Our two-story house in Kandahar stood inside a compound with a garden of colors where roses of many kinds lived, competing in fragrance with the chambeli, the jasmine plant. On summer nights, the garden also brimmed with the laughter of us, the children, on bicycles, playing hide and seek beneath the stars.

When winter came, the rhythm shifted. Evenings began after supper, the electricity generator shut off and the lantern lit for warmth and light. The flickering flame would stretch the shadow of the past across the wall of the present, as my siblings and I gathered by the adults.

The stories shared around that lantern were not fairy tales, but inheritance. Adults spoke of many things. How someone escaped a raid. How another someone never came back. How the sound of a car slowing outside meant the worst—being killed. For them, perhaps, it was their way of reckoning, with a war they had carried into peace, and with a peace still trembling on the edge of war.

I had been listening to these stories since turning six, or maybe even earlier. In 2002, however, when Afghanistan was promised a new beginning, only to end up in rubble, I began listening more closely. Something in me had opened—the way it does when your own life begins to echo the stories you've always heard. The American invasion in 2001 became my reference point for war’s meaning.

Sometimes it began with something small, a radio playing an old song, or someone quietly saying how lucky we were to have this house. From there, the memories would awaken: my grandmother’s story passed to my father, his to my mother, and then to my siblings.

How they had escaped from Kabul while the rockets were falling. How they had not known if we would survive the road. How a family we would have never met took us in and gave us warm food.

We would watch our elders’s faces in the lantern light, tensing as the stories reached that sharp point of unknowing. Our own bodies would stiffen with theirs; vessels holding fear. But then, as their faces would soften towards the end—the ending where they didn’t die—we would relax too, sometimes getting on our knees as if leaning into relief. We clung to the parts where our families had made it through. It was because of these moments that we wanted to hear those stories again and again.

Sometimes, one of us would interrupt. “Tell the funny part,” we’d say, already giggling. The one about Ana Bibi. My grandmother, asking, “Is this rocket coming from the right side or the wrong side?”

This would make everyone laugh.

Among the many stories one returned often, even more so after my grandfather died in 2007, when I was ten. In its telling and retelling, that story became more than true—it gave continuity to life, underscoring how the past is remembered, the present felt, and the future anticipated.

My mother told it with quiet reverence. My grandfather had been a leftist writer, among the first to embrace modernity in the 1950s. He supported the communist project in its early promise, reforms, and a vision for a better future.

But after the bloody coup and Hafizullah Amin’s rise, that promise curdled. Friends disappeared. Dissent became dangerous. He had written against the regime, and one day, word came. His name was on Amin’s list.

In the weeks that followed, each time a car edged too close to their gate, my grandfather retreated into his study, crouching beneath the desk, lantern in hand. Descriptions of the heavy velvet curtain and the earthy smell gave my mother’s story an almost magical aura. That image, though never photographed, imprinted itself on me. A dark room. A burning light. The slow terror of footsteps. I do not know if it happened exactly that way. But memory in Afghanistan is not evidence. It is transmission.

In Afghanistan, each poet gives his pain to the land, or lets the land’s pain speak through him. My grandfather was one of them. He wrote during the early days of Afghanistan’s turbulent history, a time when fear came not just from war, but from the silence it demanded. Years later, when he was already living in exile in Denmark, his words still echoed in Kandahar. My mother remembered them.

At one point in the story my mother liked slowing down, and from those lived experiences that she carried in memory alone, she would emerge laughing and crying with the verses from my grandfather’s most well-known poem:

Caged in the dark night I was,

A victim of the chains pulled tight, I was.

Hands bound, lips sewn, in waves of torture,

Stuck in a hellish oven of harassment and abuse.

Cold sighs rose, defiant, to the skies;

My patience is like a shooting star towards the galaxy.

My grief went violent, beyond what my worn heart could endure.

In my chest, rebellious dreams could no longer fit,

Wild cries like groans set off.

