Ustad hamahang biography examples

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My father and the other musicians were singing in the king’s salon and I fell asleep. Not long after, his mother also passed away.

“They noticed I was really good at singing so they asked us to create a group,” Hamahang says.

The group’s job was only to entertain the soldiers, and so it was music that saved the men from having to fight in the war that would later come to silence the instruments of Kharabat.

“If we sing, it is uncomfortable for us when someone is dancing in front of us. The worshippers and musicians here, although not Shiite, also belong to a minority religious community despised by ISIS and the Taliban. We are Muslims.’

One night, Hamahang saw two drunken men with guns outside his house injure a child. A harmonium, tabla drums, and a chimta (jingling tongs) are ready for the men to start playing.

Hamahang is Shaidayi’s nephew, but he is only two years younger than his uncle.

Hamahang lights a cigarette and takes a slow drag, enjoying this long-time habit that doesn’t seem to affect his singing. He had to drop out of school after eighth grade. He said he was the chief of the Taliban’s Ministry for the Enforcement of Virtue and Suppression of Vice in Kabul.

‘We left our homes without even shoes on our feet,’ Hamahang says, describing the hurry in which they left.

“I started learning harmonium from one of my father’s students, Saleem Qandahari,” he tells me.

Qandahari’s house was right in front of Shaidayi’s. Then, life must go on again. They said they were followers of a Sufi saint, Hazrat Ghaus.

There was no time to rescue precious instruments or tape recordings of their fathers’ performances. The group had taken over most parts of Afghanistan, and its militants were now moving around Kabul, brandishing their Kalashnikovs and punishing women for as little as showing their ankles. But he was assassinated only five years later, in 1978, by communists who then took over in Kabul.

While soldiers were sent to fight the guerrillas in the mountains of Afghanistan, Hamahang and Shaidayi stayed in Kabul, in a fort called Bala Hissar, whose ruins still overlook the muddy lanes of Kharabat.

The musicians have arrived.