Afghan refugees’ stories of food – and home

When you leave your country as a refugee, what can you take with you? A few objects. Many memories. And recipes. .In a room in Khirkee, a densely packed neighbourhood in southern Delhi, Ifat, a teacher from Kabul displaced by war, described her search for senjet. The dried berry is an essential ingredient in her recipe for haft mewa – literally, seven fruits – a syrupy mix that is traditionally prepared for Nauroz, the festival that marks the spring equinox. The holiday is celebrated as a harbinger of the new year across Central Asia, Iran and parts of India. Families go outdoors for picnics, and celebrate with poetry readings and music concerts. Through the room’s open window we could hear the afternoon cacophony of the neighbourhood: the hum of tea stalls, shoppers and hawkers, dogs and pedestrians. But in Ifat’s voice was the coolness of the Kabuli spring..Finally, Ifat said, she had managed to locate a stall in a nearby market frequented by Afghans where a version of the fruit was available. It was not perfect – nowhere as good as the real thing in Afghanistan – but it would have to do. The young man who ran the stall was called Feroz. He also stocked the kind of tarkari – vegetables – she needed for her stews, and the kinds of pots that she needed for her cooking. For a while, Ifat had been able to cook as she wanted to, as she used to. But then Feroz had been relocated to Canada, and her kitchen was once again deprived..I heard Ifat’s story at a writing workshop I ran in the summer of 2022 at the Simurgh Centre, a cultural space for Afghans living in the Indian capital, where I was working at the time. (The centre is run by the Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan New Delhi, a German cultural non-profit.) The participants comprised seven women and one man, ranging in age from their teens to their sixties. Each of them had lived in Delhi for years, and had gone through at least one, if not two, cycles of displacement due to war. The previous year, the Taliban had taken over Afghanistan for a second time, two decades after the US-led invasion that pushed them out of power in 2001. The change in government seemed to make the idea of home even more tenuous for the group. And yet, in our weekly sessions over that Delhi summer, it emerged in gleaming, loving detail in their stories of food and belonging..Initially, we faced an unexpected challenge: most of the participants claimed to have nothing interesting to say. Often, they fell back on the kinds of narratives and words they felt were expected of them. This meant stories that reduced their identity to that of refugees, with talk of loss and exile, or uplifting anecdotes of hope and gratitude despite the odds. I struggled to recognise them in these stories, couched in stereotypes and devoid of any complexities or humour. But all this changed when we started to talk about food. .Soon, we were spending hours discussing the distinct smells of individual spices, the texture of onions when they are just the right shade of pink, the music and the rituals associated with each festive meal. Of course, in talking about food, we were also talking about many other things. Sometimes food stood in for love and care, sometimes for estrangement and loss. And sometimes it stood in for an entire homeland. .Afghans, having faced four decades of war and displacement, form one of the largest refugee communities in the world. For this massive diaspora, Afghan food offers sustenance in more ways than one. The stories that the participants eventually chose to tell served as acts of celebration and preservation, as expressions of rage and as attempts at atonement. In the glut of writing about refugees, what is often missing are the voices of refugees themselves. These stories fill that silence..KAREEMA DESCRIBED HER mother’s kitchen in her childhood home in a village near Tashkorghan, in northern Afghanistan. She recalled its contours and features perfectly. Once she started talking about it, it seemed like she could go on for hours. .Her story was about a day when her mother ran out of cooking oil and had to send a ten-year-old Kareema to fetch some. She remembered dawdling along the way, watching a stream and singing a song by the Afghan pop star Ahmad Zahir..