My Experience of the Afghan Culture

A View from the Top of the World

It's almost Eid and I thought this might be a good time to post this article. To all my Afghan friends, if anything that I've written is insulting, I apologize. I'm just beginning to scratch the surface of the Afghan culture and I've loved writing this piece to share with everyone a bit about what my experience with the Afghan culture has been here.

I have lived in Kabul now for about a year and a half. I’ve had the privilege of being able to get a peek inside the proverbial veil and want to give you my perspective of some aspects of the everyday culture of the Afghan people. A large section of the Afghan population is nomadic. I am not writing about them as I have not got close to anyone in this group. I am mainly talking about people who most likely share the kind of demographics as the readers of this article – middle class and educated.

A child is born. “It’s a boy!!” He will continue the family name and take care of his parents. Huge numbers of relatives and neighbors are invited on the sixth day – Shab-e-Shash – evening-of-the-sixth. I was invited to one and took a friend with me. We entered to find at least 50 other women sitting tightly against each other along the perimeter of the living room. We sat down in one corner and wondered if we had been impolite by not individually greeting everyone, even though we knew no one. We had. We made up for it by overdoing the good-byes.

This brings me to Afghan greetings – an overwhelming, elaborate and complex set of rituals for the uninitiated. I am invited and I enter the house. The hostess comes up, grasps my hand and kisses me three, four, five, six times on my cheeks while unleashing a series of sentences at the same time: how are you, are you tired, is your health ok, is your family ok, welcome to my home, may you live long. I am supposed to do the same, but even after a year I helplessly hyperventilate as I cannot keep up. I’m entrenched in the polite, how are you, I’m good, thank you. End of greeting.

Now let us reflect that in most Afghan houses several brothers with their wives and parents and children live together. Each man, one by one, rests a hand on his heart, bows slightly and greets you with, Salam-wale-kum, khush amadi, zinda bashe – Hello, welcome, may you live long. All the women and teenage girls kiss you, shower you with questions, and all the little ones, boys and girls, gravely approach you and shake your hands. A good 15 minutes have passed by before it is all over and I can sit down, and I’m secretly dreading the time I have to leave, because a variation of this is going to happen all over again. At the same time, it is difficult to explain how nice it feels when a person always, always asks “how are you, are you well” before launching into whatever question he/she has.

Children are completely adored and spoiled. I genuinely can’t understand how they grow up to be so polite and capable. An Afghan 13 year old boy or girl is extremely self-sufficient. Most boys marry by the time they are 22 and girls by the time they are 18. The boy is capable and confident, able to work, negotiate in the bazaar for the best price on everything from a melon to a TV, maneuver the bureaucracy to get jobs done, organize events and the girl can cook for 30, sew everything from curtains to elaborately designed wedding outfits, take care of babies, manage a budget – it amazes every non-Afghan here.

The society is segregated at a very early age, and boys and girls older than five or six do not play together. At weddings a huge hall is separated by a wall - the women sit on one side and the men on the other. The male guests never see the bride as they celebrate the marriage of a friend. The weddings are wild and raucous affairs with hours and hours of dancing and jokes and laughter – of course the women dance with women and the men with men.

And yet, once married, the couple is allowed, in their own house, a surprising level of public display of intimacy. As the whole family sits down for dinner, husbands and wives sit side by side with knees touching and hands resting easily on each other’s legs. After dinner, as we relax over tea and fruits, husbands and wives will sit very close and even softly talk to one another while everyone else is engaged in another conversation. It is a startling contrast to the high level of segregation found in almost all other areas.

While a man can have up to four wives, most Afghans I know only have one. Culturally, it does not appear to be a hugely popular thing to do and the Afghan women I know would be deeply hurt if their husbands brought home another wife. While it is easy to divorce, it is virtually unheard of as the commitment of marriage is taken very seriously. Every earner in the family contributes a share to the family pot, and this share is determined by the money manager – and this could be the oldest male or female of the house.

Although Afghans do socialize with friends, most of the socializing is done within the family, with we

ekends being taken up by visiting relatives and celebrations related to birth, engagements and weddings of relatives. Everyone is introduced to me as a cousin as it is too complicated to explain what the relationship is.

There are celebrations that take on a more communal slant – the two big ones being Nowruz (New Year) and Qurbani-Eid. Afghans follow the lunar calendar and New Year is around March 15^th and it is so, so, so, so much fun. The markets are a crush of people buying new clothes. Fish comes into Kabul by the ton from Jalalabad and Pakistan and fish-fry vendors litter the streets.

A big fish is filleted and cleaned along its length, rubbed by spices and flour and deep fried till it is crisp. A mixture of lemon juice and oil is squirted over the fish, it is wrapped in a huge nan, which is then wrapped up in newspaper. In another paper bag, hot and colorful jalebis are placed and you strut off with your fish and jalebis – a staple to celebrate the new year.

