On 24 February, at about four in the morning, the Ukrainian actor and pop star Kamaliya Zahoor didn’t know if she was dreaming, or if the windows of her bedroom really were rattling.
She had been woken by an explosion. Another followed. The walls of her Kyiv mansion began to shake. Then the phone calls started.
Her friends were telling her the city was under attack. She hadn’t thought it was possible. It was supposed to be a bluff. Her husband had been right to play it safe. He’d flown away with their eight-year-old twins a couple of days earlier, just in case all their friends had been wrong to laugh at the idea of a Russian invasion.
He had felt a bit silly doing it, as if people might think him a coward, someone prone to overreaction, but they had a house in London, and children to protect. As she took the first of many video calls that morning and watched live as missiles rained down on Ukraine – missiles she could hear for herself as she fled to the basement – Kamaliya had no idea what to do.
‘So do you ever worry you’ll run out of chairs?’ I ask Kamaliya’s husband, Mohammad, the gently spoken British-Pakistani steel billionaire everyone just calls Zahoor. ‘Do you ever worry there’ll suddenly be nowhere to sit?’
‘No?’ he says, confused. ‘No, no.’
Five months on, we’re standing in one of the living rooms of the Zahoors’ palatial house in Hampstead, north London, absolutely surrounded by chairs. There are chairs everywhere. Golden chairs with leopards on. Big round velvet chairs. Small sofas, long sofas. Chaises longues. So far I’ve also counted 56 cushions in this room alone.
There are other rooms with chairs, too. Anterooms, side rooms, vestibules, bathrooms, each with very many cushions of their own. The dining room with 16 chairs. The downstairs toilet with just the two, though it’s rare you’d invite more than two guests into a downstairs toilet.
You get the feeling there are so many rooms here that at some point you’d have to give up coming up with ideas to fill them. ‘Just put some chairs in it,’ would become all you could suggest. Zahoor suddenly worries that this all looks a bit extravagant to outside eyes. He’s owned the house since 1996, he says, and he can’t change it now.
‘When you were in Kyiv with us,’ he says, because I stayed with the couple in Kyiv some years ago, the first time I interviewed them, ‘you saw it was all about luxury.’
It was. At the time Zahoor and Kamaliya were engaged in what they called Project Kamaliya – a campaign to ‘send Lady Gaga on to her pension’ and raise Kamaliya’s profile as a singer to global levels, using her operatic range and his chequebook to find the best songwriters, music producers and video directors they could. She found some chart success in Europe, with a Eurovision-ready sound, and supported Steps on their 2012 UK tour, apart from when she was in South Africa to headline Mr Gay World.
There were forays into television – a pilot for her own show on Ukrainian TV (Coffee with Kamaliya) plus starring roles for both of them on the Fox reality show Meet the Russians. Film work came, too, as Zahoor decided to move into film financing, finding projects that could do with money but which also might benefit from giving a part to – wink, wink – a certain singer he knew quite well.
There were cartoonish tales of £60,000 shopping sprees and of taking baths in nothing but Champagne, all designed to create a media-friendly image of unimaginable, enviable wealth. At their Kyiv home, which so far in this conflict still stands tall, I remember the expensive golden wallpapers. The marble. The massive murals of the Zahoors. It was a life of Bentleys and horses, of his and hers private jets and yachts ferrying bodyguards, nannies and make-up artists. And there were the adored pets. The cat with the entirely shaved body. The dog wearing earrings. The inexplicable falcon in the hallway.
But I also remember the love they clearly had for each other. Him, for the woman who as a young girl witnessed for herself the dark cloud of Chernobyl, who had been through lymph-node cancer quite possibly as a result, who had all this talent. Her, for the self-made man from Pakistan. Both, for the children they’d tried for so many years to conceive and worried they’d never have. And everybody, for the weird dog in earrings.
The week after we meet, the businessman and Mrs World 2008 will celebrate their 19th wedding anniversary. And Zahoor looks at Kamaliya slightly differently these days. With a subtly different sort of pride.
‘Are your animals here?’ I ask. ‘The dogs?’
‘No,’ he says, quickly. ‘They are not here.’
There’s only Millie, a furious-looking cat, who eyes me suspiciously and probably wonders why I’ve been here so long. Kamaliya’s make-up has taken a little longer than we’d anticipated today. It’s nearly 7pm and I’m assured that soon she will be ready for our 4pm interview.