از غمت ای نازنین، عزم سفر میکنم قبلهی خود بعد از این، سوی دگر میکنم.Of this sweet sadness, I set out to travel After this, I turn my qibla to a different direction.When she came to this part of the story, Kareema sang the lines, and other voices in the room picked them up. For a few moments, the air was filled with this music, and with the memory of innocent childhoods when they could hum bittersweet love songs without a care..Finally, she reached the house where the oil was sold. The man there “would rotate a wooden contraption, grinding sesame seeds to extract oil. He seemed perpetually engrossed in the repetitive task. I went home with a can of sesame oil, singing and dancing.” .She got home late to find her mother waiting in the kitchen, ready to cook pulao. The meal that day was a special celebration to welcome home her older brother, who was visiting from Kabul. He brought Kareema five gifts, in honour of her passing into the fifth grade at school. .THE FOUR OLDER WOMEN in the group – Soraya, Ifat, Kareema and Zainularab – were approximate contemporaries, aged between the late forties and sixties. All of them came to the workshop dressed in elegant outfits, their chadoris always in place. Theirs was a generation that took great care over appearances. .Zainularab was often accompanied by her husband, who waited outside with a book till she was done. Petite and feisty, she used to work with various women’s groups in the province of Ghazni, in south-east Afghanistan. This work led to her receiving death threats, and she was forced to leave in 2018. In Delhi, too, she had joined several community initiatives and worked with women’s groups on refugee issues..From her and Ifat I learnt the map of middle-class life in 1980s Kabul, during an era of relative calm in the Afghan capital under the Soviet-backed communist government. For them, the time was marked by visits to cinemas and parks, by stores selling French perfume and hand-made boots, and treasured nights out to iconic hotels with their families. Most of the time, girls were not allowed to go out on their own – but sometimes that rule was bent..In her story, Zainularab writes of one magical afternoon, soon after she graduated from college, when she planned a lunch with her friends. “We chose a restaurant in the brand new Farooshgah, a big marketplace ... After taking permission from our families, we set the date for a Thursday, which is before the weekend in Kabul.” Farooshgah – literally, “marketplace” – is located by the Kabul River, and its outdoor bazaar still buzzes with shoppers and money changers. The area was also home to the city’s first multi-storey mall, she recalled, and the restaurant the girls selected was “on the sixth floor of the building, with large windows so that you could see all across Kabul.”.In the fashion of the time, Zainularab writes, the hostess wore a blue flower on her blouse. She herself wore “a short black skirt with a white blouse, short skin-coloured socks and shiny slippery boots that I bought from the famous Homayun Sakhi store. ... We were proud of ourselves that we came to the restaurant alone, we felt independent.”.Zainularab’s story is a portrait of the kind of afternoon that distils the feeling of youth, when the world seems limitless in its possibilities. On similar outings with my friends in college in Delhi, I remember thinking that life would always be like this, that we had all the time in the world, and that all of us would never lose touch with each other. But, Zainularab writes, “Soon after this afternoon, the regime changed, the Mujahideen era came, and civil wars began. Khadija, Fazila and Sharifa, who were classmates and very close friends, never saw each other again.”.FRIENDS WANDERED THROUGH the streets of a very different Kabul in NaAshna’s stories. The only man in the group, NaAshna was in his twenties, and an enthusiastic poet, theatre artist and musician. NaAshna is a pen name that roughly translates to “the unknown” or “outsider”. He moved to Delhi in 2021, and among his rituals of farewell to his city of birth was a last visit to the stall of Kaka Ashraf – or Uncle Ashraf – who sold manto, or meat-filled dumplings, on the roadside..I knew Kaka Ashraf since I was a child. One day, when I was very young, the dastarkhwan was set in the house, the food was served and all the children in the house, including me, were sitting around it. I realised that my father wanted to leave. I didn’t know exactly where he wanted to go. I only understood that he wanted to leave without letting all of us know. I pushed my plate of okra aside and started crying and crying … I was determined to go. .The tantrum was finally soothed by his father taking him along on his expedition and stopping at Kaka Ashraf’s stall to buy him manto..After that day, we would sometimes buy manto from Kaka Ashraf’s stall. But when I grew up, I often used to go to Kaka Ashraf's place to eat manto with Rohullah. When we cooked manto at home, it tasted good. Everyone preferred to have home-made manto over market-made manto. But for me, the manto prepared by Kaka Ashraf was something else!.NaAshna’s story presents Kabul as seen through the privileges of male mobility, and opens up the spaces of male friendships. He and his friend Rohullah wander the markets and alleys as they please, hanging out at roadside eateries and restaurants without their families, just two young men out together. “Bro, should we go?” they say to each other. “And we just went.”