The Book Lady of Kabul

J. Malcolm Garcia in Guernica:

She walks without hurry, somewhat stiffly, sore, a diminutive woman unnoticed, burdened, using her chin to clamp down on a column of books she holds against her chest. Thin paperbacks most of them, a few hardcover. All written by her husband. The books appear worn as she does. Her tired eyes, lined face. Her forehead wrinkled into streams. Maybe from long, nightly exposure to the humid, grainy air, the white smoke rising from kabob grills wafting around and powdering her with ash. Maybe from seventeen years of selling her homebound husband’s books. She does not know, does not really consider her fatigue any more than she reflects on how she sees and breathes. Block by block she maneuvers through the teeming sidewalks of Kabul’s Shar-E-Naw shopping district until she enters Ice-Milk Restaurant, stops at tables.

“Would you like to buy a book?” she says.

The twentysomething customers talk to one another staring at their iPhones and ignore her. Outside, more young people gather, dressed in tight blue jeans and dazzling, multicolored shirts reminiscent of the disco era. They talk loudly, with an air of We are special, laughing, hurrying past storefronts promoting Mastercard Premium, Marco Polo Garments, Alfalah Visa, United Bank, Body Building Fitness Gym, New Fashions Kabul Shop. Their shadows converge and fade into the glow of so many green and blue and red blinking lights dangling from awnings, unfolded above advertisements for pizza and club sandwiches and chicken fingers, and those same shadows cross a boy standing in the middle of the sidewalk and leaning on crutches, his left leg gone, his right hand out for money, and the young people swerve around him as if he were standing in the center of a traffic roundabout, and amid this confusion the book lady leaves Ice-Milk Restaurant without having sold one book and stops at another restaurant, Fast Food Pizza and Burger. The West’s influence can be seen throughout Shar-E-Naw in the kaleidoscopic displays of consumerism and high prices that for a moment render the decades of ongoing war here as obsolete as the donkey-drawn carts plodding next to black Hummers stalled in traffic. But the sight of a maimed begging child, injured, she presumes, by a mine, reminds her that beneath the sequined mannequins and suggested affluence and rush to catch up with the Twenty-First Century, Shar-E-Naw is still Afghanistan.

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