In 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.