That poem, she’d say, was written in the days when Hafizullah Amin Taraki's communist party had taken control—a time of extreme fear. At the time people were being whisked away from classrooms, in the middle of a lecture. One of my mother’s teachers was thrown from a helicopter, a warning to anyone with a mind too sharp, a voice too loud. Those who remained were not in chains, but restrained by fear. The regime went after the intellectuals, the mullahs, anyone they thought could become a rallying point, a nucleus around which resistance might form. And then a glimmer of hope, or so they thought, and my grandfather continued his poem.

I don’t know whether someone heard my secret plea,

Or judged my groans as immodest cries of ungratefulness.

Clamor rose on the podium of the universe.

An adventure rose to heaven’s home;

With red monsters, black too, that flowed.

At every step they roared with anger.

I knew not then who stepped near–

To rescue me, or strike me with pretenses of giving

Everyone that came crushed the bones of my helpless body,

But at the same time, they broke the chains that snaked around me.

And so, at the breaking of the chains, I laugh,

But for each bone breaking, I cry.

The Soviets invaded, and they began breaking old chains, but they also broke bones. My grandfather went on breathing, but in the mirror of history the jail cell he had marginally avoided never closed. It passed down, unlatched, via my aunts, my older siblings, and now it takes the shape of my silence, a silence that pulses like our family’s death drive. After my grandfather, no one believed in idealism.

In Afghanistan, survival builds its house atop the buried bones of idealism. Literally.

I used to think that was just a metaphor, until I read an old article from 1997. A boy named Faizdeen, only 14, had said: “I used to dig for scrap iron…but the Taliban banned us from exporting it to Pakistan when they captured Kabul. So now I dig for bones. There is no other work, and we need the money for food.”

My father used to joke with my grandmother, nudging her to eat more yogurt and milk, “If you don’t keep your bones strong, they won’t sell well later.” I always thought he was being dark for the sake of humor. Only now do I realize his joke had roots. The absurdity was just a disguise. He wasn’t joking. He was remembering—the past bleeding into the present through the cracks in his humor.

We inherit many things: land, names, trauma. But I also inherited my grandfather’s dreams. Whatever intellect I carry, it’s a small fire lit by the same lantern whose light he read under.

In 2007, I saw my grandfather for the first time in a coffin. But I don’t remember mourning his death, I remember feeling pride. He was given a national burial. The governor came. Many of Afghanistan’s renowned poets gathered to recite verses. His funeral was not a mourning of his death but a celebration of his voice.

They said he was a man a hundred years ahead of his time, a father who educated every one of his daughters. They told stories of his poverty, how he couldn’t afford even a single sheet of clean white paper. How he walked the streets and upon finding a blank piece in the trash he picked it up and wrote on it. These stories brought him back to life, each retelling pulling him from the past, giving him breath and flesh. But even then, no one spoke of him in his entirety. His idealism was buried with him for the family's safety. And after him, idealism no longer lived with my family. The war stripped it away, leaving only the habits of survival.

In rebelling, I search for his image. I was forced to quit school at eleven, not that I ever loved it, but by fourteen I began to question everything. Life. War. The meaning of it all. Fear was everywhere, seeping through the walls, hovering over us every night. Airstrikes, suicide bombings, the air and land on fire.

I did feel in my own way: Caged in the dark night I was. And my chains were not that of being just Afghan but of a woman too.

And then I thought of my grandfather, how he was self-taught, how he created a path for himself. Suddenly, that became a path for me too.

This paid off. I became a full-time self-taught student, and in search for the meaning of life, in 2016, I went on to study physics at Arizona State University, eventually becoming a quantum computing researcher at Tufts University. I had made a promise to myself that leaving Afghanistan would mark the end of that chapter. The war and its memories would dissolve with distance.

War had never made sense to me; it was arbitrary, brutal, and incoherent. The clean logic of math and science felt appealing precisely because I could grasp it. I believed that science would help me build a new symbolic order, what Lacan might call the framework through which meaning is stabilized. A clean logic to overwrite the chaos. Even as I dove into quantum theory, however, Afghanistan kept rippling back, like an unresolved equation buried in the wavefunction.

