The Taliban Shuffle_ Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan - Kim Barker [88]
“Who is the person who should stay with us?” the host asked the audience, who booed Lima. Some of the three hundred or so audience members felt that Lima had made it this far in the competition not because of her talent but because of a massive Pashtun voting bloc. And they were upset for another reason.
“Why are they booing her?” I asked Farouq.
“She’s a woman,” he whispered. “They aren’t used to it.”
I felt bad for her. Lima was kept home during the Taliban years, and although she was eighteen, she was only in the eighth grade. She could speak little Dari, the main language in Afghanistan. When Lima was in Kandahar, she wore a blue burqa whenever she left the house. But onstage she wore blue glitter in her hair, a matching headscarf, a long electric-blue tunic with gold-sequin flowers, matching pants, fake eyelashes, and the makeup of a televangelist’s wife. She gripped her elbows in front of her chest like a life preserver and stared straight ahead, looking past the boos of the audience.
The host paused, dramatically delaying the judges’ decision. “I can tell you this time, something strange has happened.”
Something strange had indeed happened—the most popular singer had been knocked off. And Lima had made it to the final round of three.
When Lima sang, I could see why some people questioned her ability. She seemed more like a karaoke performer, perhaps even a not-so-good karaoke performer. She danced almost as an afterthought, with the rhythm of Whitney Houston and the enthusiasm of lumber. Her voice was sometimes off-key. Yet she was also slightly flirty, a bit subversive. She sang one song with almost a sneer, changing the words of a traditional Pashto song from a male perspective to a female one. In Afghanistan, that passed for rebellion.
“If I blacken my eyes with eyeliner, it will kill you,” she sang, with a slight hip sway. “Especially if I wear these bangles from Kandahar.”
My story was scheduled for the front page the next Thursday, the same day that Lima happened to be voted off the show. But Dave’s ran first, days earlier, meaning that I had helped him scoop me. That was hardly the only problem. Unknown to anyone at the Tribune, a reporter at our sister newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, also owned by the Tribune Company, had written a story weeks earlier about Afghan Star that had not yet run in the newspaper. It was a very different story, and didn’t even mention Sahar, but it was about the same TV show. Then, in a decision that would haunt me for months, the Los Angeles Times decided to run its story about Afghan Star on the same day as mine.
Our newspaper company had just been bought by the eccentric billionaire Sam Zell, an alleged maverick who liked wearing jeans and swearing. The deal was complicated and somehow involved cashing in all the stock owned by employees, but since it had gone through in the weeks between the emergency and Bhutto’s death, I paid little attention. Zell, who resembled a cross between a Keebler elf and a garden gnome, was not a newspaperman. He was a compulsive bargain hunter, the self-proclaimed “grave dancer,” making billions largely by buying troubled companies, somehow fixing them, and then selling them. So far he had tried to ingratiate himself with employees by removing the barriers to porn on the Internet, under the theory, I guess, that newspapers shouldn’t have any censorship and because everyone loves porn, even at work. After appearing at a Los Angeles Times plant in Orange County in February, he was quoted on his philosophy: “Everyone likes pussy. It’s un-American not to like pussy.”
In theory, he should have loved my story about Afghan Star. But soon after the competing stories appeared on March 13, they came to Zell’s attention. He allegedly got angry and used some four-letter words. I could understand his point—two of his newspapers had expended resources on the same feature story