Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul

In the opening page of your book, you describe how you were warned off walking in Kabul upon arrival. Why is walking felt to be a particularly risky pastime in the city? And how accurate is this assumption?

Taran Khan: In 2006, when I first arrived, the capital was considered relatively safe, at least compared to other parts of the country. Even then, I was told not to walk, not because I was a woman, but because I had come to Kabul to work from abroad. It’s interesting to see how over the years this was the broad response to the increasing insecurity in the capital, by the international community as well as the Afghan government. They essentially moved off the streets, behind concrete barriers, into armoured cars and compounds. But of course there were also thousands of Kabulis out on the streets every day.

For me, as a woman from India, being told not to walk so soon after arriving in Kabul was interesting. Because I already had this complicated relationship with walking and with being told not to walk. In my experience, most journeys began with some kind of prohibition, or a warning-off from certain terrain. So this was one more way in which this new city seemed familiar to me.

Afghanistan has a number of (Anglophone) literary associations with writers-on-foot. There’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, for one, and Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between. How did being female, Muslim, and part-Pashtun influence your interactions with Afghans – what insight did this give you, that other writers missed?

This Anglophone tradition was one I was familiar with and had read. But I was also coming to Kabul from Aligarh, so of course I connected with the city differently, and could draw on more diverse threads as well. This included literary works, including those my grandfather foregrounded for me – like how Kabul appears in the epic Persian poem ‘Shahnama’, that is well known across the region from India to Iran and Central Asia. It also included my family’s conception of Afghanistan as a place that somehow felt known, and Bollywood’s representation of Pashtuns (or Pathans as we called them), as well as Rabindranath Tagore’s classic short story ‘Kabuliwala’. All of this made a difference to how the city appeared to me, and the conversations I had, the kind of small connections and everyday gestures that stayed with me. At the heart of this, as I write in the book, is the region’s shared culture, a continuum that Baba, my grandfather, was able to perceive quite naturally. Often Kabulis of an older generation would tell me this, too – they would say things like, ‘You know, India and Afghanistan have a very similar culture’. It seemed like it was important for them to share this thought with me.

That said, I was also drawn to work like Svetlana Alexievich’s accounts from the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and the 1930s-era travelogues of Swiss writers Ella Maillart and Annemarie Schwarzenbach, as well as the work of historian Nancy Dupree. So it wasn’t necessarily things to do with my heritage alone that guided the routes of this book, or my interactions with Afghans.

Early in the book, you write of your grandfather’s passion for Afghanistan and of Kabul: “Baba inhabited Kabul more fully than I could hope to, though he had never been there.” I find it interesting how you afford these two kinds of knowledge – transmitted knowledge through book-learning and culture, and physical knowledge, gained through personal experience – equal weight. Do you still feel this to be true? And how has learning more about the history and heritage of the “amnesiac city”, as you describe it, changed your relationship to it?

I think the reason has to do with how I approached books, as a way of exploration and travel in the widest sense of the word. Growing up in Aligarh, I didn’t get to go out much. Reading was how I inhabited the world, explored places and ideas, and wandered freely. This was also a time when travel was not so common for Indian families like mine, during the early 1990’s, when the country was on the cusp of liberalization. Certainly travel for leisure was something of a luxury. In this way, Baba’s experience was similar to mine. He also inhabited places by reading about them. Like he told me, “Some cities I have never visited, but I know well.”

In Kabul, I found I could explore the city in a similar way – and walk through all these different paths. This was exploration of a kind I was very accustomed to. Besides reading, I could wander into poetry and memory, myth and fables. To me, these were routes that led to understanding and learning. They shifted the way the city appeared to me. For instance, reading about the love story of Rudaba, a princess of Kabul, in the Shahnama, was a way of revealing the capital as a setting for romance. It was also a way of locating the city as part of the literary map of the region. I also realized that most simple narratives around the city could be excavated to reveal more complicated truths. When I visited the Kabul Public Library, for instance, I was surprised to learn that the bookshelves had been repaired and painted during the Taliban years. “People read even then, child,” the librarian remarked gently.

Over the years, as you returned to Kabul, you found the geography of the city – and your routes through it – changing due to the rising security threat: “Roads were blocked off. Sometimes they simply vanished.” You pass through security checkpoints. How did risk shape your experiences in the city?