At the lunch table among friends and colleagues, my jokes were always about war—the trademark Afghan dark humor that circles back on itself, where the punchline is a silence that swallows the room. I would laugh alone. While others laughed at their own easy jokes, I didn’t. Easy laughter didn’t come very easily to me.

While others read fantasy to escape reality, I, driven by a neurotic curiosity, reached for Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Freud—to probe it.

Surprisingly, the time away from Afghanistan didn’t take Afghanistan away from me. Instead, it made me see my country in everything I read. Partly, because in the US, Afghanistan is spoken about through the vocabulary of world power, war, strategy, collapse, and rarely, if ever, through the intimate lens of the human. I didn’t notice it at first, but the more I talked to people, the more I began to feel something unsettling inside me. Literature shaped by exile, grief, and repression mirrored a part of me that was still hovering outside language, unclaimed by words.

The Afghan experience, I realized, was not just history, it was psychic. Complex, fractured, buried.

In Afghanistan, I never had to ask what it meant to be Afghan. The question itself didn’t arise. But in the US, I found myself caught in a mirror stage of sorts, not of my own making, but shaped by how Afghanistan was talked about all around me. I was reacting to a reflection I didn’t recognize. And in that reaction, I began to split. A part of me wanted to disappear. Another part wanted to speak, not about policy, but about how Afghanistan felt.

How it smelled at dawn after the Azan was called, when my mother added cardamom to the morning tea and my brother brought fresh doodi bread from the bakery. How it danced in the upbeat songs my father played. How it mourned in my grandfather’s poetry. How it lived in a child’s fear. How it died in a suicide bomb. And how, even then, when a bomb exploded nearby, Afghans knew to open the glass windows quickly -- so the second blast, which often came, wouldn’t shatter them over us. I began to see Afghanistan not as a place left behind, but as something returning, over and over.

It returns in dreams, in the pauses between sentences. My memories speak Pashto, but my thoughts answer in English. In this process, I feel that my spoken English is shaped in such a way that lived experience arrives uncannily, half-recognizable, crossing a border just to reach me.

So, I went deeper in search for voices that echoed the Afghan experience, voices shaped by rupture that spoke in fear, in silences that felt familiar. I became obsessively drawn to narratives haunted by erasure, burial, and longing—that reflected the essential and the unsayable parts of Afghanistan, helping me understand the genre-defying tragedy of a people compelled to sell the remains of humans just to survive.

There is a tragedy and a contradiction in being Afghan: despite having so much history, culture, pride and poetry, our immediate past opens the door to an incomprehensible reality, where some must sell the bones of the dead just to buy bread. It’s a truth hard to hold, an irreconcilable dialectical condition.

And sometimes I wonder, what if those bones belonged to the very intellectuals who once dreamed of a better future? Perhaps they were the remains of those killed by the communists for their idealism, or later by the mujahideen for the same reason.

In 2019, I read Miłosz’s The Captive Mind. He wrote it in postwar Paris, after defecting from Communist Poland. The book felt so connected to my life—its psychic resonances were so familiar—I wondered if it had been written by an Afghan.

Suddenly, I realized something that had never found its signifier: in Afghanistan, our minds were also captive. From the communist regime to the post-2001 government, fear didn’t disappear, it adapted. The instructions were the same, only told by new faces: don’t speak of politics, don’t say what your family thinks, don’t mention the Taliban on the phone, or the Americans either.

When our experiences are not mirrored back, when no one names them, when no one writes them down, they begin to dissolve and disappear. We start to question not just the experience, but in time, we begin to distrust our own interiority. As if the silence around us means the feeling itself is wrong.

Reading that book, among many, I felt the Afghan experience was not just real but legible. Not just tragic but thinkable. Afghanistan could be shown as it lives in the ruined houses of Afghan hearts, with all its beauty and contradictions.

