There was an air conditioner clinging to the back wall but, with its constant dripping, its primary purpose seemed to be to keep the carpet next to Raouf’s desk permanently wet. We kept the door closed to retain what little cool air it begrudgingly emitted and I was grateful that both my colleagues were deodorant devotees.
Working at The Den had spoilt me. While I spent my time there getting around in T-shirts, shorts and dresses, my new public persona required considerably more coverage. Jenny the Swedish chiropractor and Sue had donated a veritable wardrobe of long-sleeved tops, trousers and full-length skirts to supplement my meagre booty of ‘acceptable’ attire, and Jose had done a run to the bazaar to top up my paltry headscarf collection. The headscarf came off as soon as I entered work and I spent my days at my desk with my pants rolled up to the knee and my sleeves shoved back as far as they would go. Paul questioned the appropriateness of this, but I was too bloody hot to care.
The toilet was directly across from our office. A single unit that catered to the needs of around forty people and, with the water going on and off all day and the cleaners not overly keen to attend to it, it was a stinking, heave-worthy affair. There was a sign on the wall with diagrams indicating that people should not stand on the seat, wash their feet in the toilet bowl or perform some ambiguous routine that appeared to involve cocking one leg and urinating on the door.
My mantra became ‘It smells like somebody died in there!’, but I had to desist from saying this when, one night, an employee from our dubbing department actually did die in there. The story went that he had a brain aneurism, but with fundamental Islamic law holding that the deceased should be buried within forty-eight hours of death and that autopsies constituted a violation of the human body, there was no way of knowing for sure what really happened to the poor fellow.
Rashid (the Dari manager) spent most of his time with his headphones on watching Hindi music videos, so there was no real room for meaningful dialogue there. Raouf (the Pashtun manager) seemed to do little more than sit cross-legged on his chair, chewing tobacco and smiling at me. Occasionally he went into a frenzy of mouse activity, but a quick peek at his computer revealed that he was merely clicking all over his screen saver. It all made perfect sense when, a few days into my job, he bashfully asked me to show him how to send an email.
I really dug Raouf, and early on I figured that he liked me too when he flagged the possibility of taking on a second wife. Paul had warned me to expect this type of attention, so naturally I assumed Raouf was referring to me. Not wanting to offend my new friend, hand on heart I told him that I was extremely flattered, but that I wasn’t really on the lookout for a husband.
‘Not you, Tooti. You too old!’ came his tactful response.
Paul thought this was hilarious, but he still cautioned me against being too familiar with the male staff and suggested that I stop calling Raouf ‘darling’. I call everyone ‘darling’—babies, old men, teenagers and dogs, but I promised to try to excise the term from my vocabulary. Of course it proved impossible.
So, instead, I explained to my Afghan colleagues that everyone in Australia used the word in the same way that they used the word Jan (dear) when they were talking to one another. They instantly bought that, although I couldn’t help laughing the first time a hulking great security guard, wielding an AK-47, greeted me at the gate with a laboured but chirpy ‘Hello, darling. How are you?’
Raouf was very keen to improve his English and, seeing as I was writing a show for his channel, I figured he could help me come to terms with Pashtun culture. We were a match made in Jannah.
While Rashid spent his days bumping and grinding to the latest hits from India, Raouf and I started to get into a groove of our own. His favourite cartoon was Popeye, a morning staple on his channel and although my first priority should perhaps have been coaching him to master the pronunciation of my name, I opted for teaching him the words to the theme tune. I couldn’t exactly envisage a time when he would be moved to utter Popeye’s grammatically challenged declaration about the body building benefits of spinach munching but after a week he was able to growl out a semi-recognisable rendition of the song and we high-fived our success.
Raouf’s lessons for me had a more practical flavour and I was soon able to say ‘Hello. How are you?’, ‘Have a great day!’ and ‘You are very beautiful!’ in Pashto. However our lack of a common language meant that his assistance on the drama serial was almost negligible. We gave it a bloody good go though. I drew diagrams for him on my white board and felt I was quickly becoming a dab hand at charades.
