Making Soapies in Kabul

by Trudi-Ann Tierney

  After giving up the solicitor game to explore my creative bent, I landed a plum job as a cook at a public hospital, where I had three kitchen hands working for me. But we were a fairly egalitarian little bunch. Having fluked my way into the position (I actually thought that I was interviewing for the job of dish pig too), it turned out that Guillermo, Li Wei and Salim knew as much about serving up meals for two hundred people as I did.

  I guess the most responsibility I ever had before my time in Afghanistan was when I was a tour leader on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. But I wasn’t terribly comfortable with that scene—I’d be strolling up the arch, taking in the breathtaking views of Sydney, only to have some bothersome tourist ask me whether they could expect to see kangaroos hopping across the bridge anytime soon. That would snap me out of my reverie and forcefully remind me of the disheartening fact that I had twelve people to babysit for the next two hours.

  So my appointment as head of drama at Moby was an exciting and bracing first. My stint as boss-woman on the Salam shoot had given me a tiny taste of what it entailed to be in charge, but the buck there had always stopped with Paul. Now, however, I was to have an actual department all to myself—a team of around twenty writers, producers and directors who had all been beavering away for the past few years, quite happily making drama serials and TV spots without me. Initially the prospect of managing them was a mite unnerving.

  Following the successful delivery of the army TV spots, I was directed by management to focus on improving our weekly soap opera—Secrets of this House. It was externally funded and based around an extended Afghan family, all of whom lived together in the one home. In 2009, in only its second season, the client pulled the show, with five episodes of the series still to air, and refused to fund a third season until major changes were made.

  In fairness to the funder, their action was completely justified. For most of the first two years, the show had been shot in a building at work. A few walls were knocked down to make a living room; a couple of tiny offices were continually being reset to represent the various bedrooms of the family members; and a noisy alleyway outside the ‘set’ (home to a hideous grey stucco fountain) was the backyard.

  Then, in November 2009, management decided to convert the Secrets set to offices for our HR Department and, without any reference to it in the script, the on-screen family magically relocated to the big swanky house on the other side of town that had previously been my home.

  Our wholesale pullout from the big swanky house (which occurred about six months after the Moby expats mob had initially moved in) had been somewhat of a mutual decision between both landlord and tenants. For our part, we weren’t overly comfortable with having staff who could potentially report all our personal ins and outs back to our employer and work colleagues. As it was, Paul and Jose had to pretend to sleep in separate rooms.

  We had a sheet that everyone entering or leaving the house—ourselves included—had to sign, but I had my doubts about the validity or effectiveness of the exercise. One Friday we had a rooftop barbecue and three Russian mates variously signed themselves in as Adolf Hitler, Osama bin Laden and George Bush. Our security guard made a note of their arrival time next to the audacious monikers and didn’t so much as flinch.

  The house manager (whose father worked at Moby) was a rather interesting little fellow who was constantly trying to give me gifts. His first present was a box of chocolates, which I made a big show of sharing around with everyone. When he attempted to present me with a necklace I immediately declined the offer, questioning the appropriateness of the gesture, considering he was married with two children. He insisted it was all legit, as his wife had actually made the pendant herself. I had good cause to doubt the claim because I’d seen the silver-plated peacock with lapis stones embedded in its wings at a half a dozen jewellery shops on Chicken Street, the main tourist market in Kabul.

  Our communal issue with this man was our suspicion that his ‘managing’ extended to matters that didn’t entirely fit that job description. One of my housemates, Martin, arrived home one day to find that someone had been trying to track down ‘porrne’ on his laptop. On other occasions, I’d enter my room to find my two pillows propped up against the bed head, a clear dent in my mattress and the TV switched to the Hindi movie channel. But what ultimately ended his career with us was the day we arrived home, after a long and exhausting week in Jalalabad, to find him fast asleep on Jose’s pretend bed.