Miłosz describes the Murti-Bing pill, a tranquilizer of the mind, swallowed for peace with contradiction. He wrote of people who surrendered to ideology to survive. I recognized that surrender. My own grandfather’s writings sit in a Moscow basement, unpublished. My family warns me not to bring attention to them.

“Do you want the Taliban to destroy his grave?” they ask.

Against the silence, I think of my grandfather who said, “An Afghan writer shouldn’t look for applause. He must write his books, buy his own books, read his own books.”

My grandfather chose to write regardless of whether he would be read or not.

When I left for the United States in 2016, I thought I had made my choice to live for ideas. But history is not a linear march towards freedom. One's choices are never final, they are tested at every twist and turn.

In 2025, at Tufts, where I worked as a researcher, a student was taken in for writing just an op-ed for Palestine.

I have this habit when I become overwhelmed, when emotions press too hard against the inside of my chest: I write poems. That night, as I felt the space around my own mind begin to enclose, I wrote one—raw and reactive.

I hovered over the “publish” button on Substack, to click or not click. I found myself navigating not survival, but a negotiation between idealism and silence, safety and speech. Not only did I not publish the poem, but instead I deleted my X/Twitter and Instagram accounts because I didn’t want any likes, shares, or posts to be used in any way. And in that moment, I turned away from the person I had worked hard to become.

The old instincts returned. I started watching what I said again. At home, we were taught to stay quiet. Never talk about politics. Never say what your family thinks. Live like two people, one inside the home, another outside it.

There’s a name for that kind of split. In The Captive Mind, Czesław Miłosz calls it ketman: a practiced split between thought and speech that fractures the self, creating a kind of psychological contradictory duality. Under ketman, one performs the lie of the state for so long that they lose touch with their own inner truth. What starts as concealment from others becomes concealment from the self. Over time, even the desire to resist dies.

Whenever we went to the house we learnt the Quran in, or when friends visited, my mother would lean in close, her voice a hush, “Remember, even the walls have ears. Not everything needs to be said.”

Back in Afghanistan, fear had a shape: the sound of a suicide bomber, the rumble of a tank passing, the sudden shadow of a plane above, the silence after a kidnapping. Here in the United States, it’s different but no less present. It's a quiet kind of fear you have to learn all over again, the kind that follows you into your inbox, your social feed, your decision to speak or not.

“Does the past have an expiration date…?” Georgi Gospodinov asks through a character in Time Shelter.

For Afghans, it doesn’t. The past doesn't reverberate through memory and inherited fear, but comes alive in the headlines.

In Pakistan, Afghan families who have lived for decades are being deported overnight. In the US, too, there's talk that Afghans under temporary protected status may soon be deported.

Anger stirs inside me. Afghans are constantly at the mercy of the world. No matter the country, no matter the context, we are always waiting, waiting to be allowed to stay, to speak, to live.

I hate this. I hate seeing my people cast again and again as the world’s burden. I want to write about this, about how these two acts of deportation, one in Pakistan, the other in the US, are not separate, but part of the same story.

Take my cousin, for example. She came to the US on a P1 visa after the fall of Kabul in 2021, but now she’s stuck in legal limbo, uncertain if she’ll be allowed to stay. Her own family, who fled to Pakistan during the Afghan civil war in the 1990s, have lived there ever since, still undocumented, still afraid.

When she calls me, she tells me she can’t even talk about her situation. “How can I add to their worry,” she says, “when they’re barely holding on themselves?'

To this eerie synchronicity in the news, with two borders and one destination, Afghanistan, I want to add a truth. The continuity is not just between the displaced, but in the war itself. One refugee was driven out by the conflict that began in the 1970s. The other fled the aftermath of the US withdrawal in 2021. But these are not separate wars. They are different phases of the same long undoing.

The world, including both the U.S. and Pakistan, helped train, fund, and arm the mujahideen. The fire they lit has never gone out. Its shape has changed, but it continues to burn through Afghan lives.

