Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

One wonder of wintertime Kabul was the markets. In this ruined city, the stalls, surrounded by Taliban-era graffiti on bullet-pocked walls, held a profusion of local foodstuffs: pomegranates and oranges, all sorts of nuts and dried fruits, fresh meat (sometimes disorientingly fresh), spices and grains in sacks, a lot of cauliflower, the largest and most vividly colored carrots I’ve ever seen (some nearly purple), eggplants, onions, potatoes, and different kinds of sweets. While the greatest assortment could be found in the food bazaar near the river, I saw rich displays even in the poorest neighborhoods. People had no electricity, no plumbing, no heating, sometimes no roof, but they had food. Qudratullah was able to get the best ingredients, and when friends would stop by, there was always enough to eat; he had an Afghan capacity to expand meals to accommodate whoever came. So it seemed natural when I’d invited the musicians over to offer them dinner at our house, where we had not only excellent food, but also that rarer Kabul commodity, heat—in this case, from a woodstove.

I had stopped by UNESCO that day and met with its living-culture expert, who was planning a music festival but had yet to meet any musicians, so I invited him to our concert. I checked in with Marla Ruzicka, the blonde liberal who was staying at the Agence France-Presse house, and I invited her and her translator, who had done a favor for me the day before. I invited all the people who worked at our house—translators, guards, and so on. Scott Johnson of Newsweek said he thought Antonia Rados from German TV might like to come, and I was pleased. When some people from the Washington Post stopped by, we thought it would be a mistake not to include them. I invited a filmmaker I’d interviewed the day before. And so the numbers began to creep up.

When I told Qudratullah we had company coming, he said he’d need some extra money to buy food and some more extra money to buy plates and a bit of further extra money to get someone in to help in the kitchen. I said I thought there would be about thirty of us, and he asked for $200.

My estimate, it turned out, was wildly off. Between the musicians and the house staff and some other people we’d met, we had a good twenty or so Afghans, and the foreigners had all brought friends. By the time we had dinner at about seven thirty, there were between fifty and sixty people. Qudratullah, praise be upon him, produced enough food so that all were fed. We had qabili pilau, Afghanistan’s national dish, a sweet rice pilaf; roast leg of mutton, cooked until it was falling off the bone; roast chicken; borani, a flavorful eggplant dish made with yogurt and garlic; sabzi qorma, an Iranian dish of meat stewed with spinach; salad; and firni, an Afghan pudding made with cornstarch. Of course we had flat Afghan bread.

My plan had been to hear the musicians for an hour or so, but they were so happy to have an occasion and an audience that they played on and on and on. We all danced to this exotic music and ate and danced and ate. Ghaznavi sang for us. In Afghanistan, women and men don’t socialize together; even at a wedding, women and men celebrate in separate halls. Our Afghan guests, all men, showed us how they dance in a circle. The Westerners joined in, and showed the Afghans how Western men and women dance together. The music got more and more exuberant.

“My goodness,” said the UNESCO operative. “There is music in Afghanistan after all. I will have a festival, I will!”

“Why not eat more? There is more!” said my translator, Farouq Samim. “Let’s eat until every plate is clean!”

“Do you think this is getting out of control?” asked Scott Johnson, who had official responsibility for the house. I had to admit it was.

At nine o’clock, someone showed up with a bottle of whiskey, which in a Muslim country, where the law forbids alcohol, was the equivalent of showing up with pot at an American party. There was a lot of giggling, and a few of the Afghans made rapid progress toward inebriation. The next morning, I was to teach Farouq the word hangover.

Kabul has a 10:00 p.m. curfew, so the party guests began filing out at nine thirty, but the musicians lived too far away to make the curfew and so stayed over. They played and played, and at 2:00 a.m. we were all still sitting together, and the sitar and the tabla were diverting us with gentle, lyrical late-night music. The brief performance we’d planned went on for more than ten hours.