‘Today it is not luxury that’s important,’ says Zahoor. ‘With eight million people out of their homes [in Ukraine], talking about luxury is too much. For us it’s no longer about luxury.’
It sounds odd, him saying this, as we stand in a house worth many millions. But there’s a reason.
Kamaliya did what she could in the basement of their house in Kyiv for days. She live-streamed, she made calls, she tried to tell her fans and family in Russia what was happening in Ukraine. They didn’t believe her. They said it was propaganda. Her own family in Moscow said soon she would be free of the Nazis on her streets, and that one day they would all live happily together.
As I sit with Zahoor in a side room, Kamaliya is in the kitchen. The nanny is out with the children but Kamaliya is desperate for some soup. The kitchen counter is full of snacks. Ukrainian sweets. A £1.99 pack of pastry puffs. A box of cake rusks. A jar of sugar-coated fennel seeds. Ukrainian cookbooks and HelloFresh ring binders. Potatoes for her soup.
‘As things got worse, as paratroopers came to Ukraine,’ Zahoor tells me quietly, ‘I told Kamaliya, you have to run. What are you doing in the basement that you can’t do here but better? We can help from here in London. But they will come, they will kill you, they will rape you. But she wanted to stay. She wanted to fight.’
After some days, with Russian jets roaring low over her roof, it was hearing her twins, Arabella and Mirabella, cry on the phone that changed her mind. She jumped into the car, a Ford Raptor, taking a friend with a newborn and four children under 10. They carried just two suitcases with very few valuables in case of looters.
The six-hour journey to the Polish border took four days. ‘The roads were choked,’ says Zahoor. ‘No petrol.’
‘And as we [lined up for] a bridge [in Vinnytsia],’ says Kamaliya, ‘I saw the rockets land. They destroyed the bridge. There were cars on the bridge.’ Kamaliya set about helping who she could. She started driving people to the borders.
‘She took kids, she took them to one border,’ says Zahoor. ‘She took some others to the Hungarian border. Then some young girls to the Romanian border.’
‘They were maybe 13 or 15 years old,’ says Kamaliya, sitting down. ‘We were in a [convoy], a lot of us, a lot of babies with mums.’
So I take it this is just part of his chequebook fueled attempt to make her famous?
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On 24 February, at about four in the morning, the Ukrainian actor and pop star Kamaliya Zahoor didn’t know if she was dreaming, or if the windows of her bedroom really were rattling.
She had been woken by an explosion. Another followed. The walls of her Kyiv mansion began to shake. Then the phone calls started.
Her friends were telling her the city was under attack. She hadn’t thought it was possible. It was supposed to be a bluff. Her husband had been right to play it safe. He’d flown away with their eight-year-old twins a couple of days earlier, just in case all their friends had been wrong to laugh at the idea of a Russian invasion.
He had felt a bit silly doing it, as if people might think him a coward, someone prone to overreaction, but they had a house in London, and children to protect. As she took the first of many video calls that morning and watched live as missiles rained down on Ukraine – missiles she could hear for herself as she fled to the basement – Kamaliya had no idea what to do.
‘So do you ever worry you’ll run out of chairs?’ I ask Kamaliya’s husband, Mohammad, the gently spoken British-Pakistani steel billionaire everyone just calls Zahoor. ‘Do you ever worry there’ll suddenly be nowhere to sit?’
‘No?’ he says, confused. ‘No, no.’
Five months on, we’re standing in one of the living rooms of the Zahoors’ palatial house in Hampstead, north London, absolutely surrounded by chairs. There are chairs everywhere. Golden chairs with leopards on. Big round velvet chairs. Small sofas, long sofas. Chaises longues. So far I’ve also counted 56 cushions in this room alone.
There are other rooms with chairs, too. Anterooms, side rooms, vestibules, bathrooms, each with very many cushions of their own. The dining room with 16 chairs. The downstairs toilet with just the two, though it’s rare you’d invite more than two guests into a downstairs toilet.
You get the feeling there are so many rooms here that at some point you’d have to give up coming up with ideas to fill them. ‘Just put some chairs in it,’ would become all you could suggest. Zahoor suddenly worries that this all looks a bit extravagant to outside eyes. He’s owned the house since 1996, he says, and he can’t change it now.
‘When you were in Kyiv with us,’ he says, because I stayed with the couple in Kyiv some years ago, the first time I interviewed them, ‘you saw it was all about luxury.’
