Revisiting a Revolution
Baran Rehman
THE PARWAN WIND: DUST MOTES B.K. Zahrah Nasir Oxford University Press, 2007, 238 pp., 350
October 2007, volume 31, No 10

The Parwan Wind is a book about the revisiting of a revolution. The book records the second visit of the Scottish author, B.K.Zahrah Nasir, to the country of Afghanistan which has been in the grips of turmoil for a long time now. Having first been there in 1983 to cover the Mujahideen revolution, she enters the country again in 2004 after 21 years with great trepidation. By now she has remarried and settled in Bhurban, Pakistan. Zahrah Nasir’s home there is located in the hills of Bhurban, pristine as they are. She has apparently found peace at last and also her true identity—an identity which is very much constituted by her Afghan experience. It is as if her encounter with the Mujahideen has been an initiation into a world where a part of her belonged all along. Zahrah Nasir’s connection with Afghanistan is somehow bound with the fact that Afghanistan is a mountainous country with strong winds blowing across it.

Continue reading this review