But I effectively threw in the towel the day I was trying to ascertain from Raouf what types of animals Afghan farmers keep. I commenced my enquiry by drawing a big fluffy ball on four legs and bleating out my best ‘Baa’.
‘Chicken?’ was his serious response. We laughed a lot, but it was clear that I was really getting nowhere, so I was assigned a script consultant.
Habib, my script consultant, was a middle-aged Afghan poet living in Scandinavia. He was a song lyricist and political cartoonist who was granted asylum in the West in 1998. Undoubtedly an intelligent and courageous man—he was badly injured in a politically motivated knife attack on a trip back to Kabul in 2002—he unfortunately knew very little about television.
Habib and I conducted our script sessions over Skype and, whereas I simply wanted to know whether Pashtun villagers sat on chairs at tables, he was fixated on the symbolism and imagery of the show. He wanted to add a scene with two ants fighting, and another that featured a goat with burning gold coins for eyes, drowning in a river. I struggled to convince him that filming warring insects was not a possibility and that I was not prepared to drown a goat, particularly as I didn’t really get the symbolism. His response was always the same: ‘You’re not Afghan.’ No, I most certainly was not.
I finally succeeded in creating in English something resembling a drama series, and blessedly it was approved by our patient and longsuffering client. And then the real job began, as the whole shebang had to be translated into Pashto.
Fortunately I was assigned a lively, quick-witted man who was kind, wise and unflappable. Khan had attended university in India and travelled extensively throughout the region, but I still managed to fascinate him. It only took him a week to ask the question that I have been asked a hundred times since: ‘But why aren’t you married?’
My answer was always the same: ‘Because I don’t have to be.’ But the way Khan sadly shook his head signalled the genuine pity and sorrow he felt for his ageing buddy, who could only resort to some feeble platitude to defend her shameful spinsterhood.
Khan’s regular job was to provide translations for English-language films. With no intellectual property laws in Afghanistan, he simply would go to the local bazaar, pick up a pirated DVD and then write the script in Pashto for our dubbing department. Voila! Two hours of TV programming done and dusted. In fact, the first time I saw Avatar was on our Pashto-language channel.
Khan had to be particularly careful about the films he selected. They couldn’t contain any sex scenes—even a kiss was considered taboo—and any untoward sexual content had to be edited out. Our in-house censors judiciously took the axe to other sensitive material as well—divorce, illegitimate children and extra-marital affairs all found their way to the cutting-room floor and the films were regularly hacked to the point where they didn’t make sense anymore.
But violence never seemed to be an issue—I watched Die Hard at ten in the morning in Kabul. He also tried to avoid films that featured too much flesh as our editors had to painstakingly pixelate any female skin visible between the head and feet.
Khan had an excellent grasp of English but, at times, we had to resort to the diagrams and charade routine. Caves, coffins, crestfallen—so many words and concepts had to be explained or simplified, and Habib’s comparatively progressive contributions to the script all had to be carefully reviewed. It seemed that behaviour that would be deemed acceptable
TV fodder for an urban Dari-speaking audience just wasn’t going to cut it with our more conservative, rural Pashtun viewers. One scene that I had written in and that had passed Habib’s filter without question had two of our characters hugging. They were a married couple, were fully clothed and were embracing in their bedroom following the husband receiving some good news about a job promotion. Khan was adamant that I should amend the scene, and I laughed when he suggested that perhaps they just briefly grip each other’s shoulders to mark their joy. After much debate, I decided to keep it in; the censors could always knock it on the head if they deemed it too amorous and racy.
Khan couldn’t type and so did all of his work by hand. Once he completed a script, one of the writers on our Pashto-language channel, Sapa, bashed it out on a keyboard for him; Khan then did his edits before Sapa again typed up the revisions. We were just nearing the end of this laborious process for the Salam script when it was brought to my attention that a further translation of the scripts was required. Inevitably, most of the crew would be Dari speakers and the Pashto version would make as little sense to them as the English version. They would need a Dari version so they could follow what was going on. I had hoped that Khan would have time to do the translation, but he was simply too busy with his own work to assist and so we needed to start from scratch. The only consolation was that my Dari translator could actually type.
