She would return several times over the years. “Most of these (visits)… were for assignments to work with Afghan media professional,” she writes in the book under review. Over the course of these visits — some of which lasted only weeks while others ran into months — Ms Khan discovered, what she calls, “the shadow city”. She was told not to walk — the streets of Kabul were not safe, more so for a foreigner, especially for a woman. But, she “found that walking offered a way to exhume history — a kind of bipedal archaeology — as well as an excavation of the present”. The results of her wanderings is this book.
Ms Khan — a close friend with whom I have walked in Berlin, Hamburg and Delhi — does not walk in a straight line. The structure of the book somewhat replicates her style of walking. There is hardly any chronology; there are few dates by which you can map her stay in the Afghan capital. Yes, she gives you a description of her first arrival in Kabul: “When I first saw the city, it was in the throes of another transformation. The population had almost doubled to around 3 million, drawn by the promise of peace and economic opportunities.” But there are other “bridges” — to use her own term — through which she keeps arriving in Kabul in the course of the narrative.
Some of these are historic: Ms Khan claims descent from Pathans, though it is unclear whether they were from modern Afghanistan or Pashtun-dominated areas in Pakistan. Her Kabuli friends, however, seemed hardly bothered by this colonial-era distinction: “We piss on the Durand Line, sister,” they tell her. Another bridge is her Baba, her grandfather, who does not accompany her to Kabul, but guides her in spirit with his encyclopaedic knowledge of Persian and Urdu literature. Other bridges are constructed by friendships she strikes up with her colleagues, neighbours, ex-jihadis, filmmakers, librarians, all of whom are like horcruxes, repositories of some fragment of Kabul’s soul.
As a bibliophile, I found the chapter on Kabul’s books, “Written in the City”, the most appealing. “Reading was how I learned to inhabit Kabul, a large part of how I made myself at home there,” Ms Khan writes, adding, “I began to read Kabul like a story, cast in a script that is embossed on its alleys and stones.” As she soon realised, there were at least two Kabuls even in written accounts about the city — one in western texts with which she was more familiar and the other in Persian and other books, to which her Baba introduces her. There was yet another layer, an oral one: “while most Afghans cannot read or write, they are steeped in an oral tradition of storytelling”.
In this chapter, the reader also meets Haideri Wojodi, one of the oldest employers of Kabul’s heavily guarded public library. Reading Ms Khan’s description of him, I thought of Mr Wojodi as a Borges of the Afghan capital: “He seemed like a deceptively frail guardian of Kabul’s literary legacy, bound to it with a deep belief: That words are important through darkest times.” When Ms Khan asks him if people visited the library even during Taliban times, he replies: “Yes, people read even then, child.” The description is at once poignant and heart-breaking.
The book is cyclical — the last chapter of the book is called “Returns”, like the first one. “The legend of Kabul begins with a bridge, a road appearing on water,” she writes. “The same bridge is the path to departing from the island. Returning to Kabul and leaving it are not endings but states of movement, of travel.” Ms Khan’s travels in the Afghan capital ended in 2013; since then she has continued to meet expatriate or refugee Afghans all over the world. Memories and old friends are now her bridges to Kabul.
The reviewer's novel, Ritual, will be out in February
 "Shadow City")