  For Moby’s part, we were a demanding lot and I suspect they had no real concept of what they were taking on. There were calls for pot plants, furniture for the rooftop, a microwave oven that actually worked, air conditioners and reliable internet connection. My only real request was for screen doors to keep out insects. During summer, the heat in the house was insufferable and it was impossible to sleep with the doors closed. But our home was inopportunely located two hundred metres away from a communal rubbish dump and the resulting fly plague was sickening and immense. After weeks of asking nicely, I finally lost the plot. During the course of one evening, I massacred thirty-seven flies in my room with my trusty swatter and threatened to dump them on the desk of our HR manager if screen doors weren’t installed. They were fitted the following day.

  I imagine the company finally tired of playing landlord to a mob of unruly, insistent expats, and wisely decided to stick to the media game and leave the inn-keeping gig to the experts. However, the house, with its many levels and multiple rooms, would prove perfect as a film set. It would also be easy enough to concoct a storyline for season three of Secrets that would explain the change of location. Unfortunately, though, the client had other complaints too. They wanted to see more ‘traditional’ Afghan characters, more outdoor scenes, more rural scenes . . . more scenes full stop. The actors had to ‘act better’, the production values needed an almighty upgrade . . . in short, there was general all-round dissatisfaction with the way we were delivering our client’s propaganda requirements.

  The show was being entirely produced by a small Afghan team, most of whom I didn’t really know. Salam had consumed all of my time and energy, and I had spent most of my initial stint in Afghanistan living in Jalalabad.

  Thankfully I knew the senior producer, Merzad, a softly spoken nineteen-year-old, who had helped us out in Kabul on the Salam shoot. He had little to offer in our initial meeting and was obviously sensitive to the criticism being levelled at his show. His defensiveness was entirely understandable—he had no production team at all to assist him and I quickly realised that my experience on Salam had been a walk in the park compared with Merzad’s lot.

  I had no doubt that the Secrets kids had heard stories of the demanding she-wolf who railed about boom mikes being in shot and ranted at crew members who turned up late to the set. At my first meet-and-greet with the entire team, I was anxious not to be seen as an invading force. But I was playing to a hostile crowd, who scowled in response to my encouraging smiles and shrugged their shoulders when I asked them how we could improve the show. It could have been bloody, except for the fact that they resented the client more than they resented me.

  The client’s representative was a German man called Helmut. I had met him once during my early days with the company and he had seemed thoroughly nice—expansive, enthusiastic and openly declaring that he was quite in love with Afghanistan and its people. Unfortunately, this ‘love’ was flagrantly paternalistic and the Secrets kids—all intelligent, forthright individuals—weren’t buying it.

  The head writer, Hamid, was particularly vocal. He had left Afghanistan for Pakistan with his family in 1992 after the Mujahideen came to power and, at five years old, he had been working as a carpet weaver by night while attending school during the day. When he returned to the country in 2001, he sold water and toys on the street while continuing his education. Over the years, he had developed a love of filmmaking and was already writing feature scripts when he was selected by our company to attend a film workshop.

  When Secre
ts was commissioned, Hamid was asked to take on the job of overseeing the writing team. He was a proud, uncompromising Afghan and resented being told what was important and relevant to his people by foreigners. But his real peeve was Helmut’s fondness for quoting the Koran. ‘Who is he to talk to me about Islam? Fucking idiot foreigner!’

  We had a get-together with the ‘fucking idiot foreigner’ scheduled for the very next day. By the end of the first meeting with my team, I had at least elicited promises that they would be polite and would feign interest in Helmut’s opinions, so as to ensure that they would all keep their jobs for another year.

  Merzad didn’t say much during this meeting. In fact he deliberately looked away if I made any attempt to engage him in the lively discussion. I took this as a very bad sign. Perhaps I was an overbearing foreigner as well; I was quite certain that he wasn’t happy with the obvious usurpation of his authority that was now taking place.

