ONCE UPON A TIME IN KABUL:
FACT, FICTION, AND AN UNLIKELY FRIENDSHIP DURING THE PANDEMIC
Selina Sheth
Kabul, September 1996. The men attack after dark, moving with stealth and purpose, breaking locks and smashing windows, their shadowy beards and flowing tunics barely visible under the silvery moonlight. Tonight, their target is the Shah M. Book Company, a large bookstore in the heart of the Afghan capital. Here, they will shred and burn more than half of its 10,000 titles. They will leave behind broken shelves, walls blackened with soot, and a warning to its owner, Shah Muhammed Rais, that there will be worse to come if he continues to stock ‘anti-Islamist’ literature.
*
Mumbai, July 2021. It’s one a.m. on a Tuesday, but I am wide awake. Earlier today, a text from Shah Muhammed Rais made it clear that this is the only time he is available to talk to journalists. I don’t mind. I haven’t had a semblance of routine ever since Covid-19 hit sixteen months ago, and now, locked down in my apartment at the peak of a virulent Second Wave, insomnia has set in. So has anxiety, and a peculiar lack of motivation. I’ve swapped work on the First Draft of my novel for doomscrolling on Facebook and binge-watching Netflix. I’m also down to the last of my savings, so when the editor of Current magazine called last week, offering to pay me for a profile on the famed ‘Bookseller of Kabul’, I instantly agreed to the job.
I check that my I-phone is fully charged, then tap out Afghanistan’s country code and Rais’s cell number. I wait, feeling restless as I listen to the long hollow beeps that echo in my ear. I’m already regretting this assignment. What reporting can I do without physical access to Rais, without a single source or contact in Kabul? All I have in my ‘research file’ are a few dated articles printed off the Internet, a Google Maps image of a crumbling bookstore on a dusty downtown street, and a single picture of Rais: a cheerful man in his mid-sixties with dark twinkling eyes and an inscrutable smile.
I disconnect the unanswered call. Tomorrow, I’ll tell my editor that the story won’t work out. Decision made, I feel a rush of relief as I switch off my desk lamp. In the morning, I’ll go back to my novel-in-progress, rewrite the dialogue in the prologue, maybe tighten the tail of Chapter Four …
… My phone shrieks, disrupting the stillness of the night. A foreign number flashes on my screen, a glow of neon green in the darkness. I scramble to answer, and hear an affable ‘Hello’ in a Pashto accent.
‘Selina? So sorry I miss your call. I was resting … back pain, you know? We talk now?’
‘Of course,’ I stammer. Finding my voice, I thank Rais for calling me back. Attempting small-talk, I introduce myself as a ‘writer-for-hire by day, aspiring novelist by night,’ and ask how Rais is coping in the pandemic. (According to figures released by Afghanistan’s Ministry of Public Health this summer, a third of the country’s thirty million population is infected by the novel coronavirus.)
Rais chuckles. ‘I’ve lived through decades of civil war and censorship, done time in prison, fought a vicious battle in court against someone I trusted like family! Easy for me to handle a pandemic, no?’
I can’t help but smile into the phone.
*
Shah Muhammed Rais was born to a middle-class family in Kabul in the spring of 1954. The seeds of his daring Arian nature began to sprout as early as middle school. When young Rais learnt, in a Geography class, that three quarters of the earth was covered by water, he resolved to get out of landlocked Afghanistan and see the ocean for himself. The year Rais turned fifteen, he jumped on a bus with only a few hundred afghanis in his pocket. He spent three weeks travelling solo: through the Khyber Pass into Pakistan, across the cities of Peshawar, Multan and Lahore, and into Karachi, a glamorous port on the Arabian Sea coast. When he returned to Kabul, Rais was treated like a hero at school. ‘I told tales of my adventures over and over again,’ he says. ‘The next year, I set off for Iran, this time to see the Black Sea.’
