Afghanistan: Kabul glistens with glorious glass | World news

 

• Tuesday 1 March 2011 14.00 GMT

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Cake walk ... a boy carries a cake decoration to a wedding in Kabul. Photograph: Beth Wald/Aurora

Back in Kabul after a three-year absence I was again injected with that special energy this amazing city exudes. The energy that carries me through the daily pitfalls that seem to multiply overnight, like the barrier of dirt and stones and ditch that appeared just outside my gate – surprise – the other morning. The power company was after another severed cable. Just about every sidewalk in the city, no matter whether it's just a dirt path or a professionally laid cement-and-tile walkway, has suffered this fate, and the rupture is never closed over as it was before. It's like the power company's signature of duty done.

The first thing that caught my attention with a jolt was the construction boom transforming the flat grazing land north of the city, where I used to ride my horse every morning, into a futuristic city of six- to eight-storey buildings walled with coloured glass panels and decorated with works of art worthy of the thousand-and-one-nights imagination of Arthur Rackham. These rise up above the new six-lane highways, cutting through the former one- and two-storey mud homes thrown up by families fleeing from the fighting in south Kabul in the 1980s.

Brilliant neon signs on their roofs announce "Wedding Hall". They enable what might be Afghanistan's biggest single business enterprise. These affairs, costing thousands of dollars – mostly borrowed – burden the groom for years ahead. It's best to see these extravaganzas at night, for they are lit up all around with fairytale shapes encrusted with thousands of coloured lights.

Parallel in grandeur are the extravagant, palace-like edifices rising along too-narrow streets in Sherpur. These multi-family dwellings are built with each floor encircled with scallops, curves and doily-like edgings of multiple colours and variations rising up to culminate in a gazebo to scan the city.

Do Afghans have their DNA laced with Mughal genes? Am I in the presence of royalty? Have Afghans been released from a spell that confined them for centuries in little mud-brick houses along little packed-earth lanes? These palaces – for that is what they are – glitter with tiny mirrors set in the ceilings of porches; they dance in the haze of the city's pollution and dust, and they compel my imagination to set them in another time and place.