A thousand tragedies per square mile...

What do war and conflict do to our collective memory of a city? This is the primary concern and quest of Taran N Khan’s Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul. War is central to Khan’s account of the city. Shadow City is an exploration of Kabul and its hidden stories, based on the writer’s visits to the city between 2006 and 2013. Khan comes from a family that has Pashtun origins. Her grandfather, whom she fondly writes about in the book, has never been to Kabul but has known Kabul through poems and stories all his life. Blending this personal history with reportage, Khan paints a unique portrait of the city for us: its history, conflicts, bookstores, libraries, poets, cinema halls, and even its graveyards. 

It is no secret that Kabul is moulded by its turbulent history, but what sets Shadow City apart is the author’s determination to not present a singular, gory narrative. She reminds us that this is also the city where you would run into Woojodi — an old, frail poet and librarian who will talk to anyone for hours about the bookshelves of Kabul’s public library.  Khan traces the history of Kabul by walking, which she was cautioned from doing time and again. Even when not under Taliban rule, it was never easy for women to occupy public spaces the way men do; they always needed “a sanctioned reason to be on the streets”. As she walks, with no definitive purpose, the city reveals itself to be full of surprises. We read about its oldest library with endless stacks of Persian and Urdu poetry, the lives of the city’s booksellers who showed up to their stores to sell books through every conflict and war, college love affairs, heartbreak, and traditional Afghan weddings. Khan also writes about the graveyards littered across Kabul, the increasing number of suicide bombers, conflict becoming routine to the nation, lack of food and resources, the rising cases of mental illness and rampant opium addiction. 

Focused equally on anguish and beauty, Khan’s take on the city is refreshing. Her gaze is palpable, particularly in the chapter about cinema halls and films. In it, we discover Kabul’s love for Bollywood and the escapism, respite and fantasy it offers people. During the first Taliban rule, shopowners smuggled videos of famous Bollywood entertainers; children who couldn’t go to school spent entire days watching films. 

Khan often compares Kabul with Aligarh, the Indian city in which she grew up. On many of her walks, she is accompanied in spirit by her grandfather, his love and longing for the city. In the book’s final pages and after her last visit to Kabul in 2013, Khan muses on the idea of home and city as a place we carry within ourselves. Their physical, social and political realities change and transform, even in our absence — but the city we know remains within us. Two years after the Taliban took over Kabul again, Khan’s vivid account is more relevant than ever. It reminds us of the city’s complex history, its poetic beauty and its immense resilience. 

Early on in Shadow City, Khan reveals that the first story she ever read about Kabul was Tagore’s Kabuliwala — a popular Bengali short story that has been adapted to the screen in multiple languages, most famously in the 1961 Hindi film of the same name, starring Balraj Sahni. In Kabuliwala, Abdul Rehman Khan, a fruit seller from Kabul and Mini, a five-year-old girl living in Kolkata develop a heartwarming friendship. The young girl reminds Rehman of his own daughter back in Afghanistan as he tries to earn a living in India. Kabuliwala, which is not exactly set in Kabul, but in which Kabul is always present, echoes what Khan says towards the end of her own book: “...to leave Kabul was to take it with you”. 

Note: The title is borrowed from Khaled Hosseini’s novel ‘And The Mountains Echoed’.

The author spends her time reading, making friends with cats or loitering in a supermarket.

Piqued is a monthly column in which the staff of Champaca Bookstore bring us unheard voices and stories from their shelves.