The teeth makers of Kandahar
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Kandahar, Afghanistan – In a small shop off a bustling street in the centre of Kandahar city, Haji Muhammad Sultan is busy at work.
It is an early morning in March and the first customers of the day are flooding into the bazaar outside. Inside the shop, the delicate chip of Sultan’s chisel against soft plaster inside a brass, palm-sized mould is barely audible. Sultan cradles the mould gently in his wrinkled hands, chipping away at what lies within: a new set of teeth.
Once the plaster has been removed, Sultan peers down at his work, turning the dentures over slowly between his fingers. “They must be perfect,” he says with a small smile.
Sultan’s family’s denture business was established 80 years ago by his grandfather, Haji Gul Muhammad, in Afghanistan’s second-largest city. Sultan claims it was the first of its kind in the country, the only shop making handmade dentures, something that is hard to verify although residents of Kandahar will tell you as much.
Sultan has continued the family legacy, taking over the business after his father died in 2008 and making dentures at the wooden workbench featured in McCurry’s photograph.
He knows little of how widely McCurry’s photo had been seen outside Afghanistan, but he remembers the photographer taking the picture.
With his white turban and long beard, Sultan bears a striking resemblance to his father. “Sometimes people ask me if I am Haji Nazar Muhammad because I look like my father,” the 65-year-old chuckles. “When my eldest son grows old, he will look just like me also.”
Teeth for war victims
Sultan started learning the art of handcrafting sets of teeth from his father when he was 10 years old. He would come into the shop every day and sit by his side, watching him work.
When Sultan was in his 40s, he left the family business to become a military doctor during the 20-year US-led occupation, making teeth for wounded Afghan soldiers caught up in the country’s decades of conflict.
Sultan pulls out a photograph of himself as a younger man, bending over a patient lying in a bed in Kabul and peering down at him with a doctor’s bag grasped in one hand.
“I was studying prosthetics at a medical institute in Kabul at the time when foreigners came and told me to join the military academy,” he says, gazing at the photograph.
He says he joined because he wanted to help injured Afghans.
“At the academy, I was trained by Americans, learning many surgical procedures,” Sultan says. “Then they [the Americans] told me that they wanted to take me to the airfield to work for them there at a military hospital, but I refused their offer.”
Sultan says he couldn’t bear to be apart from his family any longer, “so I came back to the family business”.
To this day, Sultan continues to run the business, although he is now joined by four of his seven sons. They say they would choose no other profession than that of their father, grandfather and great-grandfather.
“We finished our studies up to 12th grade and we could have chosen any profession we wanted but we selected this profession because not many people in Afghanistan can do this work,” 23-year-old Ahmed Sayed, Sultan’s eldest son, says proudly. “Just like our ancestors, we teach it to everyone in our family.”
“My sons will also continue this work,” says Sayed. “They will learn everything we learnt and in the same way we learnt it so that this special business never dies. I don’t want my great-grandfather’s name to get lost.”
He says his great-grandfather learned the skill of denture making while on a trip to India. There, he had to remove a troublesome tooth and so made a trip to the dentist. During his appointment, he asked how false teeth were made and the dentist showed him. The experience planted the seed of a business idea.
Sayed’s great-grandfather then brought what he had learned home to Kandahar. “At his first attempt he failed but on his second attempt he succeeded,” says Sayed with a grin. “That was the start of this business.”
Matching teeth to skin
Suspended from the ceiling at the back of the shop is the bicycle that appears in McCurry’s photograph of Sultan’s father. Over the years, people have tried to buy the bike that Sultan, as a younger man, and his father once used.
“I’ve had many offers for it,” says Sultan, smiling at the object. “But I just can’t bear to let it go; it reminds me of my father too much.”
The old shop front sign is still there, although it is – like other shops in Kandahar – now covered by the flag of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan of the country’s Taliban leaders who returned to power last August.
Sultan and his sons make full sets of teeth for people as well as attend to those who are missing a few teeth. “We do everything,” he says, laughing. “Whatever the customer needs.”
They used to have their books full, with four to five patients coming every week, but now they might get one every few weeks if they are lucky, though most, Sultan says, are not coming for a full set of dentures. Instead, these days amid an economic crisis and as living costs rise, most customers are only after a new tooth or two.
