional tunic and trousers, flexing his stupefying biceps when he was not refilling our teacups.

The practice rooms at the television station are always full, despite being unheated and without amenities. When I went there the first time, Ghaznavi directed me to some particularly talented musicians. A few had recently returned from Pakistan and Iran, but others had spent the Taliban years in Kabul. One, Abdul Rashin Mashinee, caught by the Taliban playing a sarinda, was told that they would cut off his hands if they ever found him playing again. He spent the dark years working as a butcher, but, he says, “I practiced my instrument diligently, every night in my dreams.”

The group kept breaking off to apologize to me for the cold and for not having their full ensemble present. “There should be eleven of us, not six,” they said. They said that I seemed to appreciate music, and wondered if they could find their friends and get together so I could hear them all. I said I’d be delighted and invited them to my place for the next afternoon at five.

My Dinner in Kabul

I was living for the time being in an old al-Qaeda house that some friends had rented in the fashionable Wazir Akbar Khan area, where we had full-time translators and drivers. I had heard that we would have a cook, but dinner my first night in Kabul was a lovely surprise. We had spicy little meatballs in rich sauce, a wonderful rice dish, crisp fried potato cakes, and fresh Afghan bread. When I expressed astonishment, a friend explained that we had nabbed the best chef in Kabul, and that everyone who came to dinner at our house tried to poach him away. Qudratullah arrived every day at 7:00 a.m. to make us breakfast, produced a hot lunch for us at midday, and prepared dinner for us every night.