Decades-old Kabul shop: passionate owner faces customer exodus

Written By: Zahra Rashidi

A relatively worn-out four-walled shop with small alcoves briefly describes a store in Kabul where its owner has worked for over thirty years. His business was thriving, especially when Kaka Nader formed a network of regular customers and worked passionately.

Nader, 70, has been making and selling silver jewellery since he was 17. He has worked in this small shop in Taimani, one of Kabul’s busy areas, since then; it is the only shop where, despite several decades, neither the shopkeeper nor the shop has changed.

For more than 32 years, Nader has been making and selling silver jewelry. From dawn to dusk, he polishes and adds lustre to rings, necklaces, earrings, and other ornaments.

Although he says, “Thoughts are not in place, and the mind becomes slower as it ages,” he estimates, “If I am not mistaken, I have been working at this location for 32 years.”

He recounts the days when, due to a network of regular customers, his shop was thriving, and his daughter and wife also worked outside the home. Now, his wife and daughter have been confined to home due to the policies of the Taliban administration, something that Kaka Nader constantly changes the course of the conversation to remind that the prohibition on girls’ education and the suspension of women’s work must be lifted.

Kaka Nader, in his message to the Taliban regime, says, “I ask the rulers of the country to lift the work restrictions on women and educational limitations on girls.”

He says that prices in the silver market fluctuate like other markets, but he himself used to consider a fixed price for the regular customers of the shop and was satisfied with this practice, but now the situation has changed, he no longer takes orders because most of his customers have left the country.

The walls of Kaka Nader’s shop, when it was thriving, were adorned with pictures of Ahmad Zahir, the country’s beloved singer, and also with pictures of Bollywood actors, but now the walls of the shop are empty. This jeweller emphasizes that “the Vice and Virtue police asked me to remove the pictures from the shop.”

A woman who did not want her name mentioned in the report brought a large amount of silver for polishing to Kaka Nader and said, “I have been Kaka Nader’s customer for about 11 years. Wherever there is a silver shop, Kaka Nader has very good and genuine silver.”

Kaka Nader, who now works alongside Samim, his young son, says that he has aged and that his son is the main owner of the shop.

Samim says, “I want to maintain the atmosphere of the shop even if my father cannot come to it, to keep it as Kaka Nader’s shop and preserve my father’s memories.”

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