But soon after Rais arrived in the vibrant, cosmopolitan Tehran of the late 1960s, he lost all interest in hitting the beaches on the Caspian coast. ‘I discovered a city of fashionable young women in mini-skirts, a city brimming with art, culture, literature,’ he recalls. Rais spent his days exploring Tehran’s bookstores, where he became infatuated with a series of local college girls, and the poetry of Farsi greats like Firdausi and Jalal-ad-Din Rumi. He was also captivated by Shakespeare’s Othello and Macbeth, which he read in Persian. When Rais went home after his summer abroad, he carried with him the start of a personal library: three crates of books, which included the works of Tolstoy, Hemingway and Balzac. ‘Books are like seas. You have to dive in to get the pearl of knowledge,’ he says.
Unfortunately, Rais didn’t see how he could make a living from books. After graduating from high school, he took his father’s advice and went on to earn a degree in Civil Engineering from Kabul University. ‘I was young, restless, and employed by the Ministry of Power and Energy at a salary equivalent to $50 a month. I mean, I couldn’t have quit fast enough. Then my uncle suggested I join the family’s construction business. But that job involved greasing the palms of government officials. I didn’t want any of that.’
What Rais did want, more than anything, was to open his own bookstore in Kabul.
By now, the young man had expanded his collection to almost 1,000 books in Farsi, Dari, Pashto, and English. Some he’d purchased while travelling, while a few were donations from friends in the Ministry of Culture and Education. The bulk of Rais’s novels, short stories and poetry were faded paperbacks that he picked up from Kabul’s crowded book bazaars. With a nose for business, and a flair for entrepreneurship, Rais sniffed out interesting titles, and bought up unsold stocks from local booksellers at a throwaway price.
When Rais made a ‘working trip’ to India in the early 1970s, he was awed by the literary treasures he unearthed on the streets of Old Delhi. ‘I found rare couplets by the eighteenth-century Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib. Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnette an Orpheus in German. And a secondhand copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. These books sold for a mere 100 rupees a piece, which back then was just about three US dollars,’ he says.
In 1975, Rais hired shop space in Kabul’s commercial CharahiSadarat district. This was a stone’s throw from the city’s administrative and diplomatic enclaves, and the perfect location for the Shah M. Book Company. On opening day, four large trucks pulled up to the store carrying every single book that Rais owned, and within hours, every shelf and nook was filled. Those who walked past the gleaming glass store-front could see Rais’s prized multi-volume boxed set of The Anglo-Afghan Wars propped on a red velvet ledge.
Rais’s venture birthed its share of critics, with some accusing him of being particularly creative at overestimating the value of his product. New and second-hand books were displayed with inflated price tags, and some titles were marked at five or ten times their original rates. ‘I had to make a living,’ Rais says, adding that he has always seen himself as ‘more of a scientist than a businessman actually.’
Even then, nothing could stop Kabul’s elite from showing up at the only international bookstore in the city. A few years later, Rais opened a second outlet in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel, a move that attracted a regular stream of foreign tourists and expats. But even as the Shah M. Book Company became a hotspot in Kabul’s literary and cultural landscape, the political climate of the country was fast approaching boiling point.
*
In April 1978, a left-wing military coup overthrew the centrist Afghan government. Under the new Soviet Union-backed communist establishment, Rais found himself charged with ‘distributing imperialist books and anti-regime newspapers.’ Self-assured as ever, Rais argued that his bookstore was ‘a place not for the distribution of material, but for the collection and preservation of books for future generations.’ Rais’s claims fell flat. He was arrested by the government, and incarcerated in a Kabul prison for two years.
Rais did his time behind bars, getting through the experience with an attitude of defiance and humor. ‘Kabul’s jails were full of regular people, from working-class taxi drivers to university professors, all of whom had been labeled “enemies of the state” for protesting against authoritarianism. The charges against us were a joke. It was all smoke and mirrors, a way for the state to harass powerless citizens.’
