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Kandahar, Afghanistan – In a small shop on a busy street in central Kandahar, Haji Mohammad Sultan is busy with work.
It was an early morning in March, and the first customers of the day were pouring into the market outside. Inside the shop, the tiny bits of Sultan’s chisels on soft plaster inside palm-sized brass molds are barely audible. The sultan gently supported the mold with crumpled hands, chipping away what was inside: a new set of teeth.
After the cast was removed, Sultan stared down at his work, slowly flipping his dentures between his fingers. “They must be perfect,” he said with a smile.
The Sultan family’s denture business was started 80 years ago by his grandfather Haji Gul Muhammad in Afghanistan’s second-largest city. Sultan claims this is the first store of its kind in the country, and the only one that makes handmade dentures, although residents of Kandahar will tell you a lot, it’s hard to confirm this.
The Sultan’s father, Haji Nazar Muhammad, succeeded his father in the craft, which he learned from an early age. In 1998, American photographer Steve McCurry took a photo of Sudan’s father, who had photographed the people and landscapes of Afghanistan for 35 years, of the gray-bearded tooth maker sitting in a simple in the store. He was immersed in his delicate work, a row of teeth caressed in his hand. A black bicycle stands in front of a table full of dentures.
Sultan, who carried on the family legacy, took over the business after his father died in 2008 and made dentures on the wooden workbench pictured in McCurry’s photo.
He doesn’t know how widespread McCurry’s photo is outside Afghanistan, but he remembers the photographer who took it.
Wearing a white turban and long beard, the sultan bears a striking resemblance to his father. “Sometimes people ask me if I am Haji Nazar Mohammed because I look like my father,” the 65-year-old said with a smile. “When my eldest son is old, he will look like me.”