Turning Thirty

I turned thirty in Afghanistan. It was my second birthday here. The last time I’d been hit with a weird flu three days before and the fever finally broke as I entered the last year of my twenties. My chowkidar and friend, Halim came into my room to my weak groans and cheerily offered me a bowl of rice and beans. He told me again that no doubt I had malaria. “Today check blood?” he asked hopefully, just like every other day. Here everything is malaria. If you have a toothache they suspect malaria.

With such an inauspicious precedent for birthdays in Afghanistan, this year I wasn’t going to make a big deal of it, but word got out. I should have known. Information is collected and disseminated in this country with uncanny speed. I’ve heard stories of someone coughing in the old city of Faizabad across the river and returning home to the new city to find everyone discussing his health. I don’t have a TV or a radio or the Web here, but I find out everything going on in the world from Halim, who has some mysterious source, unerring and never-ending. Halim was the one to tell me that Canada -my own country - had a new Prime Minister, one “Pool Mortaan.” The Afghans know when the roads are good and when they are blocked, they know when new troops land in Kabul and where they’re from, they know when there are cornflakes in the bazaar and when there aren’t, and they knew it was birthday. They knew and they weren’t going to let it slip by without a party.

We were up in Baharak at the time, two hours away from Faizabad, and even more of a backwater. But when the men of the office ushered me into the sitting room to the place of honour they’d managed to collect a tabla, an electric keyboard, a cassette player with several tapes, and a whole platter full of candy and the type of plastic flowers you see in funeral homes. In the middle of these was a box wrapped in shiny paper and labelled with an A4 printout of ClipArt lettering spelling out “Tawalaat Mubarak! Happy Birtday Mr. Rayn!”

Afghans rarely do things without speeches, candy, bright plastic flowers, and dancing. My party was no exception. The office manager, Tawab, presented me the ensemble with a long speech full of compliments and apologies for the meagreness of their gift (it turned out to be a pair of flashy sandals). I got caught up in things and made a little speech of my own, and got some polite laughter when I said that all I got for my birthday last year was a bowl of rice, but I don’t think the joke translated well. I handed around the candy to gloss over the awkward moment. They perched the flowers up around me, then one of the drivers hit it with the electric keyboard, the agronomist, it turned out, was no slouch on the tabla, and the dancing began.

A party in Afghanistan is a strange affair for the unaccustomed, and mostly it has to do with the dancing. First of all there are no women. The women on staff had come to me earlier to congratulate me and present their excuses and apologies for not being able to attend the party that night. The excuses were pleasant fictions; the fact is that women do not go to men’s parties. So right away Westerners are deprived of one of their primary reasons for going to parties: mingling. There is no mingling. You go to parties to appear, to eat, but chiefly, you go to dance. And you will not be dancing in a crowd, anonymously. You will be dancing alone in the middle of a cheering, clapping, singing circle of your own sex.

At first I thought I could just blend into the cheering and clapping and singing. Then two grown men with beards came and pulled me up and into the middle to a general roar of approval from all. So I danced. It was not the moment to be shy about it. I pulled out moves that should only occur at Michael Jackson concerts or in French music videos. Not only me. Everyone danced. The engineers danced. A sixty-year-old plumber danced. On my thirtieth birthday I danced with old bearded men.

Things calmed down a bit when they brought tea. One of the younger guys said that this was such a good party that they should start celebrating everyone’s birthday. “First you find when is birthdays,” Halim said. “Then you take this party.” Everyone laughed and started asking who knew their birthdays, but only Halim did because his uncle, in a burst of foresight, wrote it down.

The bag of candy made another round. One of the drivers, who I always thought looked a little like Prince, took the keyboard and sang a very old Afghan song, lamenting the years of war. People fiddled with the cassette player, which had more blinking lights on it than an aircraft carrier but wouldn’t play tapes. They abandoned cassettes and struck up with keyboard and drum once more for the last big push to the end. Someone started singing. They pulled me to my feet again and everything rose to a clapping, stomping crescendo with me twirling insanely in the middle of it. All of them were on their feet. I think someone threw money at me. I’m not kidding.

The next morning I found the plastic flowers in my room. They had arranged them in the empty candy bag and wrapped shreds of wrapping paper around the whole bouquet. On the plastic leaves they’d taped words cut out of the card. It looked like a fifth grade art project for Mother’s Day: “Mr. Rayn,” “Birtday,” and “Happy.” It sort of summed it all up, really.