Shootings in Kabul

People tell the story of someone who came to Haji Langar Zamin's house and told him, "I have a problem and only you can solve it". Haji asked, “What is problem?” He explained, “I was passing in the street that leads to the Asheqan wa Arefan shrine and a woman’s hand came out from one of the upper windows to throw dust on the street. When I saw her hand, I fell in love with this woman”. Haji asked him to go with him to the house where he’d seen the hand. He was well-known and, when he knocked on the door, the owner of the house came out and asked them both to drink tea. Once they were in the house, Haji casually asked him about his family. Their host explained that just his wife and daughter lived with him in the house. As Haji was unsure whether it was their host’s wife who had been disposing of dust on the street, he asked that the daughter serve the tea. When she came to pour the tea, Haji asked his friend if this was the same hand that he had seen from the street. He confirmed that this was the same hand with which he had fallen in love when passing the house earlier. After finishing their tea, Haji asked the father if he had promised his daughter in marriage. When he replied that she had not been promised, Haji said that he would like to engage her to his friend. Her father agreed immediately, and called his wife, who was happy, and they both thanked Haji for coming to visit them.

Unpublished draft of oral testimony about marriage practices in the old city of Kabul, Aga Khan Trust for Culture, 2009.

In such stories, the streets of Kabul, are embedded with romance. A glimpse leads to love, a stroll leads to marriage. Through the ages, the most vibrant spaces for romance in Kabul (as in much of Southasia) seem to have been weddings, where the rules are relaxed, the borders of social codes less scrutinised, a blind eye turned to overtures that would otherwise draw strictures. Post-2001, after decades of war and more recent Taliban strictures, Kabuli weddings made a grand comeback. They grabbed the attention of the international press, and international agencies and newspapers reported on lavish parties that continued over several days, usually held at magnificent halls that mushroomed across the city.

Accompanying the boom in these venues, networks of associated enterprises – of clothes and decorations, beauty parlours and singers – multiplied to facilitate Kabul's love affair with weddings. On weekends, in spring or summer, it was easy to get caught in the crush of such parties swirling out from halls or beauty parlours, or to be trapped alongside lavishly decked out cars carrying the bridal couple to their future. On the roads around the edges of Kabul, you could see such wedding convoys framed by the mountains that ring the city, heading to the northern plains, cars trailing flowers and hearts, and camera crews faithfully recording every moment. In their sheer outburst of explosive merriment, in their ferocity, the weddings contained some of the rattle of war, something of the madness of love.

The lavish halls that host such weddings grew gradually out of the landscape of Kabul, many of them around the suburb of Taimani. When I first came to Kabul in 2006, the road that ringed this neighbourhood was relatively narrow, and traffic sparse. That spring, on either side of the road, I saw broken down mud walls, with small mud houses rising behind them, glistening from the rain that falls on the city around Nauroz. In the midst of this landscape, rose a large replica of the Eiffel Tower, bedecked with lights. Behind it was a large building covered with what looked like reflective glass topped with a large sign. This was the Shaam e Paris (An Evening of Paris), the first wedding hall I saw in Kabul. At the time, it seemed outrageously out of place; laughable in its aspiration to be a part of the lives of the people of the city.

By 2011, it had become hard to pick out the Shaam e Paris in between all the wedding halls that had been built around it. No more audacious, it had been eclipsed into shabby obscurity by the even greater flamboyance of its neighbours. The road had also been transformed, from prosaic flatness to a blazing stretch of colour and lavishly mounted decorations. Imposing as this 'wedding quarter’ appeared during the day, it truly came alive after sunset, when the massive complexes glittered with fountains, fireworks and lights, and lines of cars stood waiting to enter their drives. Walking down this road at night was like encountering an oddly misplaced fragment of Las Vegas. If you flew into Kabul after sunset, you could see the lights from the sky.

One spring afternoon in 2013, I visited the Sadaf Wedding Hall, a relatively modest establishment. I was there with Sardar (not his real name), who worked as a wedding videographer, one of the most lucrative and challenging jobs in the wedding economy of Afghanistan. Sardar first began working at weddings in the refugee community of Peshawar, where he had learned on the job, apprenticing with an older cameraman. After 2001, he arrived in Kabul with his family, joining the flow of returning refugees hoping to build or rebuild their homes in the city. He was in his early 20s then, and his younger siblings helped him build the business by working as cameramen and editors at night, while studying, and later holding moderately well-paying day jobs. I had met Sardar through his younger brother, who worked as a director at a local production house, much to Sardar's pride.