  But after it was over, as I was hoovering back a cigarette and wondering what to do with my taciturn team, he approached me. ‘Don’t worry, Trudi Jan. We will fix everything. I will make sure it’s all fine.’ Before smiling and walking away.

  The meeting with Helmut was an edgy affair. When he began by welcoming me to the team and assuring everyone else that the show would be so much better with a ‘foreigner’ on board, I wanted to punch him in the throat. And, despite the fact that he was just the cash cow and we were the creatives, he had an abundance of story ideas that he imagined would be ideal!

  We had a couple of characters in the show who had recently become engaged and he wanted a storyline where the girl, Soraya, became the boss of her fiancé, Kabir. I nodded enthusiastically and agreed it would make for great soap opera fodder, willing the others to play along. It was when he suggested that our female writers script the scenes that it all turned ugly.

  Merzad was translating and he looked at me for a panicked second before reluctantly passing on this brainwave to the girls. One of the women, Alka, let forth with a spray that was obviously hostile. Through Merzad, we discovered that she thought the storyline implausible and the suggestion that she write it positively patronising.

  Helmut was surprised, nay aghast, by her reluctance to take on his idea and began quoting passages from the Koran in support of women’s rights. I immediately looked at Hamid. His face glowed crimson and he groaned loudly enough for Helmut to turn and address him. ‘You like my idea. Yes?’

  Despite being competently conversant in English, Hamid growled out a response in Dari that was even and low, before picking up his notebook and calmly walking out the door. The client turned to Merzad for an explanation and I just grinned like an idiot as I envisaged our contract floating away in the wake of Hamid’s passive fury.

  Merzad cleared his throat and looked Helmut squarely in the eye. ‘He says that this is a very interesting storyline and he will take some time to think about it. But now he must leave to drive his sick mother to the hospital.’

  He threw me the briefest of smiles before turning his attention back to our client.

  ‘Oh this is very sad, no?’ responded Helmut. ‘What is the matter with her? Is it high blood pressure? Her heart, yes? You know this is a very serious problem in your country. It’s because of the food you eat. So much oil, always too much oil. You must all, all of you, stop using this oil. And not so much meat. Stop eating the meat. Eat vegetables, fresh vegetables; this would be much better for you. And you must exercise. Yes? . . . Yes! I have a great idea! You know what we should do in the show? One of the characters should decide to become healthy and try to teach the rest of the family about diet and exercise, yes? This would be good for all of your people. Everyone in this country needs to learn about this. Yes?’

  ‘Yes!’ I offered a little too quickly. Helmut, of course, was right, but his appreciation of your average Afghan diet failed to factor in the scarcity of good, fresh vegetables and domestic budgetary constraints that meant that most families were fortunate if they could afford beans, rice and bread once a day.

  I desperately wanted to avoid any further confrontation, so I quickly looked at my watch and politely informed Helmut that the team really had to get back to work—scripts to write, actors to cast and all that. He glanced at his phone and agreed that we should wrap things up; then he declared the meeting an enormous success and took his leave.

  Straight after the meeting, Merzad translated for me what Hamid had said in Dari before he left. Apart from the memorable declaration that Helmut was a ‘donkey fucker’, I can’t exactly recall what other words Hamid uttered, but I know I was able to add around five new expletives to my Dari vocabulary.

  While Helmut was happy to approve the storyline that justified our change of location, he still wasn’t entirely sold on the house we were moving to. He demanded its complete refurbishment. The chintzy lounges and ‘modern’ tables and chairs all had to go, making way for Persian rugs, throw cushions and charpoys—a traditional cot consisting of a wooden frame and a base of tightly woven rope. He also wanted to see the sky and surrounding landscape through the windows, but this request wasn’t going to be so easy to accommodate.

