The Broken Circle: A Memoir of Escaping Afghanistan

by Enjeela Ahmadi-Miller

Once in the past, I asked a bird “In what way do you fly in this gravity of wickedness?” She responded, “Love lifts my wings.” —Hafiz

I’m thinking only of him, and us, and how I will never leave him like she left me. I will never make him question my love for him. I will never make him search for me.

crucible

Babur the Conqueror,

jalebi,

Shahnaz, my oldest sister, and Shapairi, who was a year younger,

They learned about love from a distance. This is the truest love of all, when two people must wait and build up great ideas about each other until the passion becomes so unbearable and deeply rooted that they must have each other. That is how love becomes the most desirable and lasting. I wanted this love more than anything. I wanted the traditions to work for me.

Besides being my father, Padar was many things: a businessman, a property owner, a communications engineer employed by the American embassy, fluent in seven languages, a man of great bravery, and, to our great family shame, an alcoholic. But before he was any of these things, he was a poet. He had memorized most of Rumi’s and Hafiz’s poems. The other passion in his life was his total devotion to his wife, our mother, Miriam, who took that dedication with a dram of insouciance that could be at times subversively hostile.

raptly

Yet wasn’t that the greatest part of love, to talk?

fastidious

One day I asked Zia and Laila, who were smart about these things, what Mother was upset about. Laila explained that just before Shahnaz was married, the government had changed. The people who took over from President Daoud Khan didn’t like democracy. The new president was a communist. I had no idea what that meant, but my sisters’ schools had new books they wanted the students to read, so I knew it was different from the way things had been up till then. “It means they don’t like freedom,” Zia told me one night. Later, Ahmad Shah, my oldest brother, who had a real taste for gory stories, told us that when President Taraki took over, all of Daoud Khan’s family were shot: his wife, his children, his sister, his brother, and his grandchildren. They even killed his little baby granddaughter. Eighteen people, shot right in the Arg-e-Shahi, the presidential palace, the big one where the kings of Afghanistan have lived for centuries.

Poems had this way of touching the deepest parts of me that gave me comfort.

I understood that this circle encompassed the entire universe, which was far too large for me to comprehend. But this poem made it small enough for me to understand my place in it. God had put me in the wonderful city of Kabul, part of a nation of good people, and this was only a fragment of the giant circle of the Beloved. And inside that larger circle were spaces of kindness and love and hope with my brothers and sisters and parents. I was part of the circle of life, and I could rest in the gentle arms of the Beloved. I believed every word of that poem, that good things enveloped me as they had my parents and Shahnaz and her happy marriage. My life in Kabul wrapped around me, a full circle of love and hope.

Playing is a child’s form of work, a way of dispensing with the harshness of what existed outside the walls of our home,

lackadaisical

peran tumban,

chador.

panjoque.

“He bought me from my parents when I was seven.”

And possessed of a new determination, I would not lie down and let evil happen to me. I had to be as courageous as possible—and if I died, then so be it. If it was my time, I would die; if not, then I would live.

If she couldn’t leave with me, I wanted to live for her, for what she could have discovered.

undulating,

This land was harsher on its children than the relentless sun, scorching and unforgiving.

Kuchi.

I believed my pleasant life would last forever. I now knew the error of that thinking. Life could change in an instant.

I didn’t want to leave Afghanistan, but I stood there gazing into Pakistan. I must leave one to reach the other.

shalwar kameez

jinnah

dup...

harrowing

solicitude

Inshallah.

genial

‘This place where you are right now, God circled on a map for you.’”

But God knows we have come to this place, that we have things to learn so we can grow as human beings, as spiritual creatures.

“What you see is what love looks like. They can touch each other, yet they don’t irritate or enrage each other.

remonstrate

Kuchi

betel

This was a land of bright colors in so many shades, and I felt like a dull shadow.

I didn’t know who to thank for my good fortune. But scowling over my misfortune didn’t seem like the right thing to do.

lithe

I wanted to believe not only his words but his intentions in giving me such a bright picture of our new world.

thought of boys like I thought about my brothers: they were a lot of help when you needed them and annoying inconveniences the rest of the time.

Especially if they made me laugh.