Where Colorful Birds Sing.(Book Review)

The moment Saira Shah and her camera crew glimpsed the small mud house in northern Afghanistan, they knew something awful had happened there. "We all felt it," she writes in her new memoir, "The Storyteller's Daughter" (272 pages. Knopf). "It had left a residue, as tangible as a smell you can't get rid of--a kick of ammonia." In the courtyard sat three little girls dressed in colorful veils, who told Shah their story: a group of Taliban soldiers had ordered the family to leave so the troops could use the house as their headquarters. When the girls' mother resisted, the soldiers shot her before her children's eyes and then stayed with the girls for two days. "I was sure that something had happened to them after their mother was killed," writes Shah. "But I couldn't bring myself to broach the subject."

Shah, a British-Afghan journalist, captured her interview with Fawzia, Fairuza and Amina in her spring 2001 documentary "Beneath the Veil," which examined the Taliban's oppression and mistreatment of women. But in "The Storyteller's Daughter," Shah steps back to put such events in a broader context. She takes readers on a sweeping journey through several less familiar Afghanistans: the idyllic land described by her father, an Afghan writer; the war-ravaged country of her adult travels and the Afghanistan evoked in ancient parables and tales, which Shah deftly weaves through her own narrative. The result is an engrossing, elegantly written work that's part personal journey--"to reconcile my incompatible worlds of East and West"--part literary adventure and part insightful political history.

Shah, who was born in Kent, England, grew up mesmerized by her father's tales of Paghman, his aristocratic family's seat in Afghanistan for 900 years. He described fountains that flung diamonds into mosaic pools, pomegranates bursting with rubies and colorful birds singing from fruit-laden trees. Though Shah's mother was Indian, her culture was entirely subsumed by her husband's. "As far as my father was concerned, his offspring were pure Afghan," Shah writes.

Gripped with curiosity, Shah made her first trip to Afghanistan as a journalist when she was 21. Dressed as a boy, in a black shalwar kameez, she sneaked into the Soviet-occupied country and hiked the Hindu Kush with a band of mujahedin, who knew all along she was female. She paints a picture of skilled warriors who nevertheless lose their way in the country's unnavigable mountains--the same mountains where some ...