Thread: Musicians go underground

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
February 27, 2005 Sunday Home Edition
HEADLINE: Crimes of the art;
Musicians go underground and billboards get boring as Peshawar slowly erases entertainment from the city
BYLINE: CARA ANNA
Quote:

Peshawar, Pakistan --

In a city where fun is increasingly illegal, the Afghan musicians have gone into hiding. Under threat of arrest, they fled their homes in Peshawar's Old City and holed up in a crumbling building nearby, off narrow streets where people sell cheap DVDs and old remote controls. These are the last dusty pieces, perhaps, of entertainment under Islamic rule.

The musicians' former countrymen, the Taliban, are also hiding in Peshawar, the city in Pakistan that lies closest to the Afghan border. The local government's tastes might remind the Taliban of home: girls' education is bad, women in government is bad, music is obscene.

I was stupid to come to Peshawar. I journeyed here from Islamabad and Lahore looking for live music, something relaxing, a break from the Islamic culture that I still wore uncomfortably, like a head scarf in the heat. But life was even stricter here. Music was against the law.

In halting Urdu, I asked people in the street about music. The doorman at the Iranian Cultural Center helped, first clapping his hands and pointing to my hair, telling me to cover it. In equally bad Urdu, he repeated and repeated until the words "Dabgari Bazaar" began to take shape.

For research, I went to an Internet cafE, in an underground cybermall, with icy AC and cubicles stripped of private curtains. A recent TV report on hidden camera had shown young couples, desperate for privacy, fondling each other between curtain and keyboard. Surprisingly, the cafes remained open, if less busy.

At the computer, I read this: The Peshawar-based government, controlled by religious leaders, was fighting what it called obscenity. It had banned music on buses and rickshaws. It had raided wedding parties and arrested Afghani musicians in Dabgari Bazaar.

As government squeezed entertainment from the city, I learned, some people, like the musicians, went underground. Other parts of the culture died slowly in the open. I watched that happen on cinema billboards.

Cinema Road is a well-known street in Peshawar, a wide dusty row of poster shops with brightly painted buses roaring by. Above this, the cinema billboards seem painted in blood. Sweating men, snarling men, men with Kalashnikovs raised. I admired them and realized the actresses were missing.

"Illegal!" said a man at a photo stand. The government had banned images of women outdoors. I walked Cinema Road again, checking posters. Yes, rows and rows of glossy Indian actors, wet-haired, shirts agape.

Women in Peshawar are rarely in public, so I asked two male tourists to join me for a Pushto film. Pushto is the dialect of the nearby tribal areas on the border, where the United States suspects residents are hiding Osama bin Laden. The residents argue it's their custom to shelter even enemies who ask for help.

The nervous cinema manager tucked us into the owner's box, a pitch-black upstairs room where the all-male audience wouldn't see us. The soundtrack screamed. The film jerked along, crisscrossed with scratches.

There were no subtitles, and we lost the plot soon after the seduction scene. The beefy, whiskered hero, played by Pushto cinema's biggest actor, Shaheed, meaning "martyr," offered water to shy village women. One by one they crouched in front of him, drinking as he poured. Something sexual was going on, we decided, because the audience was hooting. Smile

Upstairs, we giggled. Music on buses is obscene, I thought, but the government doesn't seem to mind this.

The rest of the film was shootout scenes, prompted when a young woman cuddling her lover in a field was caught by her brother, who immediately killed them. To protect family "honor," we supposed.

Violence was bluntly intercut with song-and-dance, busty women eyeing the camera and shimmying their hips. A few young men from the audience jumped onstage, their long pale tunics flapping, imitating the dancing as the shadows of the women, grossly enlarged, caressed them. We wondered if the men were gay, if this was an outlet in strict Peshawar to finding like-minded men.

A friend, a native of the Old City, later confirmed widespread reports that some tribal men had a culture of keeping male lovers. It seemed possible, with women shut away behind wall, veil and arsenal. The girls onscreen were considered whores.

At intermission, the door behind us opened and a small man entered, a box slung around his neck, offering kebabs. Casually, immediately, he placed his hand on my knee in the dark. I brushed it away.

By my second visit to Peshawar, actors on cinema billboards had been banned as well. Desperate, the most talented artist had filled his billboard with a woodlands scene, pastel green and blue, of mountains and pines. Day after day it faded under bus fumes and dust.

My last time in Peshawar, the artist perhaps had hanged himself. Cinema Road's billboards were now a string of ugly simplicity, movie names painted in chunky fluorescent orange. The billboards are a problem now, one cinema owner told a newspaper. Most moviegoers are illiterate, and they can't tell what's playing.

The Afghani musicians, I discovered, weren't far away.

In Dabgari Bazaar, I explained what I was looking for, and the men in one shop pointed at the oldest of them, who came close and spoke in English.

"Homosexuality," he said to me, frowning. The government said the musicians promoted "unnatural" sexuality by using young men as dancers. It was said some dressed as women and were, after the performance, available to guests.

"They have gone away," the old man said, dismissing it. He offered me tea.

I asked at a video shop. The owner, misunderstanding, led me into the back room, where he was editing tapes. On the screen was a recent private party in Peshawar, clearly for the upper classes. A man in tight jeans sang a rock song, in purple-tinted lights against an ivy wall. The camera panned a room of women, unveiled, with thick jewelry and bare arms. Men stood around, holding glasses. A private exception to every government rule. But perhaps, with the right connections, allowed.

Cousins of the Internet cafe owners finally became my guides. The two young men offered no judgment on me, no information on themselves. They sat on either side in the rickshaw, beaming at the pressure of a foreign woman's thigh. We went to Dabgari Bazaar, where they asked questions and set off through the streets.

Five minutes had gone by, or 20, when we stopped at a dark twisting stairwell. We climbed past men sprawled with instruments and pots of tea. A man looked up and, in English, cried, "Thank you!" but we continued on.

We finally turned into a windowless room, and the men stopped talking and stared. My role in introductions was simply to smile, a fantastically alien white girl in the doorway. We were invited to sit. Someone brought chipped glass bottles of Pepsi with straws.

The musicians, in wrinkled tunics and sweaters, looked at each other and began.

The photo I took shows a small older man bent over his harmonium, and another on a stringed rabab. In the center of the photo is a young man. His hair is in dark, loose curls. He has no beard or mustache and has the faint dark marks of old acne, or bruises.

His skin is pale. He sits cross-legged, singing, staring at the floor, but at first he had danced, bare feet arching and spinning in small steps, arms outstretched. He wouldn't look at us.

My guides said little, perhaps not understanding the language, Dari, in which the young man sang. "They are sad," one man finally said. "They are missing Afghanistan."

A few songs, a few broken questions. Hundreds of musicians were hiding, the harmonium player said. Yes, he said, some groups had dancers dressed as women, but he didn't know where they were. "We are not bad people," he said. "The government is wrong." Men shifted. The young man said nothing. My guides prodded me to go.

I handed the harmonium player 500 rupees, less than $10, and suddenly we were in the open air, near Cinema Road.

We stepped toward the day's last rickshaw, and my guides asked how much I had paid the musicians. "That's too much," they said. A sudden disapproval weighed down the last word. "For them."

Cara Anna is a writer and former reporter for Cox Newspapers (The Palm Beach Post, the Austin American-Statesman). She recently spent several months in purdah --- the practice that includes seclusion of women from public view --- with a local family on Pakistan's Afghan border.

This is the general impression that is current about NWFP.

Can someone analyse why it is so in NWFP and yet is not so true for other parts of Pakistan?

The Frontier folks that I have seen are not of this psyche. They are quite emancipated when compared to the scenario presented in this article.