Writer Nadeem Aslam, whose recent piece in Granta was widely circulated in the blogosphere, is the author of the prize-winning novel Maps for Lost Lovers. Nadeem took these photographs in Afghanistan. In one photograph in front of me, a rotting carcass of a train stands in front of a sprawling decrepit building. I’m told wryly that this is the only train in Afghanistan. It used to run in the grounds of the Presidential Palace. In another picture, a woman in a blue burqa sits on the stone floor, and above her loom several panels of stunning tile-work. The picture on the top shows the mosque that Shah Jehan erected beside Babur’s grave in Kabul. The brown wall you see is the enclosure wall of the garden that Babur had built. The image above is of a pigeon tower in Herat: they are built to allow pigeons to roost at night. The photographer says: “Every few weeks their droppings are collected (notice the small arched opening at ground level on the right side of the tower) to be used as fertilizer. A ladder is used to go up to the tower for maintenance purposes.” Anyone who has read anything that Nadeem has written will recognize his vision of the world in these images. Who else would keep finding so much blue–the blue of the sky, the blue of tiles and the bottles–and would pit it like this against the brown of the devastated earth, the walls, and the endless graves?

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