On Independence Day, as I sat at my desk in Delhi, preparing to write this column, darkness was falling upon the city of Kabul. The flight of the elected leadership made it a bloodless coup that brought the Taliban back to power after two decades.
As I was staring at the blank screen in front of me, women’s faces on the walls of boutiques and beauty salons in Kabul were being painted over. Girls who didn’t own burqas were trying to get their hands on one. Thousands of men, women and children were holed up in the airport, or rushing towards it, hoping for a way out. A few young men, having embraced the new normal, were busy taking selfies with the Taliban, perched on their fancy rides, far upgraded from the last time. Perhaps the bigwigs in the US State Department should have watched the last season of the spy series Homeland. Its writers seem to have predicted things more accurately than all the pundits put together.
For those of us who were around 20 years ago, the American rhetoric that underpinned “the war on terror” is still fresh in our minds—and so the staggering volte farce is rich in irony. Then First Lady, Laura Bush, in the now-famous radio speech of November 18, 2001, drew attention to the Taliban’s “brutal oppression of women” and asserted that the war on terror was ultimately “a fight for the rights and dignity of women”—not only a just but a feminist war. While many feminists of colour did not appreciate the colonialist tone of this messianic sentiment and experts from the global south did not miss the scent of political opportunism behind it, mainstream media truly championed this narrative.
In 2003, Afghan-American internist Khaled Hosseini’s debut novel The Kite Runner became a global best-seller, followed by the equally successful second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns. Publishers were scouting around for all kinds of material on Afghanistan, and the early years of the renewed Western interest in the region produced a large crop of books on diverse topics: history, geopolitics, intimate reportage, travel, and, of course, women-centric novels tinged with the moral righteousness of the democratic West.
When it came to Afghanistan in literature, put off by the West’s spin, I preferred to turn to Bengali. While Rabindranath Tagore’s short story ‘Kabuliwala’ is of course widely known, my father had drawn my attention to the remarkable travelogue Deshe Bideshe (In a Land far From Home) by Syed Mujtaba Ali, a forgotten classic, which tells a rambunctious and often humorous story of his travels through the country. More recently, Sushmita Banerjee’s memoir Kabuliwalar Bangali Bou (The Kabuliwala’s Bengali Wife) enjoyed great popularity, as it documented her life in and eventual escape from Afghanistan.
Today however, the book I turn to, as Afghanistan dominated the news cycle, is the extraordinarily nuanced Shadow City: a Woman Walks Kabul, by journalist Taran N Khan, who had lived in Kabul for long stints between 2006 and 2013. Published in 2019, the book frames the city through Khan’s walks, which turn out to be a wonderful “way to exhume history—a kind of bipedal archaeology—as well as an excavation of the present”. This made deeper sense because “in the bluster and immensity of war—the one that began in 2001 and the ones before it,” the city of Kabul had fallen prey to a certain kind of amnesia.
“Exploring Kabul,” Khan writes, “required the same principles that help in the reading of mystical Persian poetry, in the relationship between the zahir, or the overt, and the batin, the hidden or implied. This works on the tacit understanding that what is being said is an allegory for what is meant or intended. To talk of the moon, for instance, is to talk of the beloved... to talk of walls is to speak of exile.”
And to return to the visual of men falling from 3,000 feet, from the wings of aeroplanes they strapped themselves to, afraid of what awaited them in their own country, is to speak of the monumental failure of human beings to escape the circularity of our own failed narratives. Apparently nothing changes. And we don’t have a clue.
Devapriya Roy
roydevapriya@gmail.com
Author and teacher; her latest book is Friends from College