I was despairing of ever emerging from this soupy, word-muddled mire. But when I finally did come up for air, I was hit with a proposal that took my breath away all over again.
Paul wanted me to produce the series. I was to oversee the entire production, mentor the crew and live in Jalalabad—a rural Pashtun town three hours outside of Kabul—for the duration of the ten-week shoot. I had worked in television for twelve years but had never produced a drama serial and the idea seemed utterly preposterous. But I was stupid and blindly adventurous, and so, with my boyfriend Nick’s blessing, I agreed to extend my stay in Afghanistan.
My friends back home told me that I was crazy, and indeed I was. I was bat-shit crazy. Crazy in love with this country I was in . . . with Raouf, Khan and the inexperienced kiddies who Paul had started to crudely assemble into some kind of crew.
Nick wondered how I’d cope as a woman supervising an all-male team in an Islamic country, but I assured him that I’d manage because I was old, forty-five years old, and verging on ancient. I was older than most of their mothers, who they uniformly loved and respected with a passion that was fanatical beyond religious persuasion.
In a country where around forty-seven per cent of the population was under the age of fifteen and the life expectancy tragically stood at just forty-four, I was practically an elder.
I had managed to fit the huge, wooden bowl into my luggage when I left Kabul. But after a full day of shopping in Bangkok resulting in a healthy haul of shoes, tops, dresses and some saucy underwear that barely fit where it touched, I just couldn’t seem to squeeze it in anymore. I briefly considered leaving this beautifully carved object in Thailand, but that was a shameful notion, which I instantly dismissed. The bowl had been given to me as a gift for my mum by Sidique, one of my lovely young producers on the Salam shoot, and I’d promised to email him photos of her holding it. I ended up stuffing into it a single sandal, a top and my newly acquired lacy bras and knickers (which all seemed a little wrong and distasteful, considering the bowl was a present from a devout Muslim boy to a seventy-eight-year-old woman) and then I managed to zip my suitcase shut while sitting on it.
I had left Afghanistan with a swag of get-well gifts from my team for Mum—bracelets, scarves and said bowl (which was roughly the size of my head)—together with promises that they would pray daily to Allah for her recovery to good health. It was October 2009 and I was heading home to nurse her, following open-heart surgery; she was to be released from the rehabilitation centre in two days’ time.
When I’d first headed to Afghanistan, I’d assured my family and friends that I was only a day away; if I ever needed to come home for any reason, I could be on the first flight out. I was proven to be a big, fat liar on a Friday, five weeks before my Bangkok stopover, when my brother called me to say that Mum had been hospitalised following some general pain in her chest and was having triple bypass surgery the following Monday. The operation was fairly routine—well, by Australian standards anyway—but her doctor had carefully outlined all the risks inherent in a woman of her age going under anaesthetic and I desperately wanted to see her before she went into surgery.
We were shooting in Jalalabad and I immediately got online and began checking flights. Factoring in my three-hour trip back to Kabul, a quick pack and a brief transit in Dubai, I could be back in Sydney at nine-thirty on the night before surgery. Then I made a call to Shafi, our wonderful, accommodating assistant to the CEO, and began outlining my itinerary. He stopped me before I’d even got to the flight details and reminded me that I didn’t have a passport—it was currently with the ministry because I was having my visa renewed. There was no way he could get it back in time for me to travel. I felt physically sick, and it took me a good hour to compose myself and call my brother to deliver the news.
The surgery was a success and a family decision was made that I should stay on in Afghanistan to finish the shoot and arrive back in Australia in time to look after Mum once she was released from hospital. The plan was to stay in Sydney for six weeks before returning to Kabul to supervise post-production on Salam. In truth, my team still had two days of filming to go when I deserted them, but I felt that I needed to decompress in a luxury hotel in Bangers for a few days before I hit home.