It is now afternoon, and Sultan sits in his chair. Stacks of boxes containing teeth of every shade, shape and size lie neatly in rows. Other replacements for lost or broken teeth are stored in plastic water bottles gathering dust.
Individual teeth made from acrylic or porcelain are imported from a variety of countries – China, France, Germany, India and Pakistan.
Sultan and his sons will choose from a vast selection of imported teeth according to which colour suits the client best, and fit them into the dentures they craft by hand, using the same techniques their forebears did. “We need lots of types of teeth because we match the colour of skin to the colour of the teeth,” says Sultan.
“It is like a puzzle. Every tooth must fit perfectly,” says Sultan of his craft.
But patients do not always behave perfectly, especially in the first stage when he uses putty to take an impression of the inside of the mouth.
“Sometimes when I am taking the size with my finger inside the patient’s mouth, he bites me,” laughs Sultan. He snaps a set of teeth together, in jest.
Behind him, Sayed, 17-year-old Ahmed Yasin and 16-year-old Ahmed Waris, Sultan’s three eldest sons, sit in the shop where they have worked since they were children. Sayed gets to work making a set of dentures for a new customer under the watchful gaze of his father.
The art of denture-making
The family uses techniques which have been passed down over the generations. Most of their tools – like their dentures – are made by hand.
A full set of dentures is made of two parts: the base, which is cast in pinkish acrylic to mimic the look of real gums, and the individual teeth.
After the impression is made, it is placed in a bronze mould called a dental flask, and filled with wet plaster to create a perfect copy of the inside of the patient’s mouth.
Sayed mixes a creamy white plaster in a small tub before carefully pouring the thick paste into a pair of flasks made by a local blacksmith. One side holds the top impression and the other the bottom.
Sayed then adds a pink waxy material to the plaster models. He fits carefully selected teeth into the material and places the model back into the flask. Plaster is then poured over the teeth. The wax is heated and melted off, and the teeth, now locked into the fresh plaster, are cleaned to ensure there is no residual wax.
Next, Sayed creates what will be the gums from acrylic resin. This is mixed by hand, poured into the cavity left behind by the melted wax and left to set.
As the new dentures set, Sultan gets to work on a set that he is finishing up for a customer.
Perfecting the teeth is a painstaking process, involving many small adjustments, and repeated fine-tuning.
He refines the shape of the teeth with a small dental drill, the only piece of equipment that is not handmade. It whirrs gently as Sultan moves it across the edges of a set of teeth, smoothing them to ensure they are tailored to the client’s mouth. The customer will then be called into the shop for any final adjustments.
‘We are all together’
On the other side of the wooden workbench, people hurry up and down the bustling street. A man selling giant mulberries on his cart pauses to swat at a passing child who reaches for a juicy temptation. Women in burqas drag young children behind them into the bazaar and disappear amid the crowds.
“Patients come to us because of the experience we have and that is what makes our work special,” says Sultan.
He says a full mouth of dentures costs the equivalent of $100 to $220, more than the machine-made variety found at dentists’ or the bazaar. The price depends on the weight and quality of the teeth and materials used to make the dentures, Sultan says. Due to the delicate nature of the task, he spends about a week on just one set of teeth.
“Machine-made teeth don’t last as long as ours. Only seven to nine years. Handmade teeth last 20 to 30 years and ours last 40 years,” he claims, smiling proudly. “The teeth made by my father would last for 45 years when the materials were high quality but they are weak now.”
They used to import materials from Karachi in Pakistan, but these days it is difficult to get materials into Afghanistan, Sultan says.
No one has come to the shop today and Sultan says business has dried up since the Taliban returned to power. “People have less money now,” he says.
“Business is weak today. We are facing an economic crisis and in the next 10 years, I fear our customers will be less and less. In this new revolution, the business has gone backwards. We used to own seven shops [in Kandahar and Kabul] but now we are all here in one,” says Sultan quietly. The family’s shops have shuttered in the past year.
Much has changed in the country, Sultan says, but he has seen regime changes and their economic fallout before. The most important thing for him is to keep his family close and continue their business.
“When there is work to do, we do it together, and with enough care,” he says. “At least we are all together.”
Soon, his deteriorating eyesight will not allow him to continue his work, he says. But he knows the tradition will survive, thanks to his descendants.
“When my father got old, I made teeth for him,” he says. “When I get old, my eldest, Ahmed Sayed, will make a set for me.”