Malik Amir Mohammad Khan Afridi (left) at a garment stores in Peshawar.
PESHAWAR: 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, Afridi spends 30 minutes a day washing, combing, oiling and twirling his facial hair into two arches that reach his forehead, defying gravity.
“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 attention. I got used to all the attention and I like it,” he said.
For centuries, a luxuriant moustache has been a sign of virility and authority in the sub-continent.
But in Pakistan, 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 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 safety in Peshawar. But he grew his whiskers and in 2012 the threats started again: Telephone calls from people threatening to slit his throat.
So he left the Taliban-hit northwest and moved to the city of Faisalabad, returning to Peshawar to visit his family once or twice a month.
“I’m scared,” he says. “I’m in Peshawar with my family but most of the time I stay at home and tell people I’m in Faisalabad if they want to meet me.”
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 eye-catching moustaches as a symbolic gesture of appreciation for the bravery and virility traditionally associated with whiskers.
Tribesmen and members of the security forces can qualify for the sum handed out at the discretion of the chief administrator.
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.
An opinion piece in Pakistan’s Daily Times newspaper last year drew parallels between power and a luxuriant moustache, although incumbent Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, the only man in the country to win a third term in office, is clean shaven.
It also had a word of advice for elected leaders, who three times in the past have been deposed by military coups led by the only three generals with moustaches.
“Never appoint a moustachioed chief of the army staff or a chief justice if you wish to govern in peace,” it warned.
Richard McCallum, the author of Hair India - A Guide to the Bizarre Beards and Magnificent Moustaches of Hindustan, says moustaches are also popular in the Indian military and police.
“Men with moustaches are considered to command more respect, more virile, more manly and a little bit older. 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.
His dream is to find political asylum or represent Pakistan at an international competition, if only he can get a visa. But he has a way to go.
An Indian holds the record for the world’s longest moustache at 4.29 metres. Ram Singh Chauhan has appeared in Bollywood films and had a cameo in the 1983 James Bond film Octopussy.
AFP
