How We Measure Time
Letters Across the Mountains (I)
London, 8 December 2025
Dear Maryam-jan,
I want to apologise. For a long time, I have felt guilt and shame at the oppression women and girls in Afghanistan are experiencing and the general silence and acquiescence it has been met with. It is difficult to raise your voice when you know it will fall on deaf ears but I wish that I could do more to rattle, if not pull down, the bars that have been placed around you.
When we spoke briefly by video call, I was surprised at how familiar you seemed and how quickly we started talking about our families and interests, as if we were just sitting beside each other at a dinner table. Technology collapses distances and turns us all into little smiling squares but it wasn’t just that; there are many places where my life circles yours.
Whenever I see photographs of Kabul, it reminds me of my hometown, Hargeisa; both cities are situated in valleys surrounded by barren, dusty hills and mountains. In the narrow, quiet neighbourhoods of both you see pink bougainvillea and ripe red pomegranates growing over mud-brick walls, in the busy markets donkey carts rattle past mobile phone sellers and Starbucks-style coffee shops, mosques fight for space with shiny new hotels and mansions. Hargeisa and Kabul have seen the ugliness of war and the slow flowering of life afterwards but in the latter women are now fighting another battle, against an enemy that should be their ally. How does it feel to be in this strange kind of warzone where the only weapons you have are your own free thoughts and desires?
I’m working on a novel at the moment — there is always a question within the story that I want to answer for myself; in this novel’s case, the question might be, ‘what happens when you continue to live with a broken heart?’
For the first time I’m writing about London, this megacity that I’ve called home for most of my life. I’ve enjoyed paying close attention to the seasons, rhythms and people. It’s made me think about how quickly things change, both in our own lives and in the world more generally. How do you measure time, Maryam? I see it most in my garden and how even the light changes as the tree crowns grow and meet each summer.
I recently read two short stories by you, ‘Turn this Air Conditioner On, Sir’ and ‘Kabul’s Haikus’. You seem drawn to the subtle, uncommunicated flow of thoughts and feelings in characters that are outside of your own specific experiences. In ‘Kabul’s Haikus’ we see the war through the eyes of a Japanese woman teaching in a girls’ school in Afghanistan; I love the reflections on everyday life that she puts into her haikus and I wondered what you gained as a writer from observing your own country’s trauma through the eyes of a recent arrival?
In Elif Shafak’s novel, There Are Rivers in the Sky, drops of water link characters across huge stretches of time and vast distances; it is an astonishing thought that our blood and rivers and rain are made of molecules that have been present throughout history. So much of our world is focused on differences, hierarchies, divisions that it can be challenging to still find any commonality but I love the idea that snow that fell on the mountains around Kabul might at some point become the rain that waters my garden.
I wish that we could have this conversation in the flesh. I would take you along the Thames and to a food market. Afghan Pulao is very similar to Somali iskukaris so maybe a market where you could try both. I have a sweet tooth so I’d want us to stop by a bakery or ice cream shop. Tell me where you would like to go on our imaginary walk.
I wish you safety, good health and inspiration. There is so much that cannot be captured in newspapers so I’m left with a very blurry picture of what life is like in Afghanistan, I’m greedy to know more.
With love,
Nadifa
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Kabul, 31 December 2025
Dearest Nadifa, Assalamu Alaikum,
I hope my greetings don’t carry with them the smell of smoke. I write to you not only from a country struck by war, but also one clouded by pollution. My headscarf has reeked of smoke all winter, black dust covers my fingers, and an invisible layer of soot always rests along my eyelashes and on the keys of my laptop. On days I look out of the window, I see that the ash clings to its glass. Kabul has been hit by a drought in recent years, so I hoped your letter would bring the rain that would wash away all the bad weather. When your letter arrived, so did the clouds, but no rain followed. I stared at the sky, hoping for a drop. Now, as the first winter rain falls, I am writing to you.
A well is being drilled outside my room in our alley and for this reason I start my mornings with the roar of machinery that drowns out the singing sparrows and steals their songs. I’m watching a Pakistani television series these days. A country I have come to know through politics and business over the years, but have now found a better way to understand it: through art.
The novel There Are Rivers in the Sky has not yet appeared on the shelves of the Afghan book market. Here, we read books with Iranian translations. The last book I read was The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak. This was the second time I picked up The Island of Missing Trees and found it more meaningful than before. It is a novel about displacement. A word that hurts in a new way ever since so many of my friends and relatives scattered around the world. The friend who gave me this book has also moved to Germany. As you can imagine I am surrounded by a lot of ‘goings’. Still, we find solace in the fact that we breathe under the same sky and live on the same planet, and that these departures are not permanent. What intrigued me most about this novel was that I identified with the storytelling tree. I saw myself in that tree more than I did in people.
