Two gold rings decorated his manicured fingers. In the same room I met Habib, a dancer, dressed in a spotless white salwar kameez.
One, his hair parted with a ruler in the middle and greased with cream, told me, "The Afghans like us as much as their own musicians. The hotel was crowded with musicians and singers, including 30 Pakistani Pashtun musicians who had come to Kabul to seek refuge from the clampdown in the north-west of their country. On Thursday afternoons, dancing boys and their owners come here to wait for clients to hire them for weddings or parties. On the first floor was a small hall and a few rooms, with shoes and flip-flops piled high outside. The air was damp and heavy with the smell of hashish, opium, urine and burned oil. In a crumbling hotel, an aged guard opened a gate that led to a dark staircase surrounded by metal grilles. Most of Kabul's musicians congregate in the southern part of the city, an area that was half destroyed by the civil war. In many of the cafes, men sit drinking tea and watching grainy images of boys dancing.
In Kabul and other Afghan cities, bacha bazi CDs and DVDs are widely on sale from street stalls and carts, serving an audience who can't afford the real thing. How did he feel about the men dressing him? "It's OK," he said.
Now I am with someone else and he taught me how to dance." He spoke matter-of-factly, then started explaining in great detail about where he buys his women's clothes. "One day a mechanic in the town attacked me, my family rejected me and I had to go and stay with that man. "My grandfather kept telling me when I was a child to be careful of men because I was handsome," he said. Later, when he had finished his performance, Mustafa told me his story. One combed his long hair, and invited the other to have the "honour" of wrapping the straps around his hands and feet.
Holding his thin arms over his head, he allowed two bearded, turbaned men, giggling and laughing, to dress him like a doll. Mustafa stood on a table and nervously smoked a cigarette. His owner opened a small bundle of clothes and produced a long, blue skirt, crimson shirt, leather straps and bells. In an adjacent room, 16-year-old Mustafa was preparing to dance next. The Afghan authorities and human rights groups are aware of the plight of bacha boys, but seem powerless to stop it. The bachas are usually released at the age of 19, when they can get married and reclaim their status as "male", though the stigma of having lived as a bacha is hard to overcome. Their "owners" or "masters" can be single or married men, who keep them in a form of sexual slavery, as concubines. The bacha dancers are often abused children whose families have rejected them. Under Taliban rule, it was banned, but it has crept back and is now widespread, flourishing also in the cities, including the capital, Kabul, and a common feature of weddings, especially in the north.
The practice of taking young boys to perform as dancers at private parties is known as bacha bazi (literally, "boy for play") and is an Afghan tradition with very deep roots. One of the men quickly grabbed the scarf and started sniffing it. The dancer twisted and sang hoarsely with him, arms thrown high above a lean, muscular body, moving faster and faster until finally the scarf dropped, revealing a handsome young man's face with traces of a moustache and beard. The sitar player sang loudly, a love song about betrayal. The bells chimed with the movement, the skirt brushing past the watching men who stretched out their hands to touch it. Then one of the men produced a sitar and a dancer entered the room.ĭressed in a flowing shirt and long, red skirt, with sherwal pants beneath and small silver bells fastened to hands and feet, the dancer stepped across the floor, face hidden behind a red scarf. Its host – a former Taliban commander now in alliance with the Afghan government and Americans – chatted jovially to his guests, mainly local farmers and shopkeepers. As more vodka was drunk, the party grew louder.