How to tell the story of Afghanistan? How to condense the country’s five-decade tragic struggle – from a monarchy on the cusp of modernisation, through a palace coup, Soviet occupation, a mujahideen takeover and even harsher Taliban regime, to a nascent democracy under the watch of western soldiers, only for it all to collapse again into authoritarian Islamic fundamentalist rule – in 400-odd pages?
Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s veteran chief international correspondent, witnessed many of these events unfold first hand from her room at the Intercontinental Kabul, Afghanistan’s first five-star hotel and the subject of her Baillie Gifford longlisted book, The Finest Hotel in Kabul. She checked in for the first time on Christmas Day 1988, as Soviet troops were withdrawing at the tail end of the Cold War. Her last visit was two years ago. And it is through the hotel’s ecosystem that she examines the tumult of Afghanistan’s recent past: the housekeepers, cooks, waiters, receptionists, security guards, bellboys, engineers and managers who ensured that, throughout it all, the Intercontinental never once shut its doors. (It remains open to this day.)
Mohamed Aqa had been conscripted into military service as a child during a clash against rebels. But aged 19, he starts working at the hotel, rising from junior waiter to restaurant manager. Abida’s exquisite dumplings land her a job as the hotel’s first female chef in 2001, when women are allowed back to work, five years after she was forced to leave a job at a different hotel when the Taliban first took power. The engineer Amanullah, “Mr Fix-It”, is tasked with patching up the plumbing and electrics as the hotel crumbles amid gunfire, rockets, or neglect. Malalai, a young woman raised during the post-2001 years when women’s opportunities suddenly opened up, remains determined to keep working at the hotel even after the Taliban return. Sadeq, the young front-desk manager, is forced to flee to the US less than a year after starring in the hotel’s first Facebook publicity video in 2020. And elderly Hazrat, the housekeeper, who can still recall his meticulous training from back when the Intercon was part of the global Intercontinental chain, remembers the golden years when popstars and princes first graced its ballrooms, and the plush luxury of the hotel’s towels, now threadbare after decades of wear.
The Finest Hotel in Kabul weaves together their stories – personal ambitions, tragedies, loves, triumphs, losses – against a backdrop of near-constant political turmoil. Other characters with more famous names come and go. The music legend Ahmad Zahir, known as the “Elvis of Afghanistan”, performs at the Intercon; 40 years and multiple bloody coups later, so does the controversial singer and TV personality Aryana Sayeed. The one-eyed Taliban leader Mullah Omar mysteriously turns up. Osama Bin Laden, known enigmatically as the “Saudi visitor”, drifts through the corridors like a ghost. Mohammad Zāhir Shāh, the last king of Afghanistan, who first opened the hotel in 1969 before being deposed by his cousin in a palace coup, returns to Kabul after almost three decades in exile to usher in a new post-Taliban era of openness and democracy.
And reappearing again and again is the journalist the staff call Lyse Doucet, “always one word – as they had heard it on the BBC’s translated Dari and Pashto bulletins”, who writes her copy by candlelight when the hotel power goes out and tells the staff that a telephone connection in Kabul is more important than a marriage. Doucet is no protagonist. Nor is she even a narrator. That honour goes to the people unable to flit in and out of the drama on international flights, who continue to make the beds and cook the food and sweep up the pieces long after the eyes of the world have moved on to a different story.
Time flows differently at the Intercontinental Kabul. Aside from a brief prelude set in summer 2021 – an opulent wedding disrupted as the Taliban retake the city, the sobbing bride fleeing in her glittering green dress – Doucet lays out the history chronologically. But it has a habit of repeating itself. Gunmen storm the building. Staff lose colleagues and family members in terror attacks. Windows get broken, then replaced, then broken again. New hotel managers promise renovations; new rulers promise new dawns. “On postage stamps stored in drawers, the king’s head was rubbed out,” writes Doucet. “Carpet weavers started knotting the new leader’s face into their rugs.”
For the narrators of this tale, the passage of time becomes a challenge: how to mark the different eras? By whether cocktails are permitted in the bar or banned under Islamic law. By the precise rules for use of the swimming pool: no women, no tight swimming trunks, the obligation to get out of the water between 1pm and 2pm for prayers. By the chandeliered Kandahar ballroom, which becomes a venue for concerts, weddings, the final of Miss Afghanistan, then is used for a warlord general to swear his oath of office, for the Taliban mullahs to debate whether to hand over Bin Laden to the Americans, and for hundreds of fledgling members of a new assembly to get a crash-course in how to be an MP in a budding democracy.
“As Afghanistan lurched through decades of trial and terror, laced with bright but brief beginnings, the Intercon was an unbreakable constant,” writes Doucet. “It never gave in, it never gave up; the Intercon was a very Afghan hotel.” There is a dreamlike quality to her writing, to the leitmotifs of these emphatically un-dreamlike events. The iconic letter K for Kabul on the hotel roof, still kicking as dust and debris settles around it. The dumplings – not too spicy, not too bland – served up to guests, staff and soldiers, no matter who is in charge. Mujahideen stuck in the entrance’s revolving door – a metaphor for revolutions and stalled progress. Beards grown and shaved; sequinned gowns exchanged for burqas exchanged for coloured headscarves. The crooning ballads of Afghanistan’s Elvis replaced by calls to prayer.
But for the Intercon staff, this is not a dream they can wake up from. Doucet has subtitled her book “a people’s history of Afghanistan.” The global news headlines play out on the most human levels. In one breathtakingly haunting moment, Abida pauses from learning how to make the perfect biscuit to reminisce about casting her first ever vote, in 2004, slipping the ballot into the box with tears in her eyes. “It seemed to be yet more proof that a brighter future lay ahead.” Her daughter is part of that brighter future, educated and successful, teaching at a girls’ primary school by the time the Taliban storm Kabul again in 2020, ruining a bride’s wedding day and undoing all the hopes that first ballot was meant to represent. Another vignette, from 2018, sees an ageing Hazrat hide with colleagues in a cleaners’ closet after terrorists start firing machine guns in the dining room, massacring guests and staff alike. “They were still scrubbing blood from the walls and ceilings two weeks on,” Doucet recalls through Hazrat’s eyes.
What we are left with is not so much a history, but a series of biographies – of individuals whose names will never feature in news bulletins, and of the hotel around which their lives revolve. The sense of intimacy Doucet creates, made possible only by the trust built up over years with her subjects, turns a dizzying string of key dates and turning points into something more akin to immersive theatre. It’s epic, told on an intricately domestic scale, through tablecloths and faulty telephone lines and the most luxurious of towels.
What do we learn from it all? Amid the frenzied revelry in the run-up to the Soviet’s invasion on Christmas Day 1979, Doucet writes, “spies and envoys, expatriates and Afghans, let their hair and their guard down” on the Intercon dance floor, demanding each night that the band play “Hotel California” by The Eagles. “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” Surely, this is true for Doucet, whose longstanding love of the hotel over more than 40 years shines through in the meticulous, almost painfully vivid descriptions of furniture, murals, menus and staff uniforms.
But, as recounted in this book, it seems true for Afghanistan too, a country always on the brink of promise, always dragged back to blood and bullets. If there is an underlying theme amid the tangled strands of memory, politics and power dynamics, it is one of resilience. Hazrat, who remembers every celebrity who sparkled through the corridors, every glimmer of hope, never gives up on his hotel, even after the Taliban take it over once more. “He still believed, with all his being, that the Intercontinental could one day be the finest hotel in Kabul again”.
[Further reading: Arundhati Roy’s “Mother Mary” is a fierce chronicle of self-invention]
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