Is Afghanistan burning?

"Streets are filled with emptiness. Multitudes throng, but the ebb and flow of life is under arrest. The vivacious Shabnam has gone missing. Will she come back? "

'Shabnam',the 1960 novel by Syed Mujtaba Ali,(set in a burning Kabul 1929, with the monarch abdicating and the rebels taking over) keeps the answer hanging. The eponymous protagonist of the novel is a resourceful person with steely determination, belongs to a well connected family,and is a darling of the masses as well. Yet, it wasn't possible for the author to conceive of an 'all's well that ends well' finale to the story of pulsating hearts that break. It isn't difficult to imagine the fate of a citizen without the qualities of the heroine if placed in a similar predicament. And what if the timeline is moved to 2021,and the novel leaps into reality? 

While fiction looms up into eerie fact, disturbing news snippets of people latching onto airplane wheels to escape the turmoil in Kabul;images of advertisements with female visages being whitewashed to accommodate the policies of the new regime have come up with intimidating regularity. 

Sairaa Karimi, the director general of Afghan Film, in an open letter to the world had voiced her premonition, "If the Taliban takes over it will ban art... They will strip away women's rights, we will be pushed to the shadows, to our houses, and our voices will be stifled into silence. Just in these few weeks, the Taliban have destroyed many schools... "

As rumours of assassinations of public servants and dignitaries from the field of media and culture are making the rounds, Taliban has assured government servants to return to their posts, and promised the inclusion of women in the new regime guided by the Sharia. 

It is a matter of conjecture of how swiftly the pall of gloom lifts , but the policy of wait and watch adopted by the world is as heart-rending a wake as S Tirumati(India's Ambassador to the UN, New York) opines,"Afghan men,women and children are living under a constant state of fear...As a neighbour of Afghanistan, as a friend of it's people, Afghanistan's current situation is of great concern to us in India".

The Taliban is attempting to shed its hard line past with assurances, interview with a female journalist of a television channel, and other measures, but utter dejection and abject helplessness is palpable in Zarifa Ghafari's (youngest and the first female mayor of Maidan Wardak province, Afghanistan) cri de coeur, "I am sitting here waiting for them to come. And they will come for people like me and kill me... There is no one to help me or my family. I can't leave my family. And anyway where would I go?"

Syed Mujtaba Ali didn't tell us where "Shabnam" went, and even with the wind blowing in the right direction,  heaps of unanswered questions are bound to pile up with ach passing day. It's an irony that the only question that has a clear answer right now was asked in the month of August, 1944 -

Yes, Afghanistan is burning!