KHALED HOSSEINI RETURNS TO KABUL

Khaled Hosseini's bestselling novel, The Kite Runner, was set against the devastated landscape of his native Afghanistan. In the run-up to the story's release as a film, the author recounts the horrors and hopes of his first visit to Kabul since 1976

Above pic shows Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada as Hassan and Zekiria Ebrahimi as Amir in Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner .

"I once saw the Taliban beat a woman so badly, her mother's milk leaked out of her bones," an old shoemaker said to me in Kabul as the two of us sat by his shop front and watched traffic bolting by Haji Yaghoub mosque. In some ways, that sentence summarises my feelings about my trip back to Afghanistan after an absence of three decades: a marriage of the horrific and the poetic.

The horror was ubiquitous. It started the moment Kabul came into view from the window
seat of the 727, a sprawling city the colour of mud and dust, bereft of the trees or blue waters I've always seen when flying over other cities.
It continued when the Ariana aircraft touched ground at Kabul airport:
strewn all around the runway were overturned trucks and carcasses of old airplanes, burnt fuselages, remains of wings gone to rust. Outside the terminal, amid Kalashnikov-toting military personnel, I was mobbed by beggars dressed in rags, all of them children. One of them - a frail boy of six or seven - got bullied by the others; his mud-caked hand lost its grip on the 5 afghani bill I was handing through the car window, and he let out a cry of such despair and sorrow it rang in my ears the rest of that first, terrible day.

Kabul has changed a great deal since I last saw it in 1976. The traffic is suffocating now,
pedestrians, mule-drawn carts and bicycle riders weaving perilously through the clogged lanes of honking cars and taxi cabs, 3 million people roaming a 30 sq mile city designed for less than half that number. The air smells of diesel fumes and smoke from the trees people burn for firewood, and sometimes the wind-stirred dust is so thick you can't see the end of
the block. The dust gets in your teeth, your eyes, your ears; everyone stops in their tracks and waits for the wind to die down. I was driven through Kabul on my second day there, a grand tour of what nearly a quarter-century of wars does to a city, to a people. As I gazed out the
car window at the endless destruction blurring by, I realised that there is not a single block in Kabul that hasn't in some way been scarred by war. The so-called "posh" parts of town have dirty, unkempt homes with shattered windows, set along roads riddled with potholes big
enough for a small child to lie in.

Read the full story from the Weekend Guardian.