by JON LEE ANDERSON
At a dinner party hosted by an Afghan warlord, Jon Lee Anderson meets one of the last remaining maskharas—an entertainer, professional blackmailer, master thief, and prolific murderer.
After the trays with our food were taken away and we were sipping at sugary black tea and munching dried mulberries, Pashean began to perform, regaling us with vaudevillian skits and dances, bawdy jokes, and gossipy, extemporaneous riffs on everything from sex to politics. To the ecstatic amusement of Atta and his boys, Pashean acted out a skit that he called “The Unwilling Bride on Her Wedding Night.” After encouraging one of the boys to play the “eager bridegroom,” Pashean placed a turban cloth over his head to resemble a burka. As the “groom” got into the spirit of things by attempting to paw Pashean, giggling hysterically as he did so, Pashean was transformed into a skittish virgin bride, a wriggling bundle of firmly locked knees, defensive slaps, and falsetto mewings of mock-terror.
Pashean called his next piece “The Willing Bride on Her Wedding Night.” Using the same youth as his stand-in for the bridegroom, Pashean imitated the amorous cooings and heated gasps of a supposedly impassioned woman, and proceeded to climb into his lap and rub the boy’s thighs lasciviously. The skit ended decorously enough, with Pashean lying supine, his head nestled in the groom’s lap, staring longingly into his eyes.
To my western eyes, this was exceedingly tame fare, more Perils of Pauline than Sex and the City, but to the Afghans in the room, Pashean’s bodice-ripping farce was heady stuff, and had them gagging and weeping with laughter and embarrassed incredulity.
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