The curse of number 39 and the steps Afghans take to avoid it | World news

Ordinarily the sight of a man having the numbers on his licence plate altered at a paint shop would would raise questions about whether a crime was being covered up. Was the man guilty of some hit and run attack? Perhaps he had stolen the valuable four wheel drive Toyota Prado – a government vehicle as denoted by its black plates.

In fact the man, who did not give his name, had simply got fed up with all the taunts from fellow road users amused by the fact that his licence plate began with the number 39. For reasons that remain hazy, the number has somehow become lodged in the Afghan popular imagination as a sign of pimping and prostitution.

This week the man finally had enough. Whilst waiting for his children to come out of their primary school he parked his car in broad daylight at a nearby paint shop and paid the resident calligrapher a couple of dollars to artfully turn the number nine into eight, in both the Persian and Arabic versions.

All around Kabul unfortunate owners of 39 number plates tell the same story of the abuse they face on the roads of one of the world's most socially conservative countries.

"I did not think it would matter when I got my car," said Zalmay Ahmadi, a 22-year-old business student. "But when I drive around all the other cars flash their lights, beep their horns and people point at me. All my classmates now call me Colonel 39."

Public aversion to the number is such that the city's traffic police department, normally a scene of frantic car owners wrestling with the multiple layers of bureaucracy responsible for issuing number plates, is virtually deserted.

The problem, workers at the department say, is that they are currently only issuing number 39 plates – and there are still another 260 plates bearing the dreaded 39 to allocate.

Those who cannot wait can pay a premium to get another number.

"The traffic commission workers are demanding bribes of $230 (£142) to issue a different number," said Zamin Ali, a 51-year-old who works as a driver. "It makes no sense because the number does not mean anything in sharia law, or in the hadith or mathematics. But if you try and sell a car with a 39 number plate you will have to discount it by $2,000."

It is not just car number plates. According to Mohammad Zahir, the head of Kabul's criminal investigations department, the unfortunate owners of flat 39 in one of the old Soviet-era housing blocks have been unable find anyone to take it off them.

"If anyone buys or rents that flat all the boys in the neighbourhood will taunt them," he said.

Although many people say they have no idea why the number is so reviled, it is possibly based on the apocryphal tale of a pimp who worked in the western city of Herat who had both a 39 number plate and lived in an apartment numbered 39.

The shunning of 39 comes weeks after horrified drivers frantically removed once coveted rainbow decorations on imported cars after discovering that they were gay pride symbols.