I picked up Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul soon after the Taliban returned to power in 2021 after waging insurgency against the US backed government for two decades. Fresh from reading reports of the many restrictions which the Taliban had placed on women, and seeing archival photographs of a westernised and cosmopolitan city, one was, of course, immensely curious to know more about how the two realities could have been simultaneously true about the country.
Taran Khan is an Indian who lived and worked in Kabul for extended periods of time as an expat after the ouster of the Taliban in 2001. Unlike most expatriates, she chose to step outside the sanitised spaces to explore the city and interact with the residents. This book is the culmination of her effort to understand the many layers of Kabul.
Having grown up in India, the author, like most Indian women, viewed walking for leisure as a luxury. We have all been conditioned into staying away from public spaces, and pretending that our walks are purposeful because that is the only way a woman can justify being out on the street alone. In Kabul, she was subject to similar restriction- she was told it was dangerous to venture out on her own, yet she walked, and as she walked, new layers of the city revealed itself to her.
The book is divided into seven sections, the first and last of which are called “Returns”. In the first “Return”, she talks about how her family was originally from Afghanistan and of how she viewed going to Kabul as a way of returning home. While she can read the Persian script, she didn’t know the language, so most of the written word was inaccessible to her. But her grandfather, who like many educated Indians of his generation was fluent in Persian, helped contextualise most of her experiences by relating them what he had read about Kabul. The “Returns” with which she concludes the book is her return to India after her last tour in Afghanistan. Over the years, she has seen the city change, till it is almost unrecognisable to her. The optimism she encountered in her first trip has been replaced by apprehension, and there is the fear of what might happen when the US troops withdraw and international aid dries up. People were worried about the growing power of the Taliban and making plans to escape. Would the country return to what it was before the boom that she witnessed?
The each of the other five chapters, she picks up a different aspect of life in Kabul, and shows how in Afghanistan layers always peel away to reveal the same story being told over and over again. The history of Afghanistan is of cycles where there is a complete erasure of history, only for the same story to be told again and again. She talks about books and writing, about mental illness, about weddings, about movies and even about Buddhism. In each of the topics, she brings her own viewpoint which is simultaneously that of a curious but empathetic outsider and an insider. Her own childhood in Aligarh finds resonance in what she sees in Kabul, and reading her account, you are struck by how deeply intertwined society in Afghanistan and India is.
It is, however, impossible to read the book without remembering and being reminded of what is happening in Afghanistan today. The same women who danced at their weddings dressed in the latest designs from European catwalks have been rendered completely invisible today. The people who carved out joyful lives for themselves within the constraints placed by society are today reduced to baby making machines. There is despair while reading the book, but there is also hope because the cyclical nature of history in Afghanistan shows that one should never give up hope. The book is also a clarion call to not take a freedom for granted because freedom is precious.
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