One of the most heartbreaking reels I saw was of an Afghan man in Pakistan. His shop was being looted, crates overturned, and a box of oranges was thrown to the ground. He ran helplessly toward it, trying to salvage what he could. I watched it and cried.

Watching his face once again broke something inside me—a psychic déjà vu. I saw my parents’ past. And suddenly, memories of family came back, memories I thought I had learned to forget. One of the stories my father often tells from the time of the Civil War is of a room full of large bags of rice. In Afghanistan, they say old rice tastes better. Leaving Kabul while rockets were falling, on an empty stomach, perhaps that’s one of the reasons that memory has stayed so vividly alive to this day.

One thing this perpetual war in Afghanistan has done well is strip people of their humanity, reducing their unique stories to mere headlines of victimhood.

I want to tell the stories that don’t make it into the headlines, the small ones, the family ones, the ones that carry the weight of a war without saying it outright. I open a draft. I start to write about the US betrayal of Afghanistan, the foreign policies that spiraled everything that came after the Cold War. But then I stop. I read it over, hesitate, and delete it.

It’s unsettling how the same instinct that made my grandfather crouch under his desk with a lantern now lives in me—surfacing as I quietly prepare to pack my bags, without knowing why.

I find myself looking over the books I’ve collected. Physics textbooks, poetry, novels, and essays. Some from home, some bought here. I always thought I would build a library. It felt like a small claim on a life shaped by ideas.

Now I’m giving many of them away. Not because I want to, but because something in me is telling me to prepare. It’s a quiet instinct, like the ones my family lived by for decades. You don’t wait to be told. You leave before you’re asked to. You stay quiet even before the silence is forced on you.

No one has threatened me. Nothing has happened. But still I hesitate. I start writing and then stop. I delete what I mean to say. I try to explain this to myself, maybe it’s fear, maybe caution, or maybe it’s secondhand, something I inherited in those moments when voices lowered during storytelling or before we left the house, receiving instructions on what to say and what not to say. A habit passed down that became part of everyday living. A silence practiced long before it was needed.

But again, as I speak to my family, it feels absurd to them. “Your grandfather was much higher than just intellect,” they say. “He didn’t publish, so you can keep quiet too.”

My grandfather didn’t publish because our family was still living in Kandahar. But now we’re out. He, however, still remains in Kandahar.

I'm concerned about free speech. I hate how war has reduced our ambitions to mere survival. As long as no bombs are raining down, you’re supposed to be fine.

Growing up and searching for Afghan intellectuals in the books I read, I always hated that I couldn’t find them in English, in dialogue with the world. Looking back, I realize it could never have been possible—for in a country constantly at war, neither poetry nor intellect could flourish, and hope could not survive.

Survival has always been more important than idealism, and you can’t live for idealism without putting your skin in the game.

But survival made sense to those who came before me. Their silence kept them alive. Can I live differently? Is it possible? Every time I see an Afghan face, it is waiting at a checkpoint, a consulate, or a deportation line.

But for every sad Afghan story, there’s a punchline. In my family, even the darkest recollection ended with something absurd—a sort of internal smuggler’s trade—emotion disguised in irony so the censors of sanity would let it pass, and in return, a small, uncanny, crooked laugh meant to keep the world from collapsing.

Among us Afghans there is an almost tacit agreement: to live against despair, one has to laugh louder than his wounds. Humor becomes a stubborn way to insist on life’s beauty.

But this isn’t your usual “hahaha” humor. It’s the kind that goes deeper than the suffering. A kind of philosophy that doesn’t deny pain, but rather makes space for it.

I do this in my own way. In my stand-up comedy class, which I take just for fun, I end with the punchline:

In one dream, I’m running from a bomb, afraid of being sent to heaven.

In another, I’m running from ICE, afraid of being sent to the Hindu Kush mountains.

My trauma has grown legs. And it keeps running. Watch out, it might kick you.∎