Between 2006 and 2013 the writer Taran Khan made multiple trips to Kabul, Afghanistan, a city she felt was misunderstood by many outsiders. She decided to get to know it the best way she knew how, by heading out into its streets on foot, with all the risks and rewards that entailed.

Annemarie Lopez interviewed her recently in London.

Kabul cannot be interrogated. The city’s stories cannot be forced, bargained, or bought. Many western writers have tried. Kabul has learned, over centuries of invasion and occupation, to hide its true self so well that even its own inhabitants sometimes forget what lies beneath. Taran Khan arrived in 2006 as a journalist, sent to teach media skills. Yet Kabul was a place she felt she already knew – through stories told by her Pashtun family, and through her childhood in Aligarh, near Delhi. These ties were made more alluring because Kabul had also lived in her imagination. Almost immediately, she felt its magnetic pull: the shimmer of its secrets, a presence waiting in the shadows. It was as if the city had been waiting for her.

She ignored the warnings of colleagues who told her the streets were unsafe, no place for a woman. She knew she had to go walking, carefully, senses tuned to what others overlooked. The city would not give up its secrets easily. It required patience, repeat journeys, attention. That patience became Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul – a travel memoir tinged with melancholy, and more than that, a quiet call for a more immersive way of discovering, and of writing about, place.

“I wanted the city to be the main protagonist,” Khan says. There is something in her voice, a quality of listening even as she speaks, that suggests she is still walking those streets in her mind. “There was a whole genre at the time of memoir about Afghanistan which was really centring the people who came from outside. While the people in the city were just supporting cast. I didn’t want my book to be one of those books.”

The prohibition against walking, she soon realized, could become its own form of invitation. Growing up in Aligarh, Khan had learned to navigate male scrutiny and understood that certain freedoms had to be stolen. In Kabul, she found the restrictions oddly familiar. “The prohibition made the place feel really familiar,” she says, “and that just gave me permission to transgress.”

But transgression, for Khan, was never about recklessness. It was an opportunity for listening and discovery. She embedded herself within local networks, following threads opened by Afghan friends and colleagues. When they said she shouldn’t do something, she listened. When they offered to take her somewhere, she almost always said yes. The city began to reveal itself not in grand gestures but in fragments – cemeteries, and beauty salons, and wedding halls, the everyday spaces that Western reporting often overlooked in its hunger for the dramatic, the violent, the exotic.

It was her grandfather who had first taught her how to see things differently. He had never visited Kabul, but he knew it intimately through literature and culture, and through him, Khan learned to read the city “like a text”. A park named after classical Persian literature wasn’t just a charming historical footnote – it was evidence of a city in constant conversation with the world, a place that had always been more than the sum of its wars.

Through her grandfather’s guidance, Khan discovered the Persian poetic concept of zahir and batin – the seen and the unseen. These terms describe the surface meaning of a text and its hidden depths – the moon is a loved one, walls speak of exile. Khan began to apply this lens to Kabul itself, understanding that what appeared on the surface was only the beginning of the story. A Buddhist stupa in a graveyard became “one layer in a palimpsest of writing, of inscription, of a document that’s being created and recreated.”

Kabul is an amnesiac city, says Khan, not because it can’t remember, but because it had been forced, repeatedly, to forget. This realization opened another dimension of the city to Khan as she walked its streets, attuning herself to the almost imperceptible traces of these buried memories. “The city was most truly itself,” Khan realized, “in its places of erasure and loss.”

Each regime had tried to write over what came before, like scribes reusing parchment. The Taliban had destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan. The Soviets had built their own monuments. The Americans had erected their security compounds. But Khan discovered that in a city, nothing truly disappears. It simply goes underground, into what she calls the city’s “liminal space” – that place between erasure and “hectic remaking.”

Walking became her method for navigating this in-between realm. “When you’re walking,” she explains, “you’re colliding with memory, you’re colliding with a built environment, you’re colliding with your own baggage that you’re bringing into the space. But at the same time, you’re completely alone in the orbit you’re taking.”

This collision of realities extended to what Khan calls the city’s otherworldly elements. She speaks matter-of-factly about its djinns and ghosts, noting that Kabul is particularly “rich with presence.” These aren’t curiosities to be explained away but integral parts of how the city understands itself. The djinns, locals tell her, are drawn to ruined and abandoned places, which abound in Kabul. They are also metaphors for the phantoms of violence and war that haunt entire generations through trauma and memory – they appear as madness, acts of violence, and in recent years, inhabit the veins of Kabulis through drug addiction.

Khan recalls her grandmother telling her how she had to listen to gatherings of male poets through a crack in the wall, because girls weren’t allowed in their presence. So, Khan learns to listen to Kabul the same way – obliquely, through fissures and gaps. She visits mental asylums where women where are locked away without hope of cure or release. She lingers in cafes where lovers whisper to each other, out of sight of prying relatives.

As Khan returned to Kabul over the years, she watched the city contract. The blast barriers and security compounds that proliferated after 2009 didn’t just restrict movement – they created what she calls “smaller and smaller notions of being in the city.” They blocked roads and erased paths, but they were also cruel, she observes, because they “turned the impact outwards,” protecting those inside, while making everyone outside more vulnerable. By her last visit in 2013, casual walking had become impossible. Every journey needed a purpose, a destination, a reason.

The city was retreating into itself, and when roads vanish, she says, paths lead inward. Khan found her own paths turning inward too, moving through terrains of imagination, encountering Kabul in fragments. There were multiple cities hiding under the fiction of a single name, and walking was the only way to find them – these other versions of the city that shimmered in the distance, in that “penumbra between remembering and oblivion”.

When she left Kabul for the last time in 2013, Khan understood something about the nature of home that she hadn’t grasped before. “Home is the city that travels with us,” she reflects. “It is the known that we cast into the unknown. The delicate web of emotions and knowledge through which we decipher other cities.” Kabul became part of what she calls her own shadow city – “the place that lay behind the places I now inhabit,” dappled onto every street she would walk afterward, even now in her adopted home of London.

When I ask her about Afghanistan now, Khan sighs, but resists the binary narratives that dominate news coverage. She pushes back against the sense of inevitability that pervades Western analysis. “The idea that this could have had a different outcome – it’s not necessarily the inevitability that we see,” she says. “I think that comes from the same impulse that dehumanizes Kabul in the sense that it’s a place that’s always been at war.”

For Afghans “who carry a memory of possibility, who carry a memory of a different ending,” she says, “that’s where the city lives for them” – not in headlines or policy papers, but in the spaces between what is seen and what remains hidden, in the stories that only walking can reveal.

Khan’s book is something rare in travel memoirs – it is a sort of urban divination, an attempt to read the future in the ruins of the past. In refusing to serve as cultural interpreter, she creates space for Kabul to emerge, as it has always been: not a backdrop for other people’s stories, but a complex character in its own right, walking its own paths through memory and time, carrying all its cities within itself like secrets, like prayers folded into its pockets.