Songbirds Are High Note for Afghans

The south side of Kabul is a desolate place--bomb-blasted buildings, mud streets and houses like medieval hovels--but its narrow and decrepit passageways are once again home to an Afghan passion that lightens the harsh days: singing birds.

Electricity, running water and plumbing are unknown here.

Indeed, little seems different from the days of the repressive Taliban regime. But the air is filled with bird song.

Dozens of shops, each no more than a single room, lean toward the streets looking as if they might collapse at any moment were it not for the towers of caged birds that fill each to the ceiling and wash the air with music. Chattering canaries and parakeets, cooing doves, robins, chirping chickadees and the sweet-singing mountain nightingale compete for attention.

“The Taliban came here and hit me with wire cables for selling my birds,” Nur Ahmed, 80, said on a recent day. “I said: ‘What else can I do for a living? I am an old man. I have no teeth, and I’ve been selling birds for 40 years. I cannot learn something new.’ ”

One of the odder of the Taliban’s legion of rules was its mandate that Afghans give up their centuries-old custom of keeping songbirds. Rooted in courtly tradition, in which kings kept both hunting birds for sport and singing birds--usually confined in ornamental gardens--to entertain guests, the practice long ago spread to even the poorest of Afghan homes.

But to the fundamentalist Taliban, bird song was a distraction from the only meritorious song, the reading of the Koran. And with a sort of Islamic twist on animal rights, the regime decreed that God intended birds to be free. Talibs strode through bird markets forcing shopkeepers to open their cages. When the Talibs found people who kept birds at home, they forced the owners to free those too.

However, because many of the birds were raised in captivity, freeing them meant that they perched in trees--confused, starving and easy prey for cats and dogs.

Now the native passion for birds is openly flourishing again. Its perseverance even in these economically difficult times serves as testimony to people’s deep longing for something that can lift them out of the devastation of their war-torn lives.

“I am jobless, but I have to buy a bird today and my family does not mind, because if we do not have birds, we will have a bad mental condition,” said Jan Mohammed, 22, who was purchasing a saira, a small bird from the thrush family with a red marking on its head whose chirping call is believed to say, “Allah, just you.”

Like so many people in this country, Mohammed--who already owned two sairas--has had personal contact with violence and grief. He lost three cousins in the fighting here in the last eight years, two during skirmishes between moujahedeen warlords and one in a battle with the Taliban.

“During all this fighting, the people of Afghanistan have lived with a lot of turmoil. These were dark days and we felt very bad, and because of that we want to forget everything. When people hear the birds sing, they can dream,” Mohammed said.

In Afghanistan, birds are at once a reminder of a more peaceful time and a source of music where the sounds of gunfire and mortars are more familiar than any melody.

“I like to spend my life with birds, I like the singing, and when I come home tired and cold, if I hear the sound of my birds I will forget everything,” said Mohammed Hassan, a slender bird seller with a lined face who looked far older than his 65 years.

“I had four sons, but I lost three in the fighting. And I have one left. He likes birds too but not to keep at home,” he said sadly.

Many younger people, however, do share Hassan’s passion. Some, like Jan Mohammed, buy birds for peace of mind. Others view them as both a pleasure and a way to make money. They buy canaries, breed them at home and then sell their offspring at the bazaar.

Some canaries, especially the one known here as the warbling “Polish” canary, are particularly prized. A “Polish” canary sells for as much as $7--and, with the exception of the nightingale, is among the most expensive birds sold here.

Kabul, the capital, supports two bird markets, while smaller provincial towns generally have only one. Many of the older bird sellers and bird keepers remember a time when people imitated the royal tradition and kept birds as a kind of decorative element in their homes, making bird selling a busy trade.

“For hundreds of years, the kings of Afghanistan kept birds in greenhouses along with the best flowers,” said Shir Agha Omar, the director of the Kabul Zoo and himself a bird lover. “Rich people imitated that tradition and built greenhouses where the birds could fly free . . . or they put them in very large, fancy cages. Often, these greenhouses were near their guest house, so that visitors could enjoy them.”

Omar’s greenhouse was destroyed during the moujahedeen fighting. Now, he says, he has only a small home: half for his family and half for his birds and flowers.

The addictive quality of birds is well known among Afghans, be they buyers or sellers.

“Birds are like cigarettes. Once you have one, you will have them the rest of your life,” said Khodadost, 45, a bird seller who specializes in mountain nightingales--birds with a sweet trill that is easy on the ear.

Unlike their relationship to fighting birds--which are also beloved by Afghans and sell for far more money--bird keepers seem to develop a special bond with their songbirds. Perhaps that’s because for so long, birds were the only thing in people’s lives that seemed to hold a promise of better times.

One man, Shirnagha, now has a small shop in the old bird market in Kabul, where he sells blue, green and yellow parakeets as well as pigeons. He used to be a farmer on the rich Shomali plain, about an hour’s drive north of the city. But the Taliban laid siege to that area, driving out its inhabitants and ruining its gardens and orchards.

The day rocket-propelled grenades began landing at his house, Shirnagha fled to a neighbor’s home. But as the hours wore on, he became increasingly anxious about the 40 birds he had left behind. When darkness fell, he crept back and went around his house collecting his cages.

“Then terrible fighting started again and I could only gather 10 of my birds, and the rockets were falling all around and I had to escape,” he said.

That was five years ago, but the memory haunts him.

“I don’t know what happened to my other birds. I loved them very much. I am still thinking about them. Were they killed by rockets? Nobody was there to feed them or give them water. Maybe cats and dogs ate them,” he said.

“Now Afghans are very poor,” Shirnagha explained, “and their hearts are breaking because they have lost someone they know in the fighting and they have lost their houses and their gardens. The only way they can forget their sadness is to listen to the singing of their birds.”

‘When people hear the birds sing, they can dream.’