Under fire: Pamela Constable in Iraq; (above) the book cover

The sinking sun cast a gloom over the Iraqi highway Pamela Constable was driving down. The Washington Post correspondent, parachuted into the strife-torn country, had left Baghdad early on an August morning last year for Basra, the southern city where riots had erupted in the wake of severe fuel and electricity shortages.

Constable needed to get there fast and it was nearly dusk. She asked the driver to step on the gas when the shots rang out.

As a veteran news hound who spent “most of the past two decades hopping among global trouble spots,” she was no stranger to the crack of assault rifles. But this time, the whizzing of the bullets sounded dangerously close.

Before she knew it, her driver swerved off the highway, trying to flee the gunmen chasing them in a car. For what seemed like an eternity, Constable’s car bounced along a dirt road before jerking to a stop in a mud-walled farmyard, with one tyre shot out.

The farm family, though taken aback, took the American journalist and her two Iraqi companions in. What emerged from the night she spent with the family was an intimate glimpse of life, penned by Constable, in post-Saddam Iraq, where tribal traditions of protecting the “guests” suppressed, at least for once, the intense hatred Iraqis now feel for Westerners, especially Americans.

A year on, Constable — Pam to friends and colleagues — seemed to cherish the experience as she spoke to me by satellite phone from Kabul, her current port of call. “It’s not always you look out of the window of your car and see gunmen shooting at you,” Constable, 52, says, with a chuckle.

Her brush with death, however, finds no mention in Fragments of Grace, her moving, just-out book on her “search for humanity from Kashmir to Kabul,” as the title says. And for obvious reasons. Iraq does not come within the geographical or political ambit of the region she talks of in her book.

Moreover, she was forbidden by her publisher from stepping outside the limit of 1,50,000 words. And she had loads of things to say about India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal — the countries she has criss-crossed in the last five years. First as the Washington Post’s bureau chief in Delhi and now in Kabul where she opened the newspaper’s office after the Taliban regime collapsed in January 2002.

Constable had always wanted to be a journalist ever since William E. Merriss had taught her to love words when she was in the ninth grade. Along with her parents, she dedicated the book to her teacher who died three years ago.

But being a foreign correspondent — which she has been since 1983 — is not easy in these troubled times especially when you are a woman. “It’s often a disadvantage because people cannot see or hear you and some don’t want to meet you at all,” she says, referring to her days in the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.

There are other problems as well. In Afghanistan, for example, there were only two public toilets for women in the entire capital.

Luckily for her, there was “no lack of bombed-out ruins and I soon became shameless about ducking inside them for a moment,” she says in her book.

Traversing the open desert was “trickier”. But she was unruffled. After half a dozen trips or so, she “memorised the locations of suitable boulders and culverts near the highways”.

She learnt what it’s to be a woman in Afghanistan when she ran out of tampons. She combed Kabul frantically for a fresh supply, only to receive “bewildered headshakes” from the pharmacists.

Tired and angry, she finally “ripped up” several T-shirts she picked up from a street stall, cursing “a country where women’s needs simply did not exist”.

She presses on, no matter what. Like her male colleagues, she’s roughed it in foreign countries, at times all by herself. “I don’t have water or electricity often in Kabul, but it never bothers me,” she says.

Constable was “basking among the faithful millions” at the Kumbh Mela when a massive earthquake ripped through Gujarat, flattening the teeming city of Bhuj and killing thousands. It took her all of 24 hours to hop from one scene to another.

But being in Bhuj was not easy then — a dark and silent city without power, water and food. There was nowhere to stay except at a small hotel still left standing. The building had cracks snaking along the walls, with the lobby strewn with shattered glass.

Like several of us, she stayed there, spending the freezing wintry night on the sidewalk as the manager would not let us sleep in our rooms for fear the damaged hotel might collapse in aftershocks swaying the ravaged city. “Remember the cows we slept with on the sidewalk?” she says now, with a laugh.

But standing in the ruins of the city back then, Constable was devastated. It was too much for her to see tiny hands sticking out of the rubble of a block that had collapsed on a Republic Day school parade. As she scribbled stories on paper by candlelight and dictated them “as fast as possible” over shared satellite phones, she felt “a sick sadness at the duty of covering” the enormous tragedy.

In Fragments of Grace, her second book after the one she co-authored on Chile under Gen. Augusto Pinochet, she writes of the haunting images of Bhuj stuck in her mind. Dazed families slumped in front of flattened huts; a young man poking hopefully through the remains of his mother’s kitchen; frantic parents of buried schoolchildren begging journalists to send for bulldozers.

These are the memories she cannot shake off even when ensconced in her office in Kabul today. When she thinks of India, she says she cannot help but think of Bhuj. “It was really awful. I will never forget that. It had very big impact on me.”

The book, based on her experiences and travels as a correspondent in South Asia, has two chapters on India, including one on Kashmir. But it’s long on Afghanistan, where she has spent the better part of the last five years covering the rise and fall of the Taliban. “It’s been most dramatic,” she says.

Afghanistan, today, is a sharp contrast to Iraq. Unlike Iraqis, most Afghans want the US-led forces to stay on in that country. “Many feel if foreign troops were to leave the country, there could be a civil war,” Constable says.

Isn’t she sick and tired of living out of suitcases for more than two decades? Yes, she says without thinking. There were moments when she yearned to get back to her roots; to be with her ageing parents; to lead a “normal” life.

The problem is, she gets “restless” if she spends more than three months at a time in the US. She misses the dust and grime and the thrills of living life on the razor’s edge.

When home, she is also afraid of being “lured into somnolence and status symbol and debt”. She dreads going to work in “a building full of padded cubicles and insincere smiles, where the atmosphere feels more like a bank or an insurance company than a force for truth”.

To many of her colleagues, she is an inspiration. “I admire her greatly. It’s extremely rare to find a fearless reporter who is also a gifted writer,” Emily Messner, who is on the Post’s foreign desk, says.

Twenty years on the move, nevertheless, has taken its toll on her. With conflicting emotions searing her mind, she wakes up in the middle of the night at times, shaken by the nightmares.

When she looked at the bruised, barely recognisable face of a photographer killed in an ambush in a Jalalabad morgue, she thought it could easily have been hers. Standing in front of the dead colleague, she pictured herself lying in a coffin.

In and out of several marriages, Constable regrets not having children of her own as she approaches “an age when many women would be sending their children off to college”. When she’s not chasing a story, she busies herself with stray cats and dogs that she picks up from the streets and lives with.

But for all that, Constable would not give up her brand of journalism. If she were to live her life all over again, she would be a foreign correspondent.