Rais’s voice has an edge to it, and I decide not to push for details. After a beat of silence, he quips: ‘When I got out, I reopened my bookstore and it was business as usual.’
We’ve been talking for more than two hours, but Rais is no hurry to hang up.
Things got worse, he tells me, with the dawn of the 1980s. First came the rise of the country’s pro-Islamic militancy, known as the ‘Mujahideen’, and then, the birth of a radical splinter group, the Taliban. By the mid-1990s, Soviet troops had withdrawn from Afghanistan, and the Taliban had full control of the land. There were frequent and public episodes of insurgency and violence, and ordinary, peace-loving civilians suffered the most. Education in schools and colleges was disrupted, unemployment was at an all-time high, and women were excluded from public life. Many families fled the country to become refugees in other parts of the world. ‘I stayed right here, in Kabul,’ Rais says, with more than a hint of bravado. Soon after, the Taliban attacked his bookstore.
‘The Taliban burnt more than half my books, but I was prepared. I had already made multiple copies of each book, and stashed them in two secret warehouses on the outskirts of the city.’ What Rais could not bounce back from, he says, was the tyranny and destruction that the Taliban had wrought on Afghan society and culture. Rais felt a ‘moral obligation’ to keep Kabul’s primary schools afloat, and he did this by donating a tenth of his personal annual income to a charity for education. ‘My company spent $3,000 a year on free textbooks and stationery. We helped students in more than sixty inner city schools.’
In the wake of the terror attacks in New York on September 11, 2001, US troops invaded Afghanistan, starting a fierce and persistent war against the Taliban that would continue for over twenty years. But even as the new millennium seethed with geo-political tension, Rais found himself embroiled in a different kind of battle – a deeply personal one.
*
Fall 2001. Rais was in his bookstore at the Intercontinental when a young blonde woman dropped by for a casual visit. This was Asne Seierstad, a journalist from Norway known for her intrepid reporting from war zones. Now, she told Rais, she was keen to write about Kabul’s famed book merchant. Rais was flattered, and even more so, when Seierstad described her book as ‘a study of Afghan culture’ and ‘one family’s experience of surviving the tragedy of Civil War.’ Rais graciously invited Seierstad to dinner at his home, a modest house he shared with two wives and nine children. Soon after, Seierstad moved in with the family. While researching her book, she wore a burka so that she could experience life firsthand as a woman in Afghanistan. ‘She was with us for three months,’ Rais says. ‘I treated her with the honor and respect reserved for a family member. I came to trust her like my own. And she betrayed me.’
When The Bookseller of Kabul was published in 2002, Rais was catapulted into the global literary spotlight. This didn’t bother him as much as the fact that the book was ‘a shameless hit job, full of lies.’ Rais had expected a heroic rendition of his life. But Seierstad’s narrative, he claimed, portrayed him as a ‘medieval patriarch, a bigamist, and a flowery-tongued buffoon.’ In a 2003 statement to the press titled ‘A Matter of Honor and Truth’, an enraged Rais denounced The Bookseller of Kabul as a ‘worthless collection of invented incidents’, some of which made inferences to his male power and privilege, to the sexual lives of his female relatives, and to the secrecy that surrounded his finances. Rais, along with his second wife Suraiya and various other family members, sued Seierstad for libel in an Oslo court, claiming that Seierstad had defamed his character, violated his hospitality, and used a ‘western colonial gaze’ to mock the Afghan way of life.
The case raised an important issue: How ethical was it for writers to hijack other people’s lives for their stories? In July 2010, the court ordered Seierstad to pay close to $50,000 in damages to Rais and his family. But Rais’s victory was short-lived. Seierstad appealed, and in 2012, Norway’s higher courts overturned the previous ruling. Seierstad and her publisher, Cappelen Damm, were cleared of liability when the judge deemed The Bookseller of Kabul an ‘accurate portrayal of people and events.’