  On either side of the house, two-metre-high sheets of corrugated iron had been erected atop the three-metre-high cement fences. This had happened during the expat occupation of the compound as a courtesy to our Afghan neighbours. At that time, because the two-storey house had no real yard, its rooftop had become our favourite hangout. With wonderful views across Kabul and the chance of an evening breeze, it was our preferred place for sitting and decompressing after a long day at work. For Paul and me (both early risers) it was also the ideal location to start the morning—over coffee, cereal and cigarettes we could catch up on all the chitchat we wouldn’t get time to cover at the office.

  Then one evening, we had arrived home to discover that the roof area had been enclosed on all sides by huge tarpaulins and our stunning city vista had been reduced to a lousy rectangle of sky. Allie, one of our project managers, was straight on the phone to HR, demanding to know what the deal was. She was informed that the neighbours had made complaints about the foreigners on the roof—particularly the bareheaded women—and so the company had respectfully agreed to cover us up.

  Allie was livid and the next afternoon took to the tarpaulins with a pair of scissors, cutting huge squares out of each section. On days when she was feeling particularly oppressed, she’d stick her uncovered head through one of her DIY windows and brazenly shake her hair about.

  A few weeks later, the ruined canvas was replaced with sheets of grass matting, but they too were quickly demolished. Despairing at ever being able to keep us hidden, the company had opted instead to block our neighbours’ view with the super-high fencing solution. Which our people now wanted to remove.

  Ahmad was dispatched to begin negotiations, his most compelling argument being that the infidels no longer inhabited the house. The people on the left were happy for certain sections of the iron to be removed, affording us a decent glimpse of sky and surrounding homes through the main living-room windows. However the neighbours on the other side refused to budge, concerned that our cast and crew might take advantage of the unfettered sightlines from the rooftop to look at their women when they were out in the yard.

  Ahmad’s assurances that nobody would be permitted onto the roof failed to sway them. Thankfully, Helmut sympathised with our dilemma and was satisfied that, with what we had already achieved, we would show enough outdoors to fulfil his edict.

  I was anxious anticipating our first day together on set, so I was absolutely delighted to discover that two of my boys from Salam—Massood the sound man and Javid the lighting technician—were on crew. I didn’t want to appear pushy and had decided I would just hang back and watch how they worked. But then I found I was compelled to intervene in the first shot of the day.

  We were actually shooting in the basement of The Diana, the guest house where I was now living. The scene featured two of the show
’s resident bad guys having a conversation about kidnapping one of our main characters. I sat at the back of the room and watched as the actors rehearsed their dialogue, while Merzad and the director, Farrukh, moved furniture around.

  I thought that their decision to place a television set smack-bang in between the two actors, its screen facing the camera, was interesting, but I let it slide without mention. Once we were ready to roll, I moved up to sit next to Farrukh so I could watch the action on the monitor. I allowed him to tape one take before calling a halt to filming.

  Using Merzad as my translator, I asked Farrukh to carefully look at the monitor and to tell me whether he could see any problems with the shot. He confessed that he couldn’t. Merzad and the two cameramen were similarly convinced that the set-up looked just fine. In desperation, I called in Massood and Javid to offer their opinions and I must admit to having experienced a moment of self-satisfied, motherly pride when Massood correctly pointed out that you could see all of our reflections in the TV screen. The inevitable post-pride fall cameth about two hours later when, at another location, Massood failed to detect that a groaning air conditioner was completely ruining his sound.

  We spent seven days filming episode one—virtually an eternity in terms of making Afghan television, but we all knew that the future of the show and indeed our jobs depended on our first offering to Helmut being tip-top.

  One of the last set-ups we filmed was in the mountains on the outskirts of Kabul. It was a brilliantly clear day, but bitterly cold and windy, and one of our two actors kept fluffing his lines. We were racing against the light and launching into our tenth take when a distant but thunderous explosion rolled up from the city below. We all froze and, as one, turned to scan the valley for signs of smoke, expecting to hear the faraway pop of gunfire in the sinister silence that followed.

  We stayed like that for some time, but the truth was that our schedule simply didn’t allow us the luxury of standing and pondering whether another terrorist attack was taking place somewhere in our town.