The journey of this family-built business paralleled the growth of Kabuli weddings. When they began, the brothers would rent a camera and edit on borrowed machines. Over the years, they had plowed back the profits into equipment. That spring, Sardar’s clients were offered the services of three cameras, a dolly, a crane and tracks to produce their wedding videos – equipment enough hardware to produce a TV show on an Afghan channel. Sardar told me that this level of technology was not unusual; it was in fact the bare minimum he felt he needed to stay relevant in Kabul’s keenly competitive wedding video market. Recently, he had asked a relative who was visiting Dubai to bring him back a projector and a new laptop to cater to the latest whim of Kabuli wedding guests. At the party, an editor arranged the images shot by the cameraman in a sequence and played them back to the guests right then and there through the projector: a dizzing new bend to wedding entertainment, as the guests watched themselves watch the screen that was showing them. "People want the latest things in their weddings and wedding videos," Sardar said. “They want their films to be no less than Bollywood films. So if they ask me for tracks and cranes to take the shots, and I don’t have them, they will just go to someone who does.”

Before we went to his office, Sardar walked me through the different parts of the hall, beginning with the manager's office. We stepped into the basement, fumbling with the slithery curtains. Inside the room, every surface glittered. The walls were covered with mirrors, endlessly reflecting each other, as well as the shine of the table tops, the columns festooned with gilt edges, the sequins on the curtains and the sumptuous tea pot. Even the candies in their tinsel wrapping gave off a soft glow. The whole room was decorated in shades of white and turquoise, the only jarring note struck by the manager himself, who sat perched on a swivel chair. With his neat suit, goatee and officious glasses, he was the image of a conscientious clerk trapped in a fairy tale.

In this office, which seemed straight out of Arabian Night, families of the couple customised their dream wedding. While it is the groom’s family that foots most of the bill, Sardar told me, traditionally, it is the girl’s parents and relatives who take most of the decisions. Over the past few years, the expectations of the latter had soared and the ideal "hall weddings" had become increasingly expensive, pushing thousands of dollars into the wedding industry. The glittering wedding halls reflected the shifts that had recast Kabul city since 2001, when some people became very rich, very quickly. They also reflected a new set of values towards luxury and the display of wealth. Like the kitschy styles of Kabul’s new skyline, like the Dubai-inspired decor of the halls, the hall wedding and its rituals are quintessential markers of this particular era. I asked the manager why so many people preferred to pay for these expensive hall weddings. “Kabul is a modern city,” he said. “People here want to get married in a modern way.”

All of which is in stark contrast to the strict control of the Taliban years, when the government would monitor weddings to ensure they adhered to strict guidelines. Music was forbidden, and celebrations were held 'underground’. Recently, the authorities have attempted to regulate the extravaganza by passing a bill that will restrict the number of guests and expenditure at wedding celebrations. A proposed law that would limit the list of invitees to 500 has received support from a section of young men and their families. But it has also been criticised for what many see as the ‘Taliban style’ edicts on dress and on mingling between the sexes at the gatherings. By policing what people wear and how they choose to celebrate, the Afghan state is venturing into difficult territory, say the critics.

From the basement, Sardar and I walked through various halls, with different rooms for services provided in-house, such as car decorations, beauticians and catering. In addition, Sadaf Wedding Hall was equipped with rooms, or 'salons', for the different ceremonies and the hundreds of guests that are routine at weddings. The smallest of these salons was capable of accommodating atleast 300 guests. For those with longer guest lists, the bigger halls had capacities of a few thousands. "In Pakistan and India," Sardar told me, “there are spaces outside where you can hold weddings, but here there is no such option.” On an average, a family may spend three to four lakh Afghanis (USD 4500 to 6000), at least, for the Sadaf Wedding Hall – just for the venue. The total cost of a Kabuli wedding ranges from between five lakh to 25 lakh Afghanis (USD 7590 to USD 38,000). I remembered talking to a colleague whose brother, working in Iran, had come to Kabul to be married. The entire family pitched in money for the event, for which the hall rental alone was 3.6 lakh Afghanis, around USD 6000. My colleague’s monthly income was less than USD 300. I asked why his family didn’t do a simple event away from a wedding hall. “It’s not a wedding if it’s not a hall wedding”, he said, in imitation of what the bride’s family had said. If he couldn’t afford it, his brother was told, he should come back when he could.

