The Bookseller of Kabul

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One of the first people I met when I arrived in Kabul in November 2001 was Sultan Khan. I had spent six weeks with the commandos of the Northern Alliance – in the desert by the Tajikistani border, in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, in the Panshir Valley, and on the steppes north of Kabul. I had followed their offensive against the Taliban, I had slept on stone floors, in mud huts, and at the front, travelled on the back of lorries, in military vehicles, on horseback and on foot.

When the Taliban fell, I made for Kabul with the Northern Alliance. In a bookshop I happened upon an elegant, grey-haired man. Having spent weeks amongst gunpowder and rubble, where conversations centred on the tactics of war and military advance, it was refreshing to leaf through books and talk about literature and history. Sultan Khan’s shelves were weighed down by books in many languages; collections of poems, Afghan legends, history books, novels. He was a good salesman; when I left the shop after my first visit I was carrying seven books. I would often pop in when I had some spare time, to look at books and talk to the interesting bookseller, an Afghan patriot who felt let down by his country time and again.

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