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Shadow City: A woman walks alone in Kabul

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Sayantan Ghosh
Sayantan GhoshSep 02, 2022 | 14:53

Shadow City: A woman walks alone in Kabul

Early on during her visit to Kabul where the author Taran N Khan took up the task of training Afghan journalists, she is advised never to walk in the city. This is a book that begins with her defiance.

It’s a unique travelogue of a woman wandering the unknown streets of one of the most turbulent places in the world – wayfaring, beating the odds, set in an odd cusp of geopolitical history when Kabul was in a transformative post-fundamentalist phase. The Taliban took control of Afghanistan once again in 2021 after waging an insurgency and forcing the US military to withdraw from the country as the world watched in horror. But Shadow City – originally written between 2006 and 2014 – is naturally unaware of that truth.

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“Some cities I have never visited, but I know well.” The writer’s father, omnipresent in the background throughout, told her once. That’s the kind of transportive power Shadow City holds in the folds of its pages too. I was in my reading room on a cloudy day in New Delhi with it, and at once in Kabul following the trails of Khan – the itinerant chronicler of this odyssey.

Another overarching theme is the idea of a reading life – exploring reading spaces in Kabul’s nooks and crannies, meeting booksellers and library directors, including a charming chance meeting with the oldest living employee of a public library who moonlights as a Sufi poet – connecting the dots back to Khan’s teenage years in Aligarh in India, where she grew up in a “conservatively liberal Muslim family”, a time during which she found refuge in the company of the books she discovered in the musty cupboards of their old bungalow.

As Khan navigates this landscape, from bookshops to marketplaces, cinemas, and graveyards, we get a glimpse of Kabul that does not limit itself to foreign money, aid workers, suicide bombings, or the civil war that outsiders have grown to associate the country with. Instead, we get a rare entry into the private and intimate lives of the people who populate Kabul, and never forget to celebrate the mundane beauties of a war-torn home, constantly learning to teeter between preserving history and adapting to inevitable vicissitudes.

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Last updated: September 02, 2022 | 14:53
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