‘The book was a fabrication masquerading as fact,’ Rais says. When I ask why Rais rejected Seierstad’s offer of compensation – a sum of $100,000, which Rais could have donated to a charity for poor Afghans – he is silent. ‘I didn’t want her money. I wanted an apology. This fight was about honor. My honor, my family’s honor, and the truth.’
As of today, The Bookseller of Kabul has been translated into thirty languages and has sold more than a million copies worldwide.
Rais insists that he is no longer bitter. ‘I believe in God. I respect women. I’ve always acted in good faith. Betrayals happen. One has to accept that life is a gamble. One has to let go.’
*
Rais found a way to move on by writing his own book – a 96-page self-published memoir that has nothing in common with Seierstad’s version of his life. According to Rais, Once Upon a Time There Was a Bookseller in Kabul is a metaphysical fantasy about ‘the horrors of war, the misunderstandings between cultures, and the tragedy of modern Afghanistan.’ Full of djinns, magic lanterns and flying carpets, Once Upon a Time follows the traditional storytelling style, or qissah, of Afghan culture. ‘Everyone these days is crazy about vampires. So, I thought, why not offer something similar, but better?’ he asks. Local internet critics gave the book a thumbs down, pointing out Rais’s puerile language and shoddy ‘Harry Potter meets 1,001 Arabian Nights’ plot. Still, no number of bad reviews could dampen Rais’s pride. ‘Once Upon a Time was translated into Portuguese and sold 400,000 copies in Brazil,’ he claims. ‘Why should I care for critics?’
It’s close to dawn, and Rais and I decide to continue our conversation the following night. A few minutes later, just as I’m about to fall asleep, my phone buzzes. I scroll through a series of incoming WhatsApp images. The first shows Rais holding a copy of Once Upon a Time and smiling at the camera. He texts: It’s still available on Amazon. Do read and review!
Another picture. Rais is standing beside a female Afghan writer whose ‘underground anti-regime memoir’ has just been launched in his bookstore. Another text: Perhaps one day your novel will be on my shelves? I champion all lady authors!
Next, a photograph of Rais on holiday at a beach resort in Albania. He sits amidst his large clan of adult children and grandchildren. A text: Family is everything.
And then, a final image, from happier times: A smiling Rais, flanked by his second wife and a tall European woman. ‘I know you will not let me down like Asne did,’ he texts. ‘Something tells me that you are worthy of my trust.’ What follows is a couplet from Firdausi’s tenth century magnum opus, Shah Nameh: The Book of Kings:
“… But all this world is like a tale we hear; Men’s evil, and their glory, disappear.”
*
In the summer of 2015, the Shah M. Book Company turned forty. It had grown into a successful family business, one in which Rais’s oldest son and daughter managed day-to-day operations. The Intercontinental Hotel branch no longer existed, but the flagship store in CharahiSadarat was thriving. It held over 100,000 titles in Pashto, Dari, Farsi, Persian, English, German, French and Russian, and included novels and verse, tomes on history and politics, coffee-table books on spirituality and mysticism, children’s picture books, and a collection of rare Afghan stamps, maps and postcards. A quarter of the store’s shelves were made up of medical, engineering and social science text books, most of which were imported from Iran and Pakistan.
But Rais was, as usual, impatient to do more. The country’s broken education system rankled him, as did the lack of access that students in rural Afghanistan had to reading material. So Rais conceived of the Book Mobile. This was a silver fourteen-meter-long Mercedes Benz omnibus, bought with Rais’s own money, and large enough to hold 20,000 books. Rais’s plan was to take road trips across Afghanistan’s rural provinces, and sell textbooks in Pashto and English at a substantial discount.
In March 2016, Rais and five of his staff travelled to the small towns of Mazer Sharif and Takhar. They laid out stacks of books on folding tables, set up a loudspeaker, and announced that people were welcome to ‘browse and buy.’ The event was a success. But a few days later, just as the Book Mobile rolled out of a village near Kunduz, a bomb exploded in the impoverished district. Had Rais and his team been just a few miles further north, they would have been dead. Rais knew a warning when he came across one, and canceled the rest of his tour.
