Book Excerpt: Enakshi Sengupta's 'Escape From Kabul' Is A Visceral Tale Of Survival

It is 2021. Taliban retakes Afghanistan’s capital after twenty years, and Kabul descends into fear and uncertainty. For Anjali and her four colleagues at the Anglo-American University of Kabul, the takeover marks the beginning of a desperate struggle for survival. Forced into hiding and hunted for their association with the university, the five women navigate a world where trust is scarce and betrayal could come at any moment. Their only goal: to escape alive.

Enakshi Sengupta's Escape from Kabul is both a gripping first-person account of women in crisis and a haunting meditation on freedom, courage, and the will to reclaim one’s voice when everything seems lost. Here is an excerpt of the book.

Book excerpt: Escape From Kabul

On an average day, the journey from Shahr-e Naw, where the compound was, to the airport should not have taken more than nineteen minutes; at the maximum, it would take forty minutes. The route was simple: pass Shahr-e Naw to Akbar Wazir Khan, on to Azizi Plaza and then the straight road towards the airport. 

Minutes passed, and they felt like long, tedious hours. Everyone was looking at the car’s dashboard clock intently, but the destination was not in sight. 

Cathy and Anjali were not familiar with the roads or their names. Cathy had gone to the airport twice, bundled inside a car with two soft-skin vehicles guarding the one in which she was traveling. Anjali had come only a few months back, and the road to the airport was not familiar to her at all. She did spot some blue-glassed buildings, one of which looked like a plaza or a mall, but she couldn’t read the letters in Farsi. 

It was when the car took a diversion and drove towards the Avesta hospital, passed the university campus of a private university near Taimani and then took a turn towards Market Road, that Nadia muttered loudly, ‘Why is he taking this diversion? This is not the route to the airport. This is a completely wrong turn towards Nooran Hospital. We are not meant to take this road. What is happening?’ 

Everyone looked at her in confusion. She leaned forward and asked the driver, ‘Why did you take Ahmad Shah Baba Road? This doesn’t go towards the airport.’

The driver kept driving and focused on the road ahead.

‘Hello! I am speaking to you, could you please answer!’

Her voice became shrill as she asked the question again. 

Everyone was holding their breath, the air inside the car was thick with apprehension, and the smell of sweat was mixed with fear. Even Fawzia’s son, who was playing with a plastic toy, stayed still, frozen in his place.

Zohra’s husband, who was sitting beside the driver, now placed his hand on his shoulder, understood the situation and politely asked, ‘Nasir Jan, are you confused? Do you know the road to the airport? If you want, I can drive the vehicle, I don’t mind.’ 

‘We must hurry, this is just causing us delay, after this, the crowd will start swelling on the road to the airport, and we will be stranded,’ said Zohra’s husband. 

The driver turned towards him, gave him a stern look and, in a low voice, let out a growl, which, when translated by others, was asking her husband to sit quietly and not to disturb him. He said he knew what he was doing and was doing exactly what he had been instructed to do. 

Zohra turned towards Cathy and said in a steel-cold voice, ‘I hope you realize that your plan has failed. We are knee-deep in muck, and I am sure you don’t have a way out of this. You couldn’t foresee this, could you? Your contacts are not helping, it seems. You have put us all in danger, including the life of this small boy. Well done! Bravo!’ 

No sooner had she spoken than the car came to a halt. Two men opened the door, one in the front and one beside them, and pushed them aside roughly to get into the car.

Protests didn’t help; their cold stare said enough.

Fawzia let out a wail.

‘Ya Allah!’ 

Their get-up was good enough to speak for who they were and to which side they belonged. The men were huge in stature; their muddied shirts sat tautly across their shoulders where they had placed a checkered cloth to rest their rifles. Their long hair was matted and coiled under their small skull caps. Their kohl-rimmed eyes were bloodshot and rheumy. Their shoes were dirty, carrying the dust of hilly tracks with them. 

Cathy shook her head, buried her face in her hand and kept rocking to and fro, muttering to herself: ‘What have I done, what have I done?’ 

One of the men turned towards her menacingly and told her to shut up. 

Anjali, who was paralysed with dread, looked at Abhay’s smiling face on her phone’s screensaver and thought, This is how you want me to come to you? This is going to be a violent one, just a prayer, make it quick and painless for me, can you do that? 

Everyone in the car knew their escape plan had gone awry. As the dust whipped up behind the speeding car, they all saw their dream of being safe at home blow away. They had nowhere to go, and Kabul had fallen.
The car meandered through lanes and by-lanes while the passengers inside sat helplessly. There was no movement; ten people in an SUV were not an easy squeeze at the best of times, and now it felt like they were helpless sardines in a can. 

Extracted from Enakshi Sengupta's "Escape from Kabul", published by Harper Collins India.