She would prefer not to see. To be blind. She does not want to notice the buildings that bear no resemblance to the ruins of her homeland. If she doesn’t see them, the pain of separation and the feelings of estrangement won’t seep into her being and reach her soul. She longs to be like a person who is born blind and doesn’t take in the view. When she is in her room on the fourth floor, she does not look outside. She goes as far as to pull the mattress from the bed and lay it on the floor to make it more like home. Each day, when the sun’s rays find their way into her room, she opens the curtains wide to imitate morning in her homeland, where the sun would pour through the window and light up the hand-woven carpet on the floor. Whenever Bahar ejects herself from this temporary hotel room and onto the street, the desire to be blind awakens again within her. If she were blind, she would not have to encounter the pitying looks of people around her: those looks that see only a bird with burnt feathers; a pathetic and powerless refugee.

It is two in the afternoon and Bahar is about to go out. She walks through the large red-carpeted lobby and stops in front of the glass door that turns like a clock. She looks around. People are coming and going with their suitcases. Bahar turns back to the revolving door, smooths her clothes, and adjusts her hijab. Lowering her head, she steps outside and starts down the narrow street that runs alongside the hotel.

For a moment, Bahar wants to look at the flowers planted on the low parapet that separates the road from the bicycle lane. Her head still bowed, she lifts her eyelids shakily. But before she can glimpse the flowers, she sees many people walking, lost in their own worlds, some with umbrellas and some without. Some are walking with her, some in the opposite direction; one is twice her height, another a little shorter; one has blonde hair and blue eyes, another has black hair and brown eyes. Just then a tall blonde woman appears in front of Bahar, distinct from the crowd of walkers, wearing red lipstick and holding the hand of a middle-aged man. Frightened, Bahar drops her gaze again. She finds solace in the raindrops that fall on the pavement.

Bahar has been harboring this wish to be blind for quite some time. It fills her mind and heart today as she sets off for her usual destination. Despite the afternoon rain, she wants to keep her daily half-hour appointment at a place where she is safe: where nothing and no one can disturb the peace that wells within her. She keeps her head down. When she hears a bus door opening, she knows she has reached the bus stop and veers away from the five or ten people who invariably stand under its red shelter. She does not want to encounter their looks as they board the bus. 

She passes a row of identical houses, each attached to the next. If they didn’t have numbers and weren’t painted slightly different shades of white and ivory, any newcomer could think English people lived together in shared houses. By the shadow of the redbud tree and the soft scent of its flowers, Bahar knows she has reached the end of the street and must look up to cross. She quickly looks both ways. Raindrops on her glasses have blurred her vision; on the other side of the road, she takes them off and cleans them with a corner of her scarf before putting them back on. She pulls down the sleeves of her coat and walks slowly along the pavement as if she is the only one there. She doesn’t feel anyone else’s presence: it is as if she is walking in an uninhabited city where it’s just her, and a cool rain.

For some time, Bahar has been pretending not to hear, either. Rather, she has tuned her ears only to what she wants to hear, so that the people around her aren’t talking at all. She puts on her earphones and listens to traditional Afghan songs as she walks: songs that let her imagination breathe and make her feel she is back home. She maintains her pace, and her chest fills with cool, rainy air. Her gaze is still lowered; her mother’s advice and the instructions of society reverberate in her mind. Women should keep their heads down and be modest. She bows her head further:  as if gravity itself were pulling it down, as if her neck had no bones in it and her head were attached to her body by a limp piece of skin.

With her shoulders hunched, one hand on her scarf and the other on her purse, Bahar silently navigates the crowd. She does not change her course: instead, others make way. The road is noisy with passing cars on her left, but on her right is the cemetery’s stone wall and wrought iron fence. This side is engulfed in silence. Only the crows caw, perched on gravestones, saying things Bahar doesn’t understand. She walks so close to the cemetery wall that sometimes her arm brushes against it. She walks close to the wall so that the invisible armor she has wrapped around herself will not be disturbed by collisions with other people. Only occasionally does she raise her head to make sure she hasn’t lost her way. 

Eventually Bahar gets down to the end of the road where it is quieter, near the entrance to the cemetery, the rain falling softly on her cheeks. She stops for a moment at the gates. The cemetery has been here for a century or more. Bahar peers in through the metal bars and glances at the dates etched on a damaged gravestone. It is as old as the cemetery and catches her eye, buried amid weeds and tall dandelions. What if people were immortal like the dandelion seeds and able to revive themselves, wherever and however they wanted to fulfill their lost dreams?

She sighs, and then turns right as she passes the cemetery. She still prefers to watch the raindrops fall than to look around. She always hesitates at this three-way intersