Making Soapies in Kabul

by Trudi-Ann Tierney

  Who was I to argue against such a stunning recommendation?

  We were holding our auditions in the ‘reception hall’ of the hotel where we were staying—a gloomy, cavernous room that smelt like wet towels and fresh wee. We had called the actors for 10am; by 9.30am there were close to one hundred men milling around outside, waiting for their moment to shine. Zahra was stationed at the door taking names and making ID cards; inside, Jose manned the camera while Aleem and Sidique played warm bodies in scenes where actors demanded one. Raouf assessed their ability to speak Pashto, and I was primarily on acting watch. We had imagined it would be a seamless, conveyor-belt operation, but it quickly became a dog’s breakfast.

  Our actors had no idea what parts they were auditioning for so, as they stepped up to the mark, we gave them a quick once-over—we made a brief round-the-room assessment as to whether they looked like an insurgent, a policeman or a drug addict—and then threw them some kind of improvisational bone to gnaw on. Following each performance, another round of nods, winks and mutterings sealed our appraisal of their work before we sent them on their way.

  I smiled brightly every time I relegated an actor to the trash heap: ‘Yeah . . . no. Maybe he could be a village extra,’ I’d offer in hurried English, cracking my best face-splitting grin. Raouf, on the other hand, relishing his role as dramatic arbiter, would scowl, shake his head with unnecessary animation and usually offer a hearty double thumbs-down to indicate his disdain for their performance.

  Aleem and Sidique weren’t far behind in the ruthlessness stakes, constantly stifling giggles and groaning mid-routine. At one point, after a ‘drug addict’ made a particularly poor show of going through withdrawal, snarling and crawling around on the floor like a rabid dog, Raouf approached him and appeared to give him a solid dressing down. When I asked Aleem to translate, he explained that he was telling the unfortunate sod that he had shamed himself by acting so badly.

  I convened a quick meeting before the next lamb was led to the slaughter, suggesting that we all perhaps show a little more respect for our thespian friends. But Jose was the only one to agree with me; the others all thought that demeaning hapless actors was an eminently acceptable sport, the general consensus being that they shouldn’t be auditioning if they didn’t have the chops.

  ‘You not Afghan,’ Raouf declared, by way of closing this argument, and once again I had to concede that I most certainly was not.

  We came away from our first excursion to Jalalabad with a handful of sound, worthy actors and a local fixer, who undertook to scout locations for us while we were back in Kabul. But we still hadn’t found our lead character, Salam. Most of the young actors whose performances we had suffered through at the casting had clearly learnt their ‘craft’ watching Bollywood films, but what might have been ‘too perfect’ for some cheesy Hindi song-and-dance routine just wasn’t going to cut it on our drama serial. Admittedly, I’d hardly written a modern-day Macbeth, but it was at least worthy of a leading man who could indicate ‘feeling tired’ with a tad more subtlety than vigorously rubbing his eyes with balled-up fists and mock yawning.

  We decided to start fishing around for our lead actor in Kabul, and Jose and Sidique put a call out over TV and radio and began the audition process all over again. We agreed that Jose would only show Paul and me footage of truly promising candidates, but after close to a week of castings we had yet to sight a single frame.

  I can’t recall now what I was doing when Jose phoned me and demanded that I immediately make my way to the audition room. We were both feeling a little jaded by that stage and had taken to wickedly re-enacting some of the poorer performances we had witnessed in Jalalabad. ‘Snarling Dog Man’ was a particular favourite, as was the ‘Psycho Insurgent’ who had wandered around the room mumbling to himself for about five minutes before pulling out an imaginary knife and stabbing himself repeatedly in the chest.

  So I hurried over, half-expecting to see some terrifying routine that superseded all acting atrocities that had come before. Instead, Jose introduced me to Atiqullah, a striking young fellow whom I could instantly picture playing Salam. He had studied acting at university and was part of a local theatre company. As Sidique once again put him through his paces, we all knew that we had our man.

