beauty

As we ate, our host, Khalife Amir, played a tamboura lute made from a small, yellow plastic oil bottle, a table leg, and two wooden awls.  He fingered only the lower string.  I had not heard music for a month.  My days had passed in silences with flurries of thought in a landscape that changed slowly.  Note by note the music brought a sense of time back to me.  Each pause was charged with anticipation of the next note and the slow revelation of a tune.  Khalife Amir measured silence, dividing each minute into a succession of clear notes from the string and then weaving time together again with his tenor voice.  The others, who had not been able to hear music performed in public during the years of the Taliban regime, were quiet.  I did not understand the words and did not need to.  The sadness was clear in the tune and the singer's tone and in the expression of the listeners, as was the beauty shared between us.


--Rory Stewart, from The Places in Between