Nadifa, the conflict in Kabul that has persisted to this day isn’t marked by constant bombings and rocket attacks. It is a different type of war, one that leaves people’s minds numb and their souls weary. One day, after it had rained, my sister and I sat down for a chat over tea and Baklava when, suddenly, there was a powerful explosion. This memory goes back many years, and I can’t remember who or what the target of that attack was, but its effect on my soul was everlasting. My sister and I couldn’t continue our conversation that day, and we both sat silently in separate corners. Just two months ago, as I typed on my laptop, I hadn’t even made it to the fourth line when the silence of my room was shattered by the sudden roar of a plane overhead. An explosion followed, sending thick black smoke billowing into the blue sky. The same thing happened yesterday as well.
After such an attack, I can no longer bring myself to continue what I was doing. I stop and stare into the distance and allow pain to flow through me as I take each breath and think of all the innocent people who have been hurt by the attack. I call my family members to ask them where they are and when they will be home and until they arrive, I remain anxious. When the sadness fades, life starts again, and work resumes.
Now I can tell you how we measure time in Kabul: with sadness and joy. The amount of time it takes for the sadness to pass defines the period. The seasons change around me: my fig and quince trees grow green, then fade to yellow as their leaves fall. But the real seasons are in the heart. When the season of sorrow passes, happiness begins.
For four and a half years now, it has been autumn, the season of the fading of hopes. This season will change whenever the situation in Afghanistan transforms. I had a quince tree in another part of Kabul city that bore juicy, sweet fruit. Every year, we would collect quinces from it. One day, a man blew himself up in front of that house and his limbs scattered everywhere inside its courtyard. I felt as if blood had been sprayed all over my quince tree, and I couldn’t bring myself to eat any more of its fruit. I have always felt guilty about giving up eating the tree’s fruit.
When I write stories, I want to explore the complexities of my own life: the quiet collision of pain and pleasure, the thin line between weariness and amazement, the journey of effort, defeat and perseverance. Even when I create different characters, I still see pieces of myself in them. I write about people whose fate has tugged at my heartstrings. In ‘Kabul Haiku’, for example, I wrote about a Japanese poet who disappeared during the civil wars in Kabul.
The Japanese people believe that they should not die or be buried in any land other than their own! Like most young people who are killed in war, the poet in my story met an unknown fate in Afghanistan. Katrina was buried far from her homeland — a painful fate. For me, my real home is not where I was born, but rather where I will draw my last breath and be laid to rest. It is said that a person will die and become part of the soil of the land from which they were originally made. I am not afraid of dying in another country, but I am afraid of being killed anywhere other than my true homeland. Katrina resembled the Hazaras of Afghanistan and suffered as much from the war here as we do. It is the human spirit that binds us together.
As much as I am afraid of emigrating, I love travelling. Emigration has its positive aspects: your homeland becomes bigger — two countries and two homes — and it broadens your horizons. I would like to experience the local Somali cuisine, see your traditional clothes, take a long walk along the streets of London, and visit an old library. Perhaps on its shelves we would find books from times in history when there were wars, like one of my books that has a bullet hole in it and was saved from the fire of an attack during the Afghan Civil War. I will bring you Nuql, almonds coated in crunchy sugar. In Kabul, we also have a traditional ice cream called ‘shir yakh’, which is absolutely delicious.
Did you hear on the news that there’s no electricity in all of Afghanistan? Even in Kabul, we only have it every other night! Some nights, I read books by candlelight or use my phone’s torch. My city is a place where the old and the new clash. Next to the digitally made and printed boards, you can find calligraphed ones.
Calligraphy still has its fans, and every house has a picture featuring verses from the Quran written in beautiful script. Ugly, high-rise buildings are common, and I can only tolerate them at night when light shines through their windows. Throughout my country, women are not permitted to be outside in the early morning or at night.
I hold your hands in mine in hopes that one day all our voices will be heard, and the world will become a better place in which to live and understand one another.
Your friend from beyond the mountains,
Maryam
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Next: A Taut String Between Us
This letter exchange was produced as part of Paranda, a writer development project and global network for women writers in Afghanistan and the diaspora, facilitated by Untold Narratives, a development programme for writers structurally marginalised by community or conflict, supported by KfW Stiftung.