.As he grows older, NaAshna investigates what made Kaka Ashraf’s manto so special. “Instead of shop-bought yoghurt, he used yoghurt that he made at home. He used mint from the lush green countryside outside Kabul instead of the ready-made variety.” .This insistence on the relative purity of the countryside versus the pollution of the city was one I had heard often in the workshop. Kabul’s population had burgeoned to nearly four million people by 2017, putting extreme pressure on the city’s infrastructure and services. It had also seen a construction boom, which meant there were fewer green spaces. A common lament was that sheep no longer graze on green grass but on garbage! .As the boys grew older, their outings to Kaka Ashraf’s stall became less frequent. “Rohullah also had many activities going on and we didn’t have much time to see each other. ... And instead of visiting the stall of Kaka Ashraf, we were going to Aqcha, a well-known restaurant in Kabul.” .But when it was time to leave Kabul for Delhi, his thoughts turned to the roadside stall for a farewell meal. He summoned Rohullah for one last visit to Kaka Ashraf’s place. .Himal shows you Southasia like no one else will. Become a Patron to support the magazine!.OTHER STORIES UNFOLDED in the streets of Delhi, filled with culinary delights. Maryam, a young artist, wrote about how she regularly succumbed to these temptations despite being cautioned against them by her parents. “When we go to the market, we cannot control the direction our feet will take,” she admits. Aged 19, Maryam was the youngest member of the group, and found joy in transgressions. .With her sister, she escaped the comforting familiarity of the domestic dastarkhwan to fill herself with forbidden treats. If food is the exile’s way of making herself at home, Maryam managed to do so with aplomb. “First we go to the pani puri walla, then we have alu tikki, after that we go to the kurkure momos stall,” she writes. “After eating momos, we are heading to have javari shirin, or sweet corn. And in the end, after all the delays on the way back home, we buy one blueberry ice cream each and come home.” .Her particular weakness is for the kurkure momos – deep-fried dumplings filled with chicken or potatoes, topped with spicy chutney, that she eats off greasy paper plates. Part of the pleasure of these gastronomic explorations, of course, is in the breaching of boundaries, and in resolving the dilemma, along with her sister, of how not to get caught. .“Padar Jan is waiting for us to have dinner together, and if I have one more bite, I will burst!” says her sister after getting a call from home. “Same here,” replies Maryam. “But you know that if we don’t eat, they will get to know that we must have eaten something outside.” On their return home, the sisters consume a second dinner to avoid raising suspicions. “But since we had eaten a lot, we couldn’t sleep till morning!”.For Laila, a chance discovery at her workplace leads to an opening up of possibilities in places she had not thought of as her own. “Today, something happened that happens very rarely. I didn’t bring lunch from home,” she writes. “I would have to eat an unpleasant lunch at my workplace. On Tuesdays, they usually cook vegetables there.” As luck would have it, the vegetable on the menu is what she called okra, and which she had disliked since childhood. “I think even if I am miles away, I can still smell this vegetable. This cannot be anything other than okra.” .But as she reluctantly tastes the portion on her plate, she realises it has been magically transformed into the Indian bhindi. Laila enjoys the vegetable so much in this incarnation that she looks forward to having it every Tuesday at work. But this leads to another dilemma – which was revealed only when she wrote this story. For almost two years, she had been eating Indian okra every Tuesday, but “Secretly, because I don’t want my mother to be offended that I don’t eat the okra cooked by her.”