“Music is the food of inspiration,” said Sakhai, a spry 48, as he bustled about his tiny store to the jaunty beat of Persian-language pop music, finishing a sale to one man and showing fabric samples to a veiled woman. “It makes me work better. When you are happy, you work better.”
For five years, there was no music in Afghanistan to inspire Sakhai. It was banned by the Taliban, which permitted only tapes of its own a cappella Koranic chanting or political and religious sermons to be sold and played.
In the first week after the Taliban fled this provincial capital two weeks ago, it seemed too quiet because there still was no music. People were nervous, unsure whether the Taliban might somehow return and punish anyone caught playing cassette tapes.
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But on Saturday, the first few music shops reopened, and by Monday the soundtrack of the bazaar had changed from street hawkers and gas generators to the high-pitched divas and overwrought tenors of bouncy Central Asian pop songs.
Music was pouring into the streets from three newly reopened cassette kiosks, and from stores like Sakhai’s tailor shop.
Sakhai, an amateur musician, had kept his cassette player and tapes buried in the back yard during the Taliban years, only occasionally unearthing them to listen in secret. When he dug them up after the Taliban fled, the machine was clogged with dirt and wouldn’t play right. Monday he went to the music shop owned by 20-year-old Yaseen and spent $50 for a new tape player.
It was a culture-affirming scene at Yaseen’s. A crowd of more than a dozen men pushed together on the street outside the stall listening to his cassette player blasting Persian and Pashtu-language tunes and deciding whether they had 60 cents to buy a tape.
Yaseen had gone across the Pakistani border twice to Peshawar to stock up on music, but business was so good he was planning a third trip. He said there had never been much interest in the Taliban tapes, consisting of prayer chants and preachy militaristic sermons. Only a Taliban member would go for a line like: “You have hidden yourself in a cave. Come and join us, we won’t kill you,” from Mullah Faqeer Mohamad.
Indeed, on Monday the Taliban section was relegated to a back-shelf as customers pressed against Yaseen’s cracked glass display case for Afghan and Pakistani pop tapes brimming with bright swooping synthesizers and Eastern-style sing-song choruses.
“I’m happy to listen to music openly,” said 16-year-old Baburzai, a taxi driver’s assistant shopping for two cassettes for the car. “Before I had to listen to it secretly in my room.”
The fact that people were listening secretly during the Taliban years seemed proof that banning music was not simply cruel but impossible.
Yaseen said he kept a secret drawer filled with cassettes that he sold covertly. But one day about a year ago, a tape he was going to record for a friend was left in the open when the Taliban’s religious police came to inspect the shop. They found it and detained Yaseen’s father for three days.
Yaseen had his own dealings with the Taliban. Several acquaintances who worked for the regime came to him one day with a request. They wanted him to get a cassette from Pakistan by Naghma.
“She is the biggest star,” Yaseen said. “She is very beautiful, and has a gorgeous voice.”
“I told them,” Yaseen said, “you don’t allow other people to listen to music, and you want me to buy one for you? They said they wanted to listen to it at home. They hadn’t listened to music in such a long time. They were friends of mine. They weren’t the religious police. I got it for them. They were happy.”