Iraqi Karaoke

June 4, 2009

At around half-past ten in the evening, B, T, and I were heading down to the big gym to shoot some hoops. After an attempt at breaking in- a very valiant attempt, I might add, in which I rolled on my side through a narrow window, wandered through the boys' locker room, and out into the dark corridor, only to find that the door to the basketball gym was locked without window-access- I climbed back out and stood around with the others, waiting for someone to come down with the keys. That's when we heard the music that altered the course of our evening. B, not feeling so spontaneous stayed behind to shoot hoops while T and I followed the music down the hill, past the un-manned security gate, across the highway, and into the gravel front lot of the giant glass-tiered house.

“Okay, so how are we going to do this?” T asked.

“Easy: just walk by and stare until they stare back. Then smile and wave to break the ice, then they'll smile and wave, and badda-bing! We're in.”

And that's pretty much exactly how it happened.

They ushered us into the garden to a table in the back. It was like stepping into one of the 1001 Tales from the Arabian Nights. At a long banquet table facing the stage sat the other guests- about a dozen middle-aged fat, bald, Kurdish men in button-down shirts wrapped tightly around their substantial bellies. On the stage stood a lone man singing a lively Kurdish tune with only a keyboardist as accompaniment. The men listened and clapped and cheered and sometimes stood up to dance. Plates of salad and hummus and bottles of imported beers lay on the table, half-eaten, half-drunk. Waiters went around serving plates piled high with chicken tikkas, lamb kebabs, liver even, all covered with giant pieces of flatbread. I sat back with my own beer, watching the moths fluttering lightly around the audaciously-colored lamps, and listening to the music. It was the song that never ended, words with no rhyme nor reason sung to the same single-bar melody for nearly an hour straight. More like a chanted story than a song; an epic poem, a Kurdish Iliad.

“What do you think he's singing about?” I asked T. One of the guests turned around and started talking to us with broken English.

“Turkey, Iraq, oil!”

“Oh my God, T, I think he's singing about the oil pipeline going through Turkey!”

“Hahaha! He's singing about current events! That's brilliant!”

Okay, so he wasn't reciting Homer. He was Yunis, the Turkmen singer singing the daily news with a voice that seemed to echo off the rims of the Earth- or at least off the mountain ridges of Kurdistan. In this area surrounded by endless fields and rolling mountains, he would suffer no complaints from neighbors about excessive noise, no violation of some silly civil law against disturbance of the peace. Kurdish Ross sat banging away at the keyboard, and neither relented with their music until the electricity shut off suddenly. Lights extinguished, stars brightened, and the singer finally put his mike down to take a swig of water and wipe off his sweat. When the lights came back on, suddenly the men were urging us to sing a number of our own.

“They want me to sing a Korean song, T.”

His eyes got big. “Oh man, that would be totally...”

“But I don't even know any Korean songs!...Oh wait, I do know one.”

“Let's do it!”

So we climbed onto the stage and sang the only Korean song I knew, an old folk song called “Ah-Ri-Rang” about some heartbroken dame who swears that if her lover tries to leave her, he'll develop a foot disease before he can walk even 10 meters (or some distance unit). It was only thanks to the gang of chanters at Rawanduz gorge that I knew the words to this song, and here I was once again singing the song for a bunch of Kurds. Only this time, I was standing on a stage with a mike and a tall, blond Brit next to me singing with whatever Korean vocabulary he'd been able to pick up during his one year in Seoul last year. The phone cameras came out in a flash as we sang our hearts out.

“Ah-ri-rang, Gal-bi joh-wah-yo (I like short ribs)!” T belted out.

“T, I really hope this doesn't end up on youtube.”

“I bet it will!”

I grinned and kept on singing till the end. Cheers and claps met us on the way off the stage. A man named Mokhtar took over the mike and sang “I love you! I love you!” effusively, pointing at T and me. We danced with linked arms and smoked orange-mint flavored shisha and watched intrigued as the men stumbled forward one-by-one to the stage, throwing red 25,000 dinar bills at the Turkmen singer who had regained control of the mike. The cheap ones picked up and re-threw the bills that had fallen on the grass.

Later, sometime way past midnight, as we made our way across the empty highway and back to the deserted school grounds, we could still hear the singing loud and clear through its monster speakers like an alternative call-to-prayer. I wondered what the Muslims were thinking when they heard Mokhtar singing “I love youuuuu, I love youuuuuu!” Elated by our latest adventure, we doubled over with laughter as we climbed the hill leading to the apartment, and thanked our lucky stars that we had decided to ditch the hoops and follow the music instead. It's a decent piece of advice: Follow the music, you never know where it may lead. Unless it leads to the back of a truck. Then avoid the music at all costs, and whatever you do, do not accept the candy!