Today, Rais admits that the Book Mobile was a failure. The lack of safety and security bothered him, he says, but even more shocking was the sudden withdrawal of support from key non-profit organizations which, he says, ‘only pretended to be working for the education of the underprivileged.’
A news report at the time accused Rais of selling books not at a discount, but at double the market price. This, it stated, was why Kabul’s reputed Goethe Institute had wanted nothing to do with the Book Mobile project. When I confront Rais with this claim, he hits back. ‘Rubbish. ‘I don’t know why the media makes these insinuations. We didn’t make a profit. We sold only a fraction of our stock in these places. I lost 10,000 US dollars of my own money, and even risked my life! But I didn’t care! Do you know, our team gifted hundreds of books to schools, sometimes we put them directly into the hands of poor children. The happiness on their faces … that alone made our efforts worthwhile.’
I press on. Why, then, were the books in Rais’s Kabul store so expensive? Rais’s response is belligerent. ‘I have been very open with my international customers. My books cost double than they would in Europe because whatever extra money I make from foreign buyers goes to subsidize local students and readers. What’s wrong with that?’
*
Two days later, Rais sends me a text. ‘Kabul is a mess. Poverty. Unemployment. More and more young men addicted to opium and heroin. There are almost no educational opportunities for girls. The religion taught in schools is not Islam, but crude Taliban-sponsored ideology. This is what you should write about.’
*
Our next conversation is brief, but buoyant. ‘Despite Afghanistan’s problems,’ Rais says, ‘people are still reading.’ He adds that many of the country’s leading scholars, writers and poets have become ‘voices-in-exile’ abroad, who publish their experiences of war, oppression and censorship for a global audience. Among them, Rais says, is Franco-Afghan filmmaker Atiq Rahimi, bestselling author of The Kite Runner Khalid Hosseini, and the Sweden-based Azizollah Nahofteh, who writes on religion and women in contemporary Afghan society.
‘The Shah M. Book Company has been integral to Afghanistan’s literary renaissance,’ Rais says, and to prove this, he sends me recent pictures of eminent clients visiting his bookstore. Among them, I recognize Turkish diplomat Huseyin Avni Botsali, Afghan-American historian Nancy Hatch Dupree, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steve Coll.
‘The last decade was a stable one for us,’ Rais says. ‘But now, with this virus, we’re fighting an enemy that is almost as deadly as the Taliban.’
*
Spring 2020. When the pandemic hit, Afghanistan had already been weakened by four decades of war, a less-than-optimal healthcare system, and poor infrastructure. It was no surprise that the government lacked the resources to contain the spread of Covid-19. Kabul, a city with a densely-packed population of 4.2 million, locked down completely. Rais had no choice but to shut down the Shah M. Book Company for three whole months.
Today, Rais sees the pandemic as less of a crisis and more of an opportunity. He tells me that he had ‘envisioned’ a digital future for the world as early as 2008 – the year in which he ‘went fully international’ with his business. At the time, Rais launched an English-language website, a digital catalogue of more than 15,000 titles, and a credit card facility. By 2019, he had more than a hundred online customers a day, and was making shipments to 190 countries.
Extended lockdowns derailed Afghanistan’s long-awaited transition to peace, and this, combined with a broken economy, saw a fresh demand for books that reflected the tense mood in the country. In late 2020, the Shah M. Book Company launched 300 new e-titles – giving readers access to books like James Dobbins’ After the Taliban, Anis Ahmed’s Gender, Law and Society in Islam, Fariduddin Attar’s Memoirs of Saints, and David McDonald’s magnum opus Drugs in Afghanistan. Rais used a third of his profits to, once again. focus on the spread of education. ‘Even though the Book Mobile project had failed, I wanted to serve students. With the pandemic, the youth outside Kabul have no access to physical bookstores, nor can they travel,’ he says.