It was. At the time Zahoor and Kamaliya were engaged in what they called Project Kamaliya – a campaign to ‘send Lady Gaga on to her pension’ and raise Kamaliya’s profile as a singer to global levels, using her operatic range and his chequebook to find the best songwriters, music producers and video directors they could. She found some chart success in Europe, with a Eurovision-ready sound, and supported Steps on their 2012 UK tour, apart from when she was in South Africa to headline Mr Gay World.
There were forays into television – a pilot for her own show on Ukrainian TV (Coffee with Kamaliya) plus starring roles for both of them on the Fox reality show Meet the Russians. Film work came, too, as Zahoor decided to move into film financing, finding projects that could do with money but which also might benefit from giving a part to – wink, wink – a certain singer he knew quite well.
There were cartoonish tales of £60,000 shopping sprees and of taking baths in nothing but Champagne, all designed to create a media-friendly image of unimaginable, enviable wealth. At their Kyiv home, which so far in this conflict still stands tall, I remember the expensive golden wallpapers. The marble. The massive murals of the Zahoors. It was a life of Bentleys and horses, of his and hers private jets and yachts ferrying bodyguards, nannies and make-up artists. And there were the adored pets. The cat with the entirely shaved body. The dog wearing earrings. The inexplicable falcon in the hallway.
But I also remember the love they clearly had for each other. Him, for the woman who as a young girl witnessed for herself the dark cloud of Chernobyl, who had been through lymph-node cancer quite possibly as a result, who had all this talent. Her, for the self-made man from Pakistan. Both, for the children they’d tried for so many years to conceive and worried they’d never have. And everybody, for the weird dog in earrings.
The week after we meet, the businessman and Mrs World 2008 will celebrate their 19th wedding anniversary. And Zahoor looks at Kamaliya slightly differently these days. With a subtly different sort of pride.
‘Are your animals here?’ I ask. ‘The dogs?’
‘No,’ he says, quickly. ‘They are not here.’
There’s only Millie, a furious-looking cat, who eyes me suspiciously and probably wonders why I’ve been here so long. Kamaliya’s make-up has taken a little longer than we’d anticipated today. It’s nearly 7pm and I’m assured that soon she will be ready for our 4pm interview.
‘Today it is not luxury that’s important,’ says Zahoor. ‘With eight million people out of their homes [in Ukraine], talking about luxury is too much. For us it’s no longer about luxury.’
It sounds odd, him saying this, as we stand in a house worth many millions. But there’s a reason.
Kamaliya did what she could in the basement of their house in Kyiv for days. She live-streamed, she made calls, she tried to tell her fans and family in Russia what was happening in Ukraine. They didn’t believe her. They said it was propaganda. Her own family in Moscow said soon she would be free of the Nazis on her streets, and that one day they would all live happily together.
As I sit with Zahoor in a side room, Kamaliya is in the kitchen. The nanny is out with the children but Kamaliya is desperate for some soup. The kitchen counter is full of snacks. Ukrainian sweets. A £1.99 pack of pastry puffs. A box of cake rusks. A jar of sugar-coated fennel seeds. Ukrainian cookbooks and HelloFresh ring binders. Potatoes for her soup.
‘As things got worse, as paratroopers came to Ukraine,’ Zahoor tells me quietly, ‘I told Kamaliya, you have to run. What are you doing in the basement that you can’t do here but better? We can help from here in London. But they will come, they will kill you, they will rape you. But she wanted to stay. She wanted to fight.’
After some days, with Russian jets roaring low over her roof, it was hearing her twins, Arabella and Mirabella, cry on the phone that changed her mind. She jumped into the car, a Ford Raptor, taking a friend with a newborn and four children under 10. They carried just two suitcases with very few valuables in case of looters.
The six-hour journey to the Polish border took four days. ‘The roads were choked,’ says Zahoor. ‘No petrol.’
‘And as we [lined up for] a bridge [in Vinnytsia],’ says Kamaliya, ‘I saw the rockets land. They destroyed the bridge. There were cars on the bridge.’ Kamaliya set about helping who she could. She started driving people to the borders.
‘She took kids, she took them to one border,’ says Zahoor. ‘She took some others to the Hungarian border. Then some young girls to the Romanian border.’
‘They were maybe 13 or 15 years old,’ says Kamaliya, sitting down. ‘We were in a [convoy], a lot of us, a lot of babies with mums.’
So I take it this is just part of his chequebook fueled attempt to make her famous?