  Paul got on board with our decision rather quickly: he was consumed with multiple broadcasts covering the upcoming presidential elections and was happy for us to make the call. The only other person we needed to convince was my old mate Raouf.

  ‘No, Tooti. This no good,’ he declared after watching the audition tape.

  ‘No, Raouf. This very good. Very, very good!’ I countered.

  Raouf had been gunning all along for a mate of his to play Salam. His candidate was some minor Jallywood celebrity whose depiction of ‘anguish’ over killing his sister involved him ripping open his pink satin shirt, dropping to his knees and beating his fists on the floor, so I was a little sceptical about Raouf’s appraisal of Atiqullah’s performance. However, with the assistance of Aleem, I discovered that the problem wasn’t with Atiqullah’s acting but with his accent: it seemed he spoke excellent Pashto, but it wasn’t Nangarhar Pashto and that would put him out of kilter with the actors we had already cast.

  I was already across the Pashto-accent-dilemma as our Pakistani actresses were all going to have their voices dubbed for the very same reason, but I was determined not to lose Atiqullah. I called him back into the office that same day and explained the situation. He understood completely and promised to present himself to us the next afternoon with a perfect Nangarhar Pashto accent.

  I excitedly divulged this latest development to Raouf but, after indulging in a lengthy stretch of tobacco chewing, followed by the ceremonial spit into the bin, he declared that it simply couldn’t be done. I explained to him that actors often have to modify their accents for certain roles and then demonstrated to him all the different ways, in accented English, that I could say ‘Hello, Raouf. How are you?’ I did typical British, Irish, American and a guttural German, plus a poor facsimile of Indian, complete with a head wobble.

  But he just laughed at me. ‘You just say: “Hello, Raouf. How are you?” What you saying? This all you saying, Tooti: “Hello, Raouf. How are you?’’’ My finely nuanced performance was completely lost on him.

  The next day we all gathered in the audition room to watch Atiqullah perform. I spent the entire time with my eyes fixed on Raouf, but he was inscrutable. Afterwards he engaged Atiqullah in some serious-sounding banter before finally turning to me with a smile: ‘He good, Tooti. This very good Pashto. Little, little more learning but he be very good Salam.’

  I held up my hand for a high-five, but Raouf left me hanging—he felt it was more of a double thumbs-up moment.

  Four weeks after our first visit to Jalalabad, we ventured back, to check on our fixer’s progress. Nick was visiting me at the time and, posing as my husband, came along for the ride. Tiggy had also just arrived in the country and was excited to meet the team and get cracking.

  Despite being paid handsomely for his services, the fixer had basically done bugger-all. Our requests to see his recommendations for the school, the village, the police station, the mosque . . . were all met with a vacant stare followed by frantic phone calls as he attempted to line up something—anything—for his impatient employers.

  The man was a friend of Raouf’s, so his lack of location-scouting chops didn’t attract the ire that I thought it quite rightly deserved. But, after a day of trudging around in forty-five-degree heat with absolutely zero results, Tiggy unleashed a spray at him that was completely justified, boldly articulated and would have been perfectly fine if it had not been publicly delivered by a beautiful young woman to a proud Pashtun man.

  ‘This is fucking ridiculous! You haven’t done a thing! You are incompetent, lazy and completely disorganised! What the fuck have you been doing for the past month?’

  Although the meaning of her rant was lost on him (and no doubt most
of our entourage), her intention was abundantly clear, and the shocked silence that followed the tirade indicated that it wasn’t terribly well received.

  ‘This no good. She loud woman. She angry woman,’ Raouf warned me as we made our way back to the van.

  And that evening, when most of the team turned up very late for a production meeting that Tiggy had called and she cut loose again, I quite literally had a revolution on my hands. After the meeting was over, an indignant delegation cornered me to inform me that they were not willing to stand by and be shamed by this angry little western woman.

  Tiggy, a very attractive thirty-six-year-old, looked a good ten years younger. Apparently she wasn’t going to be able to pull off the revered elder–mother persona that I had so effortlessly managed to foster for myself. My pang of jealousy was sharp but fleeting.