Last winter, Rais devised a system by which students in remote, snow-bound areas could order subsidized books online, and had them delivered to their homes by privately-run buses that he paid for.
*
In our final conversation, Rais tells me that despite the travails of age, and recurring bouts of back pain, he has no interest in retiring and ‘sitting idle’. He’s just finished developing plans for a new website dedicated to books and manuscripts from Afghanistan and the Middle East. ‘I see this becoming the Amazon of Asia,’ he says. Rais sends me a video featuring the project’s mascot, and I watch as an animated character tears through the streets of Kabul with a basket of books on his head and a wide grin on his face. He looks like a miniature version of Rais.
*
August 1, 2021. My profile on Rais, titled Once Upon a Time in Kabul, is published. I’m disappointed that my editor has chopped it down to 800 words, mainly to supplement a larger report on how independent bookstores in South Asia are fighting to stay in business. I would have liked my piece to run as it was written: a three-dimensional portrait of a colorful and daring entrepreneur. Our conversations have revealed an enigma, a man of contradiction and chutzpah, a poet and a hustler. Who is Shah Muhammed Rais? Shrewd and emotional, vulnerable and manipulative, complex and childlike, feminist and sexist, warrior and drama queen, and above all, a storyteller. He refuses to surrender control of the narrative that is his life, even if he liberally blurs the lines between truth and invention. He is also inspiring. At a time when corrupt government middlemen in India were capitalizing on Covid-19 infections by selling oxygen cylinders on the black market, Rais was transporting free books to poor Afghan students and campaigning for the rights of women and girls.
When my editor sends me a cheque, I donate the money to Pandemic Relief India. I send Rais a link to my published piece, and when he texts me a day later, he is philosophical about its brevity. ‘These things happen. I’ve enjoyed talking to you. My advice to you is this: Time is precious. Don’t waste it. Write your novel and get it out into the world.’
*
August 15, 2021. Independence Day in India marks the Fall of Kabul in Afghanistan. As US troops prepare to officially withdraw from the country, the Taliban seizes control of the capital. Images on the news and social media show thousands of ordinary Afghanis attempting to flee their homeland. At Kabul Airport, desperate men and women cling to a departing US Air Force plane, only to fall to their deaths. Broken bodies line the tarmac, the streets, the fields.
I think about Rais, and pray that he and his family are safe. When I call him, there are no hollow beeps echoing in my ear. Rais’s number has been disconnected.
*
December 2025. Between finishing the Final Draft of my novel, querying literary agents, and dealing with long silences and multiple rejections, I haven’t had the time to think of Rais. But then, while googling a British publisher, I come across a recent article by The Guardian with the headline: “‘I wanted to end my life’: ‘Bookseller of Kabul’ rebuilds destroyed business.”
I learn that Rais and his family have been refugees in the United Kingdom since 2022. Soon after Rais left Kabul for London, the Taliban once again targeted and vandalized his bookstore. This time, it destroyed the extensive archive of books that Rais had maintained for almost half a century. When Rais got the news, he fell into severe depression, and even contemplated suicide. But then, his irrepressible survival instinct kicked in.
Rais decided to fight back, to set up his business from scratch, and to continue to find ways to distribute books in his home country. In 2024, Rais partnered with an Indian firm to create The Indo-Aryana Book Company – an online website that ‘allows for books banned by the Taliban to be printed in India and mailed into Afghanistan.’
Now past seventy, Rais is slower, weaker, and reportedly losing his sight. But his vision for a better future hasn’t waned. ‘Books are the only weapons we have to fight extremism’, he tells The Guardian. His message to his oppressors? ‘Even if you destroy my bookstore a hundred times, I will rebuild it.’
I think: Good for Rais. In his words, I sense a lesson for my own life: Nothing is ever won by giving up. I turn my attention back to my novel, more determined than ever to finish it.
*
