‘Today, people did not look at me the same way’: In Delhi, a conversation with an Afghan friend

“The only difference between them and us is that we managed to escape alive,” said a friend who very special to me as she kept her gaze intact on this one dying tree amidst a shadow of greenery.

It was 4.17 pm on Monday as we sat on the same makeshift bench at the same park in Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar neighbourhood where we had met ten months before. Drops of sweat drenched my white kurta as the scorching August heat spared nobody. But that did not matter to the girl in her late 20s sitting across from me. Nothing much mattered to her anymore, actually. Only the ageing tree did.

“I hope they don’t chop it off. In the quest to keep everything green and alike, I hope they at least give it enough respect to die on its own, you know?” she said, looking me in the eye for the first time in 16 minutes. She didn’t expect an answer.

It had been less than 24 hours before that her phone began flooding with news notifications, and calls from back home. From a home she ran away from when she was threee. From a home that was Kabul.

“I remember everything very faintly,” she whispered as…

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