Obituary: Nancy Dupree died on September 10th

SHE cut a curious figure in the bazaars of Peshawar, in Pakistan, in the 1990s: a tiny figure in salwar kameez with fluffy white hair, a sweet doll’s face and, when needed, the mouth of a stevedore. Nancy Dupree was looking for papers. Any papers. Magazines, UN reports, newspapers produced by rival factions of the mujahideen, posters, comics, photographs. It didn’t matter if they had been used to light a fire, or wrap meat; if they were legible, she wanted them. Any goddamn thing, as long as it had to do with Afghanistan.

Her task was one she would never have started on, had she not fallen crazily in love with that poor, war-ravaged, beautiful land. She was reconstructing, document by document, the recent history of Afghanistan from the Soviet invasion in 1979. Those were times to pass over in silence, as far as Afghanistan’s textbooks were concerned: the years of Soviet occupation, the rise of the warlords, the American invasion and the Taliban takeover, a period of such chaos that even she, who had lived there for decades, had left for Peshawar and America. But she had not forgotten.