Ed is in Chicago

I finally made it to Kucha-ya Kharabat last Saturday – the long-planned outing of my short life in Kabul. This area of the old city proved to be suitably ‘kharab’ – falling-down mud brick walls, shop awnings made out of emergency shelter bivvi-bags, and mud, mud, mud, mud, mud - thick seas of mud sucking in and out like the tide.

On previous occasions when I had planned to come here to investigate the instrument makers, I invited a bunch of other people, but despite vaguely positive answers, no one ever got off their flattened weekend backsides to come, and indeed something always went wrong with the transport (don’t get me started on the situation with booking cars in our organisation – it would produce many pages of tedious bile). On this occasion however I announced that I was going come what may, a car did turn up – half an hour early no less, and I had 3 other people besides the driver, accompanying me. Ahaha! Decision is the key!

We followed the signs for instrument makers – faded Technicolor hoardings with tabla and dutar depicted, and after a couple of closed-down shops, we came into a tiny workshop with a few dusty instruments hanging around, and a couple of young men – the instrument maker and his androgynous friend. The instrument maker didn’t seem to be very busy, and sat us down on plastic chairs and showed us his wares. Most of the instruments he offered me were old ones – long-necked dutars with 2 strings – nice-sounding in the right hands, but I wasn’t sure I had the correct helping of Afghan instrumental charisma. A fantastic singer-songster like Mir Maftun from Badakhshan in the remote and mountainous north, who strums up a frenzy with his songs about smoking Hashish and beautiful young boys could excite the senses with a single string no doubt. But I thought I wanted a bit more to handle. Rubabs are funny-shaped things with about a million strings, so I was immensely put off those as well. What I wanted was something with a nice even number of strings – 4 or so, that I could play nice simple tunes on. The first he offered was a beautifully inlaid rubab that he said he would part with for the sum of $1200 – I had been thinking of a cap of $100, so I was a little taken aback, but Afghanistan is always more expensive than you expect. The stocky German tells me that this often the case with post-war economies – something to do with the roads and telephone systems having been shot to pieces. As it turned out, you don’t actually have to play all the strings of the rubab – just 3 are actually to be played upon, and the rest vibrate in harmony, so that gave me courage. There was one rubab that was half finished, that I could have for $120, but I thought I would shop around a bit first.

The androgynous friend offered to take me to find a teacher - a man called Ustad Ghulam Hussein - a fattish master-musician with fingers like sausages and a curling smile-grimace who lives in a broken-down room, in a muddy hovel behind a hoarding made from a piece of UNHCR shelter in the broken-down old city. I was introduced by the startlingly female male and the master sat me down crosslegged among his mates, knee-to-knee around the electric fire and played to me with his grimacing smile playing softly round his snarling black teeth, with one of his rubab students and a tabla master busking along. It was great. I love these plinky-plonky instruments, and there was something so effortlessly rhythmical in the way they struck up a ditty. Then we negotiated a deal for lessons. He told me that he had taught an American in his house before and charged such and such, but I worked a cheaper price for coming to sit knee-to-knee with him once a week in the old city. I tried to convince him that perhaps it would be a waste of his time to teach such a one as me up from absolute scratch, and that possibly I could learn from one of his students, but he told me that no, I could not learn properly from anyone else. The student (a middle-aged man with a pointy face, and a book filled with the scribbled notes from months of lessons) chimed in agreeing that yes, that you had to be taught properly at the beginning in particular, and that there was no other master in Afghanistan now who could do it – they were all abroad or dead. How could I gainsay this endorsement? Now I have to try and manage to slip past the security cordon once a week in order to get a taxi to his house and back for a few hours. Not easy, but probably better that telling logistics that I want to take a car there once a week, and waiting for the vehicle that never comes.

After the lesson-discussion, I did buy myself a rubab at another shop, and spent the evening plinking away happily and tunelessly to myself, interrupted only by the occasional shout of ‘Ed.. shut the fuck up!’ from one of my colleagues. Ah, what man must suffer for his art. Just wait till I have had a few lessons with the grimacing master, and am able to charm the very birds down from the trees! (What trees?)

After the Ustad, I tired myself out - I am so unused to walking around, its incredible. I suppose I must have been walking for a good 3 hours after Lunch at the Mild-Mannered American’s. It was a nice occasion - he is living with this Afghan American who has come back to invest in the country and make money, and apart from being nice to get out of the guesthouse, it was lovely to have dinner with some Afghans- they were basically a whole bunch of old men, plus me and the Ruddy-Faced Mild-Mannered One. The old codgers were mainly returnees, plus a few others – people involved in business or ministries of one kind or another, and very kind and friendly. After lunch we went into a separate room for tea, and a very sweet old fellow with white hair gave us chocolate and an Afghan sesame nougat, and we listened to our elders talk about Afghanistan and London and this and that. The host is a family friend from way back it seems. We talked a bit about Arthur Miller who has just died, and it was a nice change to talk to someone would spontaneously bring a playwright into the conversation. Possibly only Bouncing Brendan (he of the inspirational blog – see my first post), amongst my colleagues, has spontaneously quoted literature at me. There seems to be a heavy predjudice towards non-fiction amongst these development types. I was trying to remember which Miller play I have seen, but Tenessee Williams plays kept jumping into my head. It was A View From a Bridge, I remember. A great man has died.

And we talked about nationality and identity, with a good amount of anecdotal evidence to draw on, with the Afghan who has long lived in Virginia, the Mild-Mannered American who has an English mother, and myself having pledged my love to an English girl brought up in Italy, as well as having by now a certain sense of detachment from the country that first saw me take breath. Mind you, this ambiguity does not, at present, seem to project far beyond my own self-image. As far as this little world is concerned I am the perfect Englishman. At least since I came to Afghanistan. I have heard this before, but never as strongly as I hear it now. I put it down to being surrounded by Americans who often seem to want to idealise a kind of static, stratified, unchanging England, and so will pounce unquestioningly on anything that they feel approximates to the idea. I suppose I have myself played up to this in the past. At Oxford I briefly went out with an American girl (possibly ‘stayed in’ would be a more appropriate phrase) and felt myself feeling strangely drawn to acting the bumbling stuttering Hugh Grant Englishman. God – its embarrassing to look back on it! It was doomed of course, but I have learnt my lesson, and I don’t allow myself to get into that – possibly also why I object to the stereotype. Still, I do appreciate the convenience of stereotyping, and in fact, it is likely that ambivalence to nationhood is possibly quite a ‘typically English’ trait in any case. Something to do with the end of empire and guilt for the colonial past.

Our host said that he catches himself referring to ‘The Afghans’ and ‘The Americans’ as they. And if he does so, he sometimes corrects himself and changes it to we. And then he gave the inevitable compromise of calling himself a ‘citizen of the world’, or something like that. The key fact being that what he loves about his home, is his home in the smaller sense – his house in Virginia, and his family and friends. It is interesting – the case of the returned Afghans. Something I will have to watch. The general term used by ordinary Afghans for the returnees is ‘Sag-shui’, or Dogwasher – because of the fact that they are seen as having gone abroad and debased themselves through menial work, while the others stayed at home and suffered the woes of their country. As for our host, he clearly doesn’t come in that category, but clearly he keeps himself somehow aloof.

As for me, my sense of home is by now pretty diffuse. I love to return to London, but really now I only feel at home where Flora is.