When Indian journalist Taran Khan arrived in Kabul in 2006, she imagined it as a homecoming—a chance to reconnect with her Pashtun ancestors. So when she was told not to walk the streets, she heard an invitation. Working as a media trainer in the Afghan capital, Khan deliberately ignored the warnings that kept most foreigners confined to compounds and vehicles. Her transgression became the foundation for “Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul,” a book that refuses to serve Western readers the confessional travel memoir they might expect.

The prohibition against walking felt familiar to Khan, who had grown up navigating male scrutiny in Aligarh, near Delhi. Rather than feeling constrained, the restrictions gave her permission to transgress in ways she had done before. But her defiance was methodical rather than reckless. She embedded herself within local networks, following threads opened by Afghan friends who became her guides through the city’s hidden geographies.

Khan’s approach challenged the dominant genre of Afghanistan memoirs, which typically centered Western protagonists while relegating Afghans to supporting roles. She wanted the city itself to be the main protagonist. This decision drew criticism from some reviewers who complained she hadn’t revealed enough of herself—criticism Khan believes is rarely directed at a western male author. But she rejected the expectation that women’s travel writing should function as “glorified journalling” for Western consumption.

Instead, Khan developed what she calls “bipedal archaeology,” using walking as a method to excavate Kabul’s layered history. She approached the city as a palimpsest—a document repeatedly written over—reading it through the map of various texts including Persian poetry and epic memoirs like the Bāburnāma, the sixteenth-century chronicle of Mughal emperor Babur. Guided by the Persian literary concept of zahir and batin – the seen and the unseen – she learned to read the city like a text. Her grandfather, who had never visited Kabul but knew it through literature, helped unlock this deeper vision. Parks named after classical Persian poetry weren’t merely quaint details but evidence of a city in constant conversation with the world.

This lens revealed stories absent from Western news coverage: beauty salons and wedding halls presented not as exotic curiosities but as integral parts of urban life. Khan rejected the “gee whiz tone” of much foreign reporting, which treated Afghan social life as remarkable simply for existing. She found the city “most truly itself” in its places of erasure and loss – a Buddhist stupa in a graveyard became “one layer in a palimpsest of writing.”

But as security deteriorated, Khan watched Kabul become increasingly walled off. The blast barriers and compounds that proliferated after 2009 didn’t just restrict movement – they created “smaller and smaller notions of being in the city.” By her final visit in 2013, casual strolls had become impossible; every journey required purpose and destination.

Reflecting on Afghanistan’s current situation, Khan resists narratives of inevitability. For Afghans “who carry a memory of possibility,” she suggests, the city lives in the spaces between the seen and unseen—in stories that walking can reveal but walls are designed to conceal. Her book stands as testament to a different kind of travel writing: one that allows cities to remain complex protagonists in their own stories, rather than mere backdrops for foreign adventures.

Text by Annemarie Lopez.