The Taliban and I

About the BookAN EXTRAORDINARY FIRST-PERSON ACCOUNT OF AN INDIAN BRIDES ENCOUNTER WITH THE TALIBANIn September 2013, the body of a woman was found in the Paktika province of Afghanistan, riddled with twenty bullets. She was identified as Sushmita Bandyopadhyay from Kolkata. The story in the area was that she was killed by Taliban militants, although the organisation formally denied being involved. Subsequently, the police arrested two men suspected of killing her, both of them members of the Haqqani militant network. The murder marked the tragic and violent end of a story that began in the second half of the 1980s in the city of Kolkata, when she met, fell in love with, and finally married, in 1988, a man named Jaanbaz Khan. Jaanbaz was an itinerant door-to-door salesman from Afghanistan, one of many from that country who, have over the twentieth century, been known as Kabuliwallahs in India. Sushmita and Jaanbaz married in secret and escaped to Afghanistan. And this was where her encounters with the horrors described in this book began.About the AuthorSushmita Bandyopadhyay married Afghan businessman Jaanbaz Khan in Calcutta in 1988 and moved to Afghanistan soon afterwards. The Taliban tried to subject her to the oppressive rules they had set for Afghan women, but she rebelled. In 1995 she risked her life to escape their clutches and return to Calcutta. She wrote the bestselling Kabuliwalar Bangali Bou (A Kabuliwalas Bengali Wife) in 1997 and Mullah Omar, Taliban O Ami (Mullah Omar, the Taliban and I) in 2000. In 2013 she returned to Afghanistan, where she was killed, presumably by the Taliban.About the TranslatorArunava Sinha translates classic, modern, and contemporary Bengali fiction and non-fiction from Bangladesh and India into English. He also translates fiction from English into Bengali. Over seventy of his translations have been published so far in India, the UK, and the USA. He has won Indias top translation prize, the Crossword Award for translated books, twice. He teaches at Ashoka University, where he is also the co-director of the Ashoka Centre for Translation and is the Books Editor at Scroll.in.