music

I was about six years old when I heard someone say the word “nandaray” – it sounded lovely nan-daaa-ray… I imagined it to be a woman wearing a floaty white dress doing a twirling dance. I could only imagine nandara until one day I saw it. By then I was well into my twenties and it was 2009. The nandara, the show, I watched was at the French Cultural Centre in Kabul.

On the stage were Dur Mohammad Keshmi and Mir Maftoon and in the audience were teenaged Kabulis, boys with the shadow of moustache above their lips and girls made up, dressed in tight jeans and long tunics huddled together.

Maftoon and Keshmi were amazing. The rhythm of their music, the almost erotic words of their songs about young, often unrequited, love and their subtle dance moves, Maftoon with his shoulders and Keshmi with his bearded face made us drunk. The boys cheered, whistled and danced, the girls swayed. It was beautiful – it was the first nandara – the very first show I watched. It was magical.

That day I cried. I mourned the loss of the two decades of my life when I couldn’t be part of a show – the twenty years lost to the war, the displacement and the Taliban. I also cried of happiness that, unlike me, the auditorium full of young people could experience the magic of show without waiting for so long. They were so beautiful to watch.

Today, a young man blew up the same auditorium. Early on people said that the bomber sat in the audience, watched the play and then blew himself up. I couldn’t believe it. How could someone watch a play – be part of a nandaray – and still decide to end his life? Why did he do this and why a show? Why kill magic and beauty?

I am now wondering what (else) can we do to change things for good? Should we be more careful of our security and build our fort walls higher? Should we run around telling the world that YES Afghanistan has hit iceberg but isn’t sinking? Should we fight the “experts” on Afghanistan who claim that we are a naive, corrupt and insignificant minority in Afghanistan and strong majority, the religion and the tribe is on the side of the bomber? Should we pull Ghani from his collar, look him in the eye and tell him that he must fight and not embrace the enemy? Should we create a mural, light candles, place flowers, should we invent a new language, should we break the Internet??? What should we do? What can we do?

One thing that I know we should do is to make sure that the nandaray goes on. We must make sure that everyone in this country gets hooked on a magical show. And we need to make sure that this show is a good one; with excellent loud music, beautiful colours and lights, with poems that pulls on heartstrings, with intoxicating dance. Maybe one person will watch the nandaray, see the beauty and decide to live on and not die and kill.