After close to seven months in Afghanistan, I needed to tend to cracks in my heels you could slip a five-cent piece into and a strip of hair regrowth the width of my arm. I wanted to reward my stomach with something other than rice and kebab and street-stall chicken, and I longed to slough off the dust and dirt accumulated in eight weeks of tramping all across the Nangarhar countryside.
For three days running I allowed firm, expert hands to massage away the stress of perhaps the most exhausting, but also the most exhilarating, job I had ever undertaken. And I was not worried about abandoning my team to go it alone because I was leaving them in the capable hands of Aleem, my senior producer, who had just turned nineteen.
When Paul had first introduced me to Aleem, I honestly wondered why there was a fourteen-year-old kid working for the company. I could literally count the wispy, soft hairs on his chin (four) and, as he stood quietly telling me about his love of television, I was considering the very real possibility that my tiny hands could comfortably encircle his slight little waist. But he was, in fact, eighteen, had been with Moby for six months, had never worked on a drama production and would be one of my producers on Salam.
Twenty-year-old Sidique had already been assigned to me and, having been with Moby for two years, was a veritable TV veteran. Again, no experience in drama but he was sassy and smart and he knew his way around the company, which was an unwieldy beast that I still hadn’t learnt to properly navigate. And soon after Aleem came a clever and gorgeous Hazara girl, Zahra, but she would have to divide her time between working on Salam and producing a cooking show.
As we began making props lists and costume lists and plans for Jalalabad, I eagerly awaited more appointments—maybe a production assistant or two, an enthusiastic young runner, a set dresser who could maybe double as a wardrobe consultant. To his rascally credit, Paul spent a good two weeks deflecting my queries about extra staff and only finally addressed the issue one night over dinner and after a bottle of wine.
He offered me one of those good-news-bad-news scenarios. The good news was that Paul’s partner, Jose, was coming on board. Hooray! A hairdresser by trade, Jose had been working as the company’s resident stylist before he’d moved into production. He, too, was a TV newbie, but he’d quickly made his mark as a leader of men, by virtue of being street smart (as you would expect from a worldly, well-tra
velled Colombian) and a good few years older than the other producers. Plus I loved him and would have a fellow expat and friend to tread this strange new terrain with. The bad news was that Jose would be the final addition to my production team. Boo . . . hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo.
In the following weeks, I managed to convince a gutsy friend of mine, Tiggy, to come across from Australia as my first assistant director in exchange for food, accommodation and a modest monthly allowance. She claimed she was after adventure, but I still maintain that what got her across the line was my declaration that the ratio of men to women in Kabul was a solid nine to one.
Between all of us, we would cover casting, wardrobe, set-dressing, location scouting, props buying, scheduling, budgeting, catering . . . and any other random tasks associated with making an eight-part drama series. And when Zahra left the company early into the shoot to study full time at university, our pitiable little tribe dwindled to five. My two directors were also thoroughly green but enthusiastic, and I was genuinely freaked out about being the ‘expert’ on set.
Our first job was to hold auditions for the main roles. Tiggy was still making her way over, so Aleem, Sidique, Jose, Zahra, Raouf and myself would travel to Jalalabad to hold the casting. We made a general call for actors on local radio and television and within two days we had at least fifty males signed up to try out for a twenty-something drug addict and a forty-five- to fifty-five-year-old mystical elder, plus miscellaneous police officers, insurgents, a mullah and a couple of kids.
Our actresses all needed to be imported from Pakistan as Afghan Pashtun women were traditionally forbidden by their families from appearing on TV; we would select them through photos, CVs and the recommendations of one of Raouf’s mates.
I had chosen audition pieces for each of the male characters, but was told by Aleem that we had no way of getting them to the actors beforehand—very few of them would have access to email and almost none of them to a printer—so we would simply ask them to improvise something appropriate on the day. I had my doubts about this, but Raouf assured me there was nothing to worry about. He was a native of Nangarhar Province, where filmmaking was apparently prolific; the capital of Nangarhar, Jalalabad, had even earned itself the moniker ‘Jallywood’ for its abundance of producers, directors and actors: ‘These good actors. These best actors. These actors too perfect!’
Making Soapies in Kabul Page 3