On an early morning car ride from Tashkent to Samarkand after a performance in 1983, the Uzbek pop singer Nasiba Abdullaeva tuned in to an Afghan radio station by accident and found herself entranced by a song that was playing.
“From its first notes, the song fascinated me, and I fell in love with it,” Abdullaeva recalled. She asked the driver to pull over so she could quickly memorise the lines. “I didn’t have a pen and paper, so I just asked everyone to be silent.”