.To read Maryam and Laila’s stories together is to see a map of home being created – a map in which the remembered home and the home of refuge can sometimes overlap. .IN THE EPHEMERAL kitchen conjured up in our sessions, generations gathered..Laila’s sister Faryal is 23 years old, and the baby of her family. Faryal wrote about her school days in Afghanistan, when she and her friend Salma, or Sam, would use their pocket money for burgers at school. Back home, she dreaded the lunch of kofte, or meatballs, in curry. So her beloved aunt Ama Bibi would always prepare kobeda kabab, or fried meat, with chips, all especially for her. It was a gesture of affection for the youngest of the family, which Faryal took for granted. .One afternoon, Faryal writes, she walked into the kitchen and realised that her aunt had been transforming the koftas that she disliked into the kobeda, and threw a tantrum. “She removed one piece of kofta from the pot and put it in hot oil. At that moment, I thought that Ama Bibi had been deceiving me all these years, and tears flowed from my eyes. I told Ama Bibi, ‘You are very deceitful’, and I ran to my room.” .The outburst ended with a hug between aunt and niece. But for Faryal, now living in Delhi, that long-ago and trivial afternoon has taken on greater dimensions since she has not seen her aunt for years. The child has acquired a sharp understanding of the alchemy of love that transformed her food. “I miss Ama Bibi and even Ama Bibi’s kofta with the gravy. I miss her love for me, I miss her care and the way she always treated me like a baby, even though I have long grown up.”.FARYAL AND LAILA are sisters, and Ifat is their mother. A former schoolteacher, Ifat chose to write about her home science notebook, which she had preserved perfectly since she was in the tenth grade. “I have kept it even after my wedding, till now … This notebook has my notes on relationships in the home, women’s health care, looking after a child during pregnancy and after birth, and recipes for all kinds of foods, sweets and jams.” .In Herat in the 1970s, Ifat used to live on an air base, where her father worked. “I used to cut photos from Iranian magazines and Russian clothing catalogues that belonged to my mother and stick them in my notebook. As Herat province is on the border with Iran, Iranian magazines came from that route.” The recipes were mostly copied from her mother’s recipe book, and were for Afghan, Russian and European dishes. .In Ifat’s slim volume is a record of this era in Afghanistan, when it was home to consultants and workers from different parts of the world. It reminded me of the copies of Women’s Era magazine that my mother kept stacked in a cupboard, with illustrations of modish women from 1960s England. .When she left Kabul for Delhi, Ifat brought the notebook with her, and now she used it as a repository for the seena-ba-seena, or in-person, learning she had lost. “Passing down the pages of this notebook has become like a family tradition between us. First, my sisters, then my daughters, and now I encourage my nieces, who have grown up far away from Afghan culture, to take notes from my booklet, so as to keep the family tradition and culture of authentic Afghan food alive. And I wish for a proper house and kitchen where I can enjoy my cooking again.”.FOR IFAT, the notebook stood for many things that she had had to leave behind when she left Kabul for Delhi. Her pots, and her collection of senjet that made the perfect Nauroz haft mewa. The wooden spoon set she used to serve her haft mewa. Her kitchen chats and recipe swaps with her family, and her “proper home”. .Other things left behind were Zainularab’s promise to her mother to return home soon, which was unfulfilled even at her mother’s funeral. Faryal’s hours with her friend Sam. Laila’s learning her Ama Bibi’s recipe for kofte in her own kitchen. Kareema’s singing with her family. NaAshna’s turning a corner on a whim to visit Kaka Ashraf’s stall. Among the many uncounted costs of war were these losses, all laid out on our table. .And then there was the present. Outside the window was Delhi, with its voices of refugees and migrants from across India and the world, each community with their own dizzying range of cuisines. A reminder that the city we were in was one of raucous co-existence and cosmopolitanism..At the end of each session, we stepped out of our sun-filled room into the gathering cool of the evening, gleefully sating the hunger created by our ephemeral remembered foods with the solid reality of kurkure momos ordered from a roadside stall. They were crisp, unwholesome and delicious.