This is an interesting question because I think in places like Kabul, categories like risk and security tend to be quite fluid. They can often mean different things in the abstract and on the ground. I found that risk often appeared where you didn’t expect it to be. On the streets, but also in the stories told by the owner of a beauty salon, or in the working routine of a wedding videographer.

It also depended on your relationship with the city, as it does everywhere. For instance, I found it more unnerving to be inside a compound surrounded by guards and high walls, than out in the anonymous flow of traffic. I learnt quite early in my time that things can change very fast, and depended on the people around me for advice and guidance.

It was also interesting to find ways around this shifting terrain, especially as the city grew. It became bigger, in terms of its geographical spread and population, even as it seemed to shrink, with streets being barricaded off, or hemmed in by large walls. This meant that sometimes following a different route, or exploring something that seemed irrelevant or invisible to others, turned out to be a rewarding journey.

I think one of the reasons your book is so enthralling, so captivatingly unusual, is the glimpse it offers into aspects of Afghani culture so distant from the war-torn, conservative image we see in the newspapers. You have a section on the ‘wedding quarter’ of Kabul, lit up like Las Vegas and where women wear fishtail gowns and backless dresses, albeit strictly among family. As you just alluded to, a wedding videographer tells you his is “a very dangerous job” – should his footage of women dancing without inhibition leak, it becomes a question of honour. Do you miss the “moral complexity” of daily life in Kabul? Do you carry any of it with you?

I think such complexity exists everywhere, and I was able to see it in Kabul quite easily because it was so familiar to me from having grown up in Aligarh, and having negotiated the tension between public appearances and private desires and actions. Like when a friend lit a cigarette outside a theatre in Kabul – and within minutes got a call from his father in Switzerland, asking him why he was smoking. I could empathize with his feeling of being within the range of family networks, even when he was in a supposedly anonymous space. It was like being out on a street in Aligarh – under constant scrutiny.

I do feel this is something common to human behaviour, though, so it’s something that exists in Kabul or Berlin or Mumbai. It just depends on our way of seeing the city.

What books on Kabul would you most recommend to an outsider trying to get a sense of the city?

The Baburnama, the autobiography of the emperor Babur. A classic of world literature, the author’s curiosity and candour as well as his direct prose style makes this a timeless read. Babur conquered Kabul when he was 21, and came to hold the city in deep affection. His memoir documents the varieties of tulips growing in its environs, records inebriated parties with his friends and details the gardens he laid out with great care. Babur died in Agra and his remains were moved to Kabul a few years later. His grave is a simple monument open to the sky, surrounded by a garden that was restored in 2007, partly using the Baburnama as a guide.

In a Land Far from Home: A Bengali in Afghanistan is the memoir of Syed Mujtaba Ali (translated by Nazes Afroz), who travelled from what was then Calcutta to Kabul in 1927 to teach at a school. Ali describes the city and its inhabitants with affection, insight and humour, capturing the beauty of shifting seasons as well as the idiosyncrasies of his colleagues. The book is also a portrait of a crucial era in Afghan history, when Amir Amanullah was implementing his modernizing measures. Ali was caught in the tumult of the revolt against the Amir, and was eventually evacuated back to India in 1929.

An Historical Guide to Kabul, by Nancy Hatch Dupree. The renowned historian and authority on Afghanistan wrote this volume that was first published in the 1960s as a guide for tourists. Accessible and charming, it reveals the author’s deep knowledge and affection for Kabul. Reading her tours through the city’s streets, shrines and bazaars is like wandering into a postcard-perfect memory of Kabul’s years before war.

Kabul: A History 1773-1948, by May Schinasi, translated by R. D. McChesney. This academic work is a meticulous immersion into the city’s historical shaping and shifts. Essential reading to understand how the past inflects the present, even if it remains obscured.

Real Men Keep their Word: Tales from Kabul, Afghanistan translated by Arley Loewen, is a collection of short stories by the Afghan writer Akram Osman. Set mostly in the tightly packed alleys of Kabul’s old city during the 1950s, they bustle with colourful characters, customs and emotions. There are pahlawans (wrestlers) and lovers, street hawkers, kite flyers and courtiers – intertwined to create a window into Kabul’s particular urban culture.

Taran Khan