Bearded folly
Aidan Hartley
In Nairobi I bumped into a friend who was home from running a safari camp for anti-terrorism troops in Kabul, which is where I was headed myself. He wore a mullah-style beard. 'Have you gone native or what, men?' I asked. 'Christ no, men,' he said. 'You'll need a beard in Afghanistan, eh? That way the snipers can't tell you're a mzungu from far off. And you'll need a flak jacket too, men.' Later the same day I read Robert Kaplan's brilliant book Soldiers of God, in which he describes how the Pathans regard males without decent beards as womanly — and possibly homosexual. This was three days before departure. What was I to do? I stopped shaving. but I knew it was too late.
Now, I come from a long line of British military men. Generation after generation, they had two things in common: they fought the Pathans and they managed to grow impressive amounts of facial hair. In many ways my ancestors' story is one of changing fashions in whiskers: midVictorian mutton chops gave way to bushy bugger grips and on to beautiful waxed moustaches and even ones that made my great-grandfathers look like wild Sikhs. Rudyard Kipling was a friend of my greatgreat-uncle and aunt and he based his 1899 Indian 'tale without a plot', The Stoll; of the Gadsbys, on their courtship. 'Kissing a man without whiskers,' the young woman of the play announces to her sister, 'is like eating an egg without salt.' My problem was that I'd never tried growing a beard or even a moustache of any kind.
I flew to London en route to Kabul. As I stared at my pathetic stubble in the aircraft lavatory mirror I saw that I was done for. My wife Claire works in the film business and she had a suggestion. 'Why not get a theatrical beard?' I thought this was a rather good plan, so we got on to a theatrical outfitter in Notting Hill. The people there said they could do me a full-on beard for between 120 and 150 quid, depending on whether I wanted to resemble Mullah Omar or go for the whole-hog Osama bin Laden look.
This wasn't a Father Christmas strap-on that you just hook on around your ears. It was a stick-on job and very authentic, Dressing up has always been half the reason why Englishmen of a certain persuasion travelled in Central Asia. Once in my shalwar-kameez I'd be just like a character out of the Great Game. The doubts set in when I considered what might happen if an Afghan pulled my beard by way of affectionate greeting, as I had heard they might probably do. Clearly, I would offend my hosts or invite derision. Like Scheherazade's tale of the famous fart, I would become the butt of jokes up the Khyber for decades to come. And there were other reasons that persuaded me against a false beard. What if I washed? What if the sleet and snow battered my jaws on the Shebar Pass, where Robert Byron once minced on about the watershed between the Oxus and the Indus? Imagine the shame as the glue came unstuck before my peers .. .
There must be vitamins that speed up hair growth. Maybe spinach. All I got was chicken on my flight, which stopped in Baku. If Western Christendom is Gillettesmooth and the Deobandists of Tora Bora are shaggy in the face, everything between from Bulgaria to Baghdad is clone-style 'tash. The Azeris of Baku have big black caterpillars on their lips that make them look like cottagers in the bushes of Holland Park. They wear Soviet-style uniforms, and apart from a bit of crude oil their national economy is devoted entirely to extracting bribes from hapless transit travellers like me. Baku, like Equatorial Guinea or Birmingham, is one of those stains on the earth that you know will for ever be beyond rescue.
After a dreadful ride on an Azerbaijan Airlines Tupolev that must have been old when the USSR invaded Afghanistan, we touched down in Kabul. In the airport terminal I came face-to-face with gangs of Americans and British security contractors, aid workers and hacks. Some wore flak jackets and toted guns, all the men had beards of one sort or another and many were in shalwar-kameez. The Western females affected Muslim dress, but they weren't fooling anybody, certainly not any long-distance potential snipers. They looked like a bunch of wazungu on holiday in Mombasa. Most of the Afghans I met for the next three weeks were cleanshaven, and lots of them wore polyester suits, not pyjamas. They laughed at my attempts to blend in with my scraggly goatee. On my last day in Kabul I shaved it all off in disgust.
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