‘Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul’ by Taran N Khan
‘Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul’ is a lyrical, personal, and meditative portrait of Kabul by journalist Taran N Khan. In the years between 2006 and 2013, as Khan worked in Kabul, she was cautioned never to walk. She did so anyway.
Without a guidebook, and with a keen acknowledgment of the unusualness of walking as a woman in the war-torn city, she finds new routes around Kabul. In her journeys, she peels back the layers of a city that holds years of history within itself. She describes the city as a palimpsest—populated by ruins, monuments, and memories, with remnants of the past co-existing with the Kabul of the present.
Khan explores the layers of a city that may not be apparent at first glance. This layered city is revealed to her, and she reveals it to us, in unusual ways: in Kabul’s bookstores and libraries, the subtle and unsubtle ways the city holds monuments and graves for the dead, and from the lived experiences of the people around her. A doctor she meets tells stories of the Kabul he remembers from childhood, and how it has been remade over and over again in the years since.
In Microrayan, she meets two young women who used to watch Bollywood films in secret, in a room with blacked-out windows. In Kabul’s Public Library, the librarian tells them of its life under the Taliban government: “people read even then, child.” Khan recalls poetry in Persian and Urdu read to her by her grandfather, and she finds verses everywhere in Kabul: quoted to her by people she meets, as graffiti on the wall, and on the back of taxis and trucks. What emerges from her stories is a picture of Kabul that grows larger with every chapter, and a new perspective with which to view a region that we often imagine only in terms of war.
Winner of the Tata Literature Live! First Book Award for Non-Fiction (2019), and the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year award (2021), it was our pick for the Champaca Book Subscription as we read along the theme of travel.