Three days before the New Year you start preparing Haft Mewa (seven fruits) – walnuts, almonds, redkishmish, black kishmish, pistachios, dried apricots and dried plums. You wash and rub, wash and rub, till the almonds and walnuts are white and all the skin is gone. You then clean the raisins and soak it all in water for three days. In the end you get this heavenly fruit soup in which you sprinkle rose water. It is a good thing that people laugh at you if you make it any other time, because honestly, you can eat kilos of it – it is just that good.

Music blares from every street corner, people visit each other, kite flying competitions decorate the sky and then the mela– Sakhi-Jan mela – starts and GOES ON FOR 40 DAYS!! Vendors, palm readers, gamblers, musicians, tricksters all come together to give you and your loved ones a very good time.

In contrast to the revelry is the celebration of Qurbani Eid, in which animals are sacrificed and the rich feed the poor. The smell of blood fills the air as brightly colored sheep, cows and goat are sacrificed, the meat divided into three parts – part one for the family, part two for the neighbors who could not afford to sacrifice, part three for the mosque where it is cooked in huge vats and served to the poor. Again, droves of families and friends visit each other and people keep track of who did not come to visit!

Aside from food, most expendable income is spent on clothes. Afghans are fashionable people and extremely good looking. They are also thin, have wonderful skin and hair, and are comfortable in traditional and western outfits. The men wear salwar kameez. For casual attire they have jeans, t-shirts and casual shirts. For women, the salwar kameez is an import from Pakistan and they do wear it, but equally common for the women are jacket and skirt suits (full length), and jacket and pant suits. All women wear head scarves. There are many who still wear the full burqa when they go outside,and as they walk you can still see the fashionable clothes and the high heels.

Every culture has a relationship with sports and it is huge here in Afghanistan. The society is very competitive as evidenced by the rapid rise of the Afghan cricket team. Soccer is hugely popular. Wrestling and body-building are highly respected sports and lately every block has started boasting a school on martial arts. The more distressing, but nevertheless popular sports are dog-fighting and cock-fighting. However, the crowning glory is the national sport - Buzkashi, and to me, this sport in many ways explains the mystery of Afghanistan.

I'm at a loss of words on how to describe this game. The one I went to had about a 100 horses with riders. It was a large field surrounded by the ever present wall and there was a white circle (about 5 feet in diameter) in the center of this dusty field. A calf had been slaughtered and beheaded and dipped in brine overnight to prevent rigor and to make it pliable. The body was thrown next to a flag on a post dug into one end of the field, and the riders went at it. The object is to retrieve this calf (estimated at between 30 to 40 kilos) and then to toss it inside this circle. It is one man against all and except for hitting the face, all is fair.

The men bandage their legs with layers of cloth, then surround their calves with long sticks and bandage that, and then put on the famous long Buzkash boots. Their bodies are heavily padded with very thick coats and pants, their heads are covered with thick fur hats. They have to leave their hands bare. No gloves are allowed. They carry short whips filled with sand and the horses are trained to bite. In the crush of vicious horses that are bucking from the whips, men who are whipping each other, a rider has to retain control of his horse, grab the calf, shove it under one leg to grip it, hold on to one leg of the calf with a hand, and then try to get it to the circle.

Sometimes the body positions simply defy any sense of gravity and often you see a rider holding on to the calf with just his thigh, lashing out with both hands at attackers, with the horse seemingly knowing exactly where to go. The better rider watches other riders fight to lift the calf off the ground (remember, these horses are about 6 feet high, muscular and strong) and just as someone has a bit of a hold, forces his horse right into the tangle of horse and men, takes the other leg and through sheer physical force of horse and rider emerges with the calf.

It went on for three hours (there were several rounds) and at the end no man died, fell off a horse, no horse buckled or limped - and most of us just sat there in complete disbelief about what we just saw. I mentioned that once there is peace and security in Afghanistan, marketing this alone to the west will hold up the Afghan economy. We were in Kabul, the ones held in Mazar and Badakhshan (northern provinces) are played with around a 1000 horses. All I could think of is this game is a clue of why no one ever has been able to conquer Afghanistan.

We were just four women among a few thousand spectators of men and could not really cheer loudly and that was difficult. There were bleachers carved into the mountain for everyone to sit. As soon as we entered, there was first silence, and then people scrambled to bring out rickety plasic chairs for us to sit on. We were with my favorite Afghan guide here, who scoured us an invitation from the war lord (General Fahim, the famed Masood's right hand man, and an ex-defence minister). General Fahim never demeaned himself by actually coming to us, but we felt pretty safe knowing that we were his guests. You can google this sport for narrative that does more justice to this extraordinary sport, than my narration has been able to achieve.

Peace be with you. You can write to me at santwana@hotmail.com.