  As Nick lay in bed reading a book, I was up and down all night; I joined Aleem and Sidique on the balcony, Raouf in the garden and Tiggy in her room. It was like a classic French farce, with doors opening and closing all over the joint, complete with covert entrances and exits, and whispered conversations in the dark.

  During the course of this interminably hot evening, I made it perfectly clear that I wasn’t going to accept the ‘You’re-Not-Afghan’ argument anymore. We were attempting to make television to western standards, and it required discipline, commitment and everyone generally doing their jobs. I was quite prepared to shame anyone who wasn’t prepared to work.

  When it came to Tiggy, my argument was simple and succinct. I warned her that, if she didn’t dial it down a bit, she’d probably get shot.

  The start of the Salam shoot coincided with the Afghan presidential elections of August 2009 and, one week before we were due to travel to Jalalabad, our head of security, Ahmad, told us that it was too dangerous to go. Our client had already cut us considerable slack and we couldn’t possibly delay any longer, so we selected a series of scenes that we could shoot locally and moved production to Kabul until it was safe to travel. A bombed-out palace on the outskirts of the city would become our junkie den and one of the security guards at work generously offered up his house (essentially relegating the nine family members who lived there to an out-building at the back of the small compound) as the location for our lead character’s home.

  Our Jalalabad actors were excited to come to the capital; our Pakistani actresses not so much. While they were prepared to hop illegally across the border and make the short trip to Jallywood, travelling further west into Kabul was a whole other scene. As the only Pashto speaker in our troupe, Aleem was quickly dispatched to Peshawar, their home base in Pakistan, to negotiate with them. He sat with their husbands, fathers, mothers and brothers, drinking endless cups of tea and attempting to smooth things over. In consultation with myself and management, he renegotiated the terms of their contracts, ensuring them a third of their pay upfront and the rest when filming wrapped. And when one of the actresses ultimately refused to come, he held a hurried audition to find a replacement.

  When the women finally arrived, Aleem was their confidant, protector and friend, and every concern or complaint that they had (of which there were many) was conveyed to me through that darling slip of a boy. They didn’t like the food and they were unhappy with their costumes. Because Ahmad was convinced they were all sex workers, he had forbidden them from leaving their guest house at night. They turned up on set each day with a fresh list of complaints and teary declarations that they would abandon us altogether if the situation didn’t improve. It took a considerable amount of consoling, cajoling and some hardline negotiating with our security chief to keep them on board.

  The actress we had chosen to play Fatema, the progressive, university-educated and unmarried sister of our lead character, arrived in Kabul looking considerably larger than when I had viewed her in photographs a few months earlier. Cool bananas, it wasn’t necessary for our shining star of Afghan womanhood to be a size six. Then, four days after she arrived, Aleem was called up in the middle of the night to take her to hospital. She was vomiting, she was feverish—she was five months pregnant. She didn’t seem bothered by this development and nor did her mother, whom we had selected to play her on-screen mum. Fortunately Fatema was going to be blown up in a bus explosion in episode one, so we didn’t have to recast the role.

  By the time we returned to Jalalabad three weeks later, Aleem had established himself as the father of the whole tribe. And when, just a week into the shoot, Jose, Tiggy and I relocated to the only western guest house in town due to our rather precious distaste for cold showers, rats and being gawked at by turban-wearing men every time we left our rooms, he assumed this role with supreme authority. He stayed up late at night; he ran through the lines for the next day’s scenes with the actresses; he lectured the other boys about keeping it down when they partied and played poker in their rooms; and he woke up an hour earlier than everyone else so as to get the crew organised and to work on time. When they finally all made it to the set each day, it was with great relief that he handed the reins over to me.

