Beard, beard

In Afghanistan, facial hair can be endless topic of conversation, much as the weather is in England. This is because facial hair is so common and so varied - but almost noone is entirely lacking. I amused myself in the run up to the parliamentary elections by scanning the posters portraying the candidates' faces, which by the final week plastered every wall, truck side, water tank and even tree trunk in the city centres, looking for the one with least facial hair.
Many had the full Taliban-style beard and moustache, neatly combed but otherwise unpruned, and glowered fiercely at the electorate from under their turbans.
Indeed, I began to think that affecting a smile for the camera must be perceived as a sign of unwonted frivolity and lack of dignitas on a par with being clean-shaven. It is difficult to take the clean-shaven seriously, as a rule – my husband shaves quite regularly, but he does have large sideburns.
There were those candidates whose facial hair was hennaed, or elaborately topiaried, whose beard covered only a central patch of chin, and even those audacious enough to shed the beard altogether – leaving only a large moustache. Those latter ones had usually also discarded Afghan dress in favour of a Western suit.
There were, of course, women candidates running for election too, but generally speaking their posters were of rather inferior quality – printed in black and white, in a very grainy texture that would have hidden any downy upper lips, and may also have rendered them hard to recognize on voting day.
[As so many of the electorate is illiterate, each candidate’s name on the ballot sheet is accompanied by a very small mug shoot]. The female candidates also looked almost unremittingly grim.
A luminous exception to this rule was provided by the posters of a young woman photographed tilting her head to one side and smiling warmly, against a pale yellow background, in a light coloured headscarf tied loosely enough to avoid the danger of headaches. I hope she gets through – and I know of at least one man who voted for her, the chap who sold me a SIM card the other day.
He also asked me whether I had been to school. I felt rather insulted by this somehow, and haughtily replied that I had a degree, too – then of course felt extremely sheepish when he explained placidly that he himself was undereducated, and picked up what he knew about mobile phones (most of it in English), after leaving school at 10. He had a moustache.
I have since been told that there is only one facial hair configuration that one must always beware of, unless it is on the faces of very old men – and that is the flowing beard with shaved upper lip. Such men are invariably narrow minded in the extreme, or so I am told.