Regardless of size, all the halls had arrangements for segregation between the sexes, and most of the seats were on the women’s side. Depending on their budgets and desires, couples could sit under crescent moons or silk tents, and walk to the stage over a small wooden bridge flanked by rocks and green ferns. The one constant in these diverse backdrops were the images of Bollywood actors, themselves dressed up in bridal finery, laughing in marital rapture at the couple and their guests. It was in these salons that Sardar and his team spent most evenings working, capturing the glitter and beauty of backdrops and arrangements, adding even more light to the brightly-lit stage and ceremonies. I had seen teams like his at work: sharply dressed young men in suits, clutching video cameras, directing the relatives and the couple with fierce concentration. After it was over, Sardar returned to his office, located at the back of the hall, a small, dank room in a dingy corridor that smelled of hashish.

On one of the computers in his office, Sardar showed me some videos he had just completed. The first was of a wedding reception that had been held a few nights earlier at the Sadaf Wedding Hall. It followed the standard format for most wedding videos, I was told, as a redolent voice proclaimed “In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful” – the invocation that devout Muslims begin each task with. This soundtrack was replaced with a raunchy song from an Indian film, over which credits rolled for around two minutes. These included the name of the couple, their wedding venue and the names and numbers of the beauty salon, the videographer, the decorator and the musicians. “We cannot use the bride’s real name in some of these,” said Sardar. “Some grooms don’t want their wives names to be on the lips of every man in the bazaar”. The video cut to a photo montage of the couple in various romantic poses – leaning on each other, eating cake, driving away in their special car. “This is the part that takes the longest to do because of all the effects it needs,” he added, as the couple’s faces dissolved in a burst of fireworks.

The video then showed the wedding hall from the outside, its fountains and lights in full flood, before moving the narrative to scenic locales. The bride and groom appeared juxtaposed in front of the Taj Mahal, then the Eiffel Tower, then the lakes of Bamiyan. More than the opulence of its production and the fantastic special effects, more than the music and the whirling images that appeared in the video, it’s most remarkable aspect was the contrast it provided with the image of Kabul, as it is known to most people around the world. I watched as photos of the bridal couple appeared with their arms wrapped around each other, then more images of the bride in a clinging dress. The family appeared, dancing to traditional Afghan songs, and then gyrating to racy pop songs. I asked Sardar who the intended audience for these videos were, who would get to see these uninhibited images of the family? Only themselves, he said. Nobody other than the people in the videos, the immediate family, would get to watch the recorded images, so layered with seduction and opulence.

In many ways, the modern day hall weddings are not a new phenomenon. From the accounts of friends and from looking through their photo albums, I was aware of the fact that the location of choice for Kabul’s elite weddings in the 1970s had been the Intercontinental Hotel. In video footage of these weddings, you can see the bride in her white gown, the western-style dresses of the guests, and the swimming pool of the hotel that provided the backdrop. But in other ways, the weddings that Sardar and his team documented so painstakingly represented a rupture, a generation gap heightened by decades of war and displacement.

I once talked to a female colleague who had taken her aged father-in-law on a rare outing to a cousin’s wedding that had been held in one of the biggest halls in town. The old gentleman had been traumatised by the entire event, she said, and especially by the kind of clothes the women had been wearing. But wasn’t it a segregated event, I had asked. Yes, but the women had come to pay their respects to him, she explained. And that had almost been his undoing. “The poor man nearly fell ill right there,” she said. “All that money, all those naked legs.”



But while limbs may be on display in the hall, part of the risk of Sardar's job is ensuring they are never seen anywhere else. Security is one of his foremost concerns. On his computer, I saw raw footage of the wedding party, close ups of women, of the bride. If even a few of these frames were to find their way out from his hard drive to the outside world, it would be unlikely that Sardar would ever find work again. "It’s a very dangerous job," he said. “People have even been killed after this.” I had some experience of such strict control. At several weddings I had attended, the invitation card had come with the firm instructions not to carry a camera.

To save the honour of his clients and their families, not to mention his own life, Sardar kept his office locked at all times, and deleted all footage from his computer after he had completed the production, while a family member, usually the groom or his brother, watched. If the scenes he recorded were so taboo, I asked him, why were they okay to enact at all? “If they didn’t do these (scenes) people would say that she did not love him, or vice versa. Their relatives would regard them badly,” he explained. “If a groom didn’t arrange for such a video and such a ceremony, the girl would cry and say that he did not love her.” Sardar’s job as the video producer was to package this day into an epic romance, transport it to a scale fitting the purported scale of the couple’s love. He was to provide a new layer to the already flamboyant event, he was to move the audience from the disheveled streets of Kabul, to a place where they were the stars of their own reality.