  We had two security guards assigned to us for the duration of the shoot. Zarhawar, who was a native of Nangarhar, stayed with us on a full-time basis while various other guards came and went throughout our time in Jalalabad. Zarhawar was a habitually smiling Pashtun man who had me sussed out from the get-go; he made it his personal mission to keep an eye on me. Through Aleem he issued my security briefing: ‘No singing, no dancing, no clapping in public.’

  I thought this was an odd directive. But he had observed me in Kabul for months before the shoot and his prohibition only made me realise how often I do, in fact, sing, dance and clap. I would tunelessly break into any little snippet of song that entered my head; I would jig with the sound man to the latest Hindi hit blaring from his phone and I would clap with joy after a particularly good take. My impulses were endless, but it only took one stern look from Zarhawar to shut them all down.

  By the end of each shooting day, I would be like a mad street dog that had been tied to a fence all week; so, as soon as we were settled into our van, I would lead the team in a rousing rendition of the ‘Zarhawar Song’ to his immense embarrassment. The lyrics were simple and the tune consisted of only a few ascending notes; however, we would belt it out with gusto, clapping and swaying and jigging all the way back to our guest house: ‘Zarhawar, Zarhawar. He’s the king of Afghanistannnnn!’

  And repeat. And repeat. And . . . repeat. Lame? Sure. But after a ten-hour shooting day in the middle of summer, it didn’t take much to amuse us.

  The guest house where we were staying, The Taj, was a heavily fortified affair and the other occupants were a mix of NGO workers, government advisors and their western security contractors. About a week into our stay, after we had rumbled into the compound in our battered HiAce van at the end of a long day of shooting and Zarhawar in his simple salwar kameez had casually walked us to the gate, one of the security contractors, Amy, hauled me aside to express her serious concerns about my personal safety. She believed that Jose and Tiggy, with their raven hair and olive complexions, could both easily pass as Afghan, but I was a stand-out fair-skinned blonde and an obvious target.

  Amy was a scary bird—she had muscles where I didn’t know muscles could exist. She would grab me around the waist with one arm, hoist me off the ground and carry me around the bar, and she had taken to calling me ‘Pussycat’. She was head of security for one of the world’s largest accountancy groups and, with another contractor, was safeguarding an auditor, Scott, who was working with local government.

  Scott’s entrances to The Taj were finely tuned events. Two armoured jeeps in convoy would roar down the driveway, stopping directly outside the gate to the guest house. Amy and her cohort would stride from their cars in perfect formation, guns drawn, before opening the door for their flak-jacketed client and marching him inside.

  When I assured her I felt perfectly safe in Zarhawar’s hands, she almost exploded. ‘Are you fucking mad
? Your life is in the hands of some local, dopey git wearing man jammies. Does he even have a gun?’ I confessed that I wasn’t entirely sure and she grunted more disgust. ‘Oh, Pussycat, you are seriously fucking demented!’

  Over the next two hours, and in between doing push-ups on the bar, she alternately interrogated and lectured me on security. No, I didn’t own personal protective equipment, nor had I ever taken part in any drills on kidnapping-prevention techniques. No, I didn’t have a ‘proof of life’ question. What was a ‘proof of life’ question, anyway?

  I quickly learnt that I, too, was a ‘dopey git’ and that a ‘proof of life’ question is a personal question about yourself that hostage takers are asked to provide when they need to prove that you are still alive.

  ‘Oh, like my date of birth,’ I offered.

  ‘No, you daft twat! It can’t be something they can find on the internet! Something like: what was the name of your first dog.’

  ‘Okay, that can be my “proof of life” question.’

  ‘It’s no use having one if nobody in your company is going to ever fucking ask it!’

  By the end of our session she had given me a cover—I was now married with three children back in Australia to support, because my husband was terminally ill (apparently this might engender some sympathy from my captors). I had a silver ring for my wedding finger, to back this claim; even more effectively, I had a small, innocuous-looking hand torch with a base that was covered in tiny ridges of saw-like teeth. Amy showed me how, with a savage thrusting and twisting motion, I could use it to take out an eye. I asked her if she’d get me out of Jalalabad if the shit went down.