Kamal was not invited to come along.Īnd like that, it was over-the parties, the dancing lessons, the stand-in family. He says that even the most hardened civil war fighters would watch in a state of helpless rapture.īut when the Taliban took control of the country in 1992, Kamal's master was forced to flee with his family to India. Kamal found that he had a natural aptitude for dancing, and was soon in high demand at parties. It was she who arranged for him to study dance. He never traded me around with his friends as some did."Įven the man's wife eventually accepted the arrangement, lavishing attention on Kamal and treating him as a member of the family. Kamal is reluctant to talk about the sexual component of his relationship to his bacha baz. "I wasn't the most beautiful of the boys, but I had one thing most of them didn't have.I had talent." Kamal remembers attending parties where other boys were on proud display, their masters vying to see who had the most attractive boy. He told people I was his adopted son."īacha bazi flourished in the years leading up to the rise of the Taliban, particularly among warlords and mujahideen fighters. "I was his little prince," Kamal recalled. It would be more than a decade before he saw his family again. When Kamal's mother and siblings fled to Pakistan, his master (or bacha baz) agreed to take care of the youth. The Soviets had withdrawn from the country and a bloody civil war was under way. "He was someone I knew and trusted," Kamal says of the man he once called master. He had never heard of bacha bazi, the practice of wealthy or powerful men conscripting adolescent boys into sexual slavery. When he was 14 his father died and his mother placed him in the care of a family friend. Then they began clapping with the music as the middle-aged dancer spun around them in a blur of light and color. He was no dancing boy, but a man of about 40, his face starkly made up, his blue dress covered with tiny bells and sequins.įor a moment the baffled partygoers only stared. At around midnight the host threw back a curtain and a dancer leapt through the doorway.
Jokes went around about the reception a delicate youth like the Chinoise could look forward to in a Kabul jail.īut a last-minute substitute was found. Then someone's phone rang: The boy had been arrested by Afghan police while dancing at a wedding. He was the jealously guarded "property" of a wealthy Kabul businessman who had promised to bring him around later in the evening.
Many had seen him dance at other parties. The 16-year-old Hazara youth was known as "the Chinoise" for his striking oriental features. Some were drinking while others were smoking hashish in open windows, looking down into the street of the middle-class Kabul district of Karte-Char as they anticipated the boy's arrival. The 20-odd men who had come to the party were expecting a dancing boy, or bacha bereesh.
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