Sometimes screaming was heard from behind its black-painted windows.
Everywhere, the Beard Patrol roamed the streets in Toyota trucks on the lookout for clean-shaven faces to bloody.
They shut down the cinemas too. Cinema Park. Ariana. Aryub. Projection rooms were ransacked and reels of films set to fire.
Laila remembered all the times she and Tariq had sat in those theaters and watched Hindi films,
all those melodramatic tales of lovers separated by some tragic turn of fate,
one adrift in some faraway land, the other forced into marriage,
the weeping, the singing in fields of marigolds, the longing for reunions.
She remembered how Tariq would laugh at her for crying at those films.
“I wonder what they've done to my father's cinema,” Mariam said to her one day.
If it's still there, that is. Or if he still owns it.”
Kharabat, Kabul's ancient music ghetto, was silenced.
Musicians were beaten and imprisoned, their rubabs, tambouras, and harmoniums trampled upon.
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