None of this is unique to Kabul. Wedding videos the world over are replete with grandiose imagery of romances and happy endings. In Kabul, however, the wedding videographer must achieve this effect within the very confined conceptual and physical space of a wedding hall, where the strict norms of everyday life seem to be reversed. Sardar also stood in the delicate position of being the only non mahram, or non-family member, in rooms filled with women, dressed in their skimpiest, dancing their hearts out for his camera. This meant he had to maintain a reputation of absolute integrity, probity and discreetness, making himself a mere extension of the camera. There were several families, he said, who called him and no one else for their events, and he was like a member of their family by now. Recently some clients had started asking for women videographers; in such cases, Sardar would politely turn down the job. There were not enough qualified camerawomen in Kabul, he said, and he could not risk being saddled with dissatisfied clients. For now, and until professional women entered the workforce, the families had to be satisfied treating him as a temporary mahram to the ladies dancing with abandon, and be permitted to arrange the bridal couple in embrace for the camera.

Despite all his precautions, Sardar had had his share of trouble. "People are either drunk or emotional there, or just want to show they are 'heavier' than the others." By ‘heavier’, I realised, Sardar was referring to the power games that happen at weddings everywhere, but in Kabul, the games of one-upmanship may end up having rather dire consequences. At one wedding, he recalled, the bride’s family had taken exception to his shooting the women’s section and had sent him away. “Then the groom’s brother had seen me and said – ‘What are you doing here, go back in and shoot’.” A fight ensued, escalated and then moved out of the hall. “The boy’s uncle went to the salon and rubbed dirt on the bride’s face. In retaliation, the bride’s brothers went round and beat up the groom’s brother and uncles.” Incredibly, the reception went ahead the next day. “The groom married her and kept her at home, while he took another wife,” he said, and was silent for a while in contemplation of this cold revenge. “It’s all become about power and one-upmanship,” he added. “It’s as if it’s not a wedding but war.” He had seen strange things, tragic things, silly things in the twilight zone of the wedding halls, where so-called Afghan values were both paramount and suspended, he said. “Anything can happen here, it’s all about izzat (honour). It’s like we are in a place where there are no laws, you can do whatever you like” he said, and I listened, unsure of if he was talking of Kabul, or the world, or just the halls he spent his days and nights in.

Before we left the manager's office, I asked Sardar how many weddings had taken place in the Sadaf Marriage Hall. He just laughed, unable to venture a number. He did tell me that the hall was booked for at least two parties every day, once from 9:30 am to 3:30 pm, and the second from 4 pm to midnight. The former time slot, he said, was preferred by wedding parties that came from the provinces, where it’s also a sign of prestige to get married in a hall in Kabul. I asked how much profit his hall made over a month but he refused to answer. All he said was that there were new halls being built all over the city. It was one of the few growth industries in the country, something he was sure would not go away. This is an assertion that is being disputed in post 2014 Afghanistan, with the dip in aid dollars and the withdrawal of the NATO forces ending Kabul’s bubble. But, it is also an open secret in Kabul that several of these halls are owned by prominent politicians and warlords, for many offer an easy way of legitimising poppy money through the elaborate decor and playful marble fountains. For all their smart newness, the wedding halls also represented how little had changed in the new Afghanistan, and how the soaring buildings that represented modernity still sprang from the old edifice of corruption and bloodied wealth.

Two years ago, Sardar got his younger brother married in one such hall. They paid up for a lavish wedding, with all the frills. At every step, Sardar provided the best possible frill for his family – the flowers on the car, the menu for dinner, the trips to the beautician, and even the wedding video. He was taking up every assignment he got to pay off the loan he had taken for the wedding. For every video he made, Sardar charged USD 600 (AFN 40,060), which meant a profit of about USD 300 for every video. There were no weddings and hence no business through the long winter, but during the spring and summer months he worked double shifts and covered an average of two weddings a day. Sometimes Sardar didn’t go home for weeks, spending his nights in the office, and days in a shiny suit at the salons.

I asked if Sardar would have his own marriage in the same wedding hall where he worked. He smiled wryly: "A single wedding sets you back by two years. Everything I make goes into paying off my debts. There is no way I can get married like that." But what would he do if he fell in love? “Only to a woman who was ready to get married for 100 dollars!” he said.

~ This is an edited excerpt from Taran N Khan's forthcoming book of essays on Kabul. This was published in Himal Southasian's The Marriage Issue Vol 28 No 4. 

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Cover Photo : Pajhwok.