Sunday Times 2
Dicing with death for a moustache
View(s):PESHAWAR, Pakistan / Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (AFP) -Pakistani businessman Malik Amir Mohammad Khan Afridi has been kidnapped, threatened with death, forcibly displaced and lives apart from his family: all because of his enormous moustache. Impeccably trimmed to 30 inches (76 centimetres), Afridi spends 30 minutes a day washing, combing, oiling and twirling his facial hair into two arches that reach to his forehead, defying gravity.
Pakistani businessman Malik Amir Mohammad Khan Afridi smiles during an interview with AFP in Peshawar (AFP)
“People give me a lot of respect. It’s my identity,” said the 48-year-old grandfather in the northwestern city of Peshawar, when asked why he was prepared to risk everything for his whiskers. “I feel happy. When it’s ordinary, no one gives me any attention. I got used to all the attention and I like it a lot,” he said.
For centuries, a luxuriant moustache has been a sign of virility and authority on the Indian sub-continent. But in Pakistan, Islamist militants try to enforce religious doctrine that a moustache must be trimmed, if not shaved off. So Afridi went from celebrity to prisoner of Lashkar-e-Islam, then a rival and now an ally of the Taliban in the tribal district of Khyber on the Afghan border.
First the group demanded protection money of $500 a month. When he refused, four gunmen turned up at his house in 2009.
He says they held him prisoner for a month in a cave and only released him when he agreed to cut it off. “I was scared they would kill me, so that’s why I sacrificed my moustache,” he said.
He fled to relative safety in Peshawar. But he grew his facial hair back and in 2012 the threats started again: telephone calls from people threatening to slit his throat. It costs $150 a month to maintain — more than a Pakistani teacher can earn — although he gets a moustache bursary of $50 from the home district in the lawless tribal belt he was forced to flee.
The Khyber administration pays anything from $10 to $60 a month to men with particularly eye-catching moustaches as a symbolic gesture of appreciation for the bravery and virility traditionally associated with such facial hair. Afridi has a hair dryer, bars of soap, shampoo, an alleged German oil from Dubai whose label he has ripped off so no one knows its alchemy, a mirror and an old bottle of homemade coconut oil.
Then there are towels and a hair brush. He massages the secret oil into his whiskers, twiddles and twirls them in front of the mirror and dries them to stand on end, before striding around a shopping mall, quickly attracting a crowd.
Richard McCallum, the author of “Hair India – A Guide to the Bizarre Beards and Magnificent Moustaches of Hindustan,” says “when you get away from metro areas, India is still a patriarchal place. Men are men and the men like to show off and preen.”But Afridi’s wife and 10 children are less keen.
“Sometimes my family tell me ‘cut it, it would be better if you lived with us.’ I can leave my family, I can leave Pakistan, but I can never cut my moustache again,” he said. “I don’t like smoking. I’m not fond of snuff, or drinking. This is the only choice in my life. I’d even sacrifice food, but not the moustache. It’s my life.
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