It was in 1985 that McCurry's portrait of Sharbat appeared on the cover of National Geographic. Sharbat was barely 13 years old then, living in a refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan. McCurry had graduated in photography from Philadelphia University and had headed for India in the late '70s—a decade marked by instability in the subcontinent and hence a fertile ground for the budding photojournalist. Making India his base, McCurry made innumerable trips to Pakistan and Afghanistan, taking pictures for all the major Western dailies and weeklies. Afghanistan was on the boil, with the Soviet Red Army engaged in a fierce battle with the mujahideen. City after city in Afghanistan was turning into rubble under relentless mortar shelling. The refugee camps that were set up along the Afghan-Pakistan border would become McCurry's karmakshetra—where he returned repeatedly over the next two decades, trying to find stories of survival in the midst of destruction, horror and death.