Afghanistan: It's not easy to be lyrical about bombs, but Saira Shah, author of The Storyteller's Daughter, manages it: "I hadn't expected them to be so beautiful, like millions of fiery living creatures or the haunting flicker of lost stars." Mary Russell reviews Saira Shah's The Storyteller's Daughter.
Marooned halfway up a mountain in Afghanistan, Shah was looking at a payload of butterfly bombs, dropped by the Soviets on the Mujahideen and so named because of the plastic wings that allowed them to flutter to earth and land softly, waiting for an unsuspecting foot to detonate them. These lethal little beauties had built-in timers which, if they hadn't already been trodden on, detonated them 48 hours later, thus leaving the way clear for Soviet ground troops to move up safely to the Mujahideen's mountain caves.
Shah's Afghan father, Idries Shah, who made Sufism popular in the 1960s, emigrated to England, hung the flag of the Afghan royal family on the bedroom wall of his Tunbridge Wells house, cooked huge meals of yellow rice and spices and told his daughter bewitching tales of the homeland, some of which were tall but all of which were full of wisdom.
Small wonder then that there was a tug of war between her two selves - the well-brought-up, liberal, middle-class pacifist and the Afghan "rapacious robber-baron" who admired daredevil warriors, the shooting of guns in the air and the madness of mountain mayhem.
Which was why, armed with a degree in Persian from London's School of Oriental and Asian Studies, the 21-year-old Shah set off for Afghanistan. The year was 1986, the US-backed Mujahideen were taking on the Soviets, and Shah became a stringer for a number of newspapers, commuting between Pakistan and Afghanistan, led along mountain tracks and smugglers' routes to Mujahideen strongholds.
Later, in her mid-30s, she returned with a camera concealed under her burka, to make a film about life under the Taliban. This was the acclaimed Channel 4 film, Beneath the Veil.
In between her journalistic assignments, she met up with her Afghan relatives, most of them exiled in Peshawar. There were the aunts, Soraya and Amina, the first of whom tried to marry her off to a pilot while the other sought to rescue her from such an alliance. And there was her Uncle Mirza, who liked to half-chew some small delicacy before taking it from his own mouth and popping it in hers.
There were week-long treks through the Hindu Kush with Zahir Shah, her Pashtun guide, who invariably got lost. "It is a fallacy of the West that mountain folk can navigate across such bleak terrain by some form of invisible radar," she observes somewhat grimly, her feet numb with frostbite.
There was the food: endless pilau spiked with rancid sheep-dripping, which the mountain men cleaned from their blackened fingers by stroking their beards. And always in the background there was the noise of mortars, bullets, explosions and B52 bombers drowning out her words, even on the page. Living dangerously, she survived all this, while the cameraman, James Miller, who worked with her on her Channel 4 films and to whom this book is dedicated, was shot dead by the Israeli army only two months ago while filming in Gaza.
But what is intriguing above all about this book is that though Shah constantly questions her cultural identity, it is clear from the way she is amused by the behaviour of the people she meets, challenged by their attitude to war and saddened by their lot, that she is what she suspected she was in the first place: a middle-class, liberal pacifist. Coming to terms with that could be the greatest challenge of all.
Saira Shah will give a reading and speak about her experiences at Kilkenny Arts Festival, on August 13th at 8 p.m. in the Kilkenny Ormonde Hotel
Mary Russell has an MA in Peace Studies
The Storyteller's Daughter. By Saira Shah, Michael Joseph, 309pp, £16.99