Of late, I have developed a hatred for ’best sellers’. These often prove a wastage of time. A ’best seller’ becomes particulaly an irritating imposition on one’s time when it achieves the status of ’controversial book’. ’The Bookseller of Kabul’ by Åsne Seierstad, however, was no exception three years ago when it began making headlines.

I read it when it had become best seller as well as ’controversial’. I simply hated the book. Åsne invoking all the Western prejudices about Afghan society and blending them with sensationalism, had endeavoured to delineate the dirty US occupation of Afghanistan as ’Whiteman’s burden’, West should not hesitate to shed. This is not to assert that propaganda commissars at Langley commissioned Åsne Seierstad to deliver a sensational book about Afghanistan that audience in West would find easy to lap. However, it was a fantastic coincidence that while George/ Barbra Bush(es) were telling telling West that Afghan women deserved pity, Åsne was penning down these lines: ’I have never been as angry as I was with the Khan family, and I have rarely quarrelled as much as I did there. Nor have I had the urge to hit anyone as much as I did there. The same thing was continually provoking me: the manner in which men treated women’.

Honestly, I have never been as angry as I was with the reading of Åsne’s ’best seller’. Nor have I had the urge to hit anyone as much as I did reading this book. The same thing was continually provoking me: the manner in which a quasi-fascist journalist distorts facts and shows disrespect to a culture and country like Afghanistan.

While she was continuously provoked by treatment of Afghan women but a brutal warlord Ahmed Shah Masood, responsible for countless killings and rapes, remains her hero: ’’He was chrismatic, deeply religious, but also pro-western. He spoke French and wanted to modernise the country’’. However, the communists remain her villains even if the ’communist dictators’ proved the best rulers for women rights. Similarly, Taliban are demonised: ’’Before the Taliban withdrew they poisoned wells and blew up water pipes and dams’ (Åsne could have addedd that Taliban did according to the manuals provided by the USA in 1980s). But not a word about ’Mujahideen’ who reduced Kabul to ashes after Dr Naguib quit the government.

Åsne might have punished the poor readers with more best sellers (she has authored two more books but none as best selling as the one under discussion here) and might have become the leading Norwegian Orientalist had ’Sultan’ as well as Afghan society as savage as portrayed by Åsne. Instead of revenge and fatwa against Åsne, Rais decided to reply a book with another book. Thus wrote Shah Mohammad Rais, ’SULTAN Khan’, his ’’Once Upon a Time There Was a Bookseller In Kabul’. However, it was not merely for the sake of scholistic pleasure Rais has come up with a book. It was mainly because Åsne’s book reduced his happy family into a ’deeply unhappy family’.

Rais recounts: ’’My wife’s brother was the first person to become a victim of Åsne Seierstad’s book. The father of one of his classmates read book and he retold parts of it to his son. His son immediately realized that one of his classmates--- that is, my brother-in-law ---was a relative of the book’s protagonist. This is where the problem started. Soon all my brother-in-law’s classmates are told that his father sold his sister to the bookseller, to buy two affordable women for him and his brother, and that the bookseller bribed him and his father so that he could spend the night with his sister before they were married. He was hurt by all this and it led to fights and brawls between him an is classmates’.

Before going into more exposures about Åsne’s best seller in Rais’ book, let me confess that book, if not written by a ghost writer, is strikingly impressive in its style. Rais narrates his story to a couple of old Trolls sent by the king and queen of Trolls who lord a Troll kingdom in the north of Norway. A 100-page, quick-read , the book contains all the elements of a saga: trolls, tragedy, love, hate, revenge and a happy ending.

One by one, Rais not merely exposes, what he calls, Åsne’s lies but also attempts to enlighten his reader as to the history and culture of Afghanistan. But it is, in fact, an attempt to contradict Åsne’s story. ’’There were eight women in the house when Åsne Seierstad came to live with us: my mother, my sisters, my two wives, my two widowed cousins and Najiba, a Hazara woman who worked as a house maid. Several times during her stay, Åsne Seierstad visited Najiba’s house, and that is where she learned about the difficult situation Afghani women are in’’, Rais says and suspects that any mention of Najiba was carefully avoided as concocted story about ’’Leila’’ would look meaningless. The story about ’’Leila’s’’ misery is pure invention, he says, and explains that not merely ’’Leiila’’ but all his children’s education suffered during Taliban’s period. As soon as situation improved, not only ’’Leila’’ but all his children were back in schools.

Rais tells us how Åsne tilts and angles the facts just to concoct a juicy story. For instance, the anecdote about the school curriculum. She goes on to list the questions ’’Fazal’’ had to answer in his class room: Can God die? Can God talk? And s on’ But she does not tell that this was from Taliban- era text book that was taken off the curriculum even before Åsne came to Kabul. ’’A liar suffers bad memory’’, Rais comments with a grin.

He thinks,’’Åsne Seierstad makes fun of the union between people and puts price tags on women as if they were cattle. She even sets their value low.’’ Contradicting Åsne’s yet another cock and bull story, Rais tells us: ’’When my sister got married she was twenty year of age, I was eighteen. Åsne Seierstad claims in her book that my parents sold my sister for 300 pounds to be able to pay for ’Sultan Khan’s education. But there has always been free education in Afghanistan!’’.

Though the book in all its details is worth reading yet the best part, retrospectively, is Åsne’s email Rais got on 20 Aug 2003:

Dear Shah,

Osne.

Well, dear Åsne Seierstad, the bookseller has bidden exactly what you bade him. He just is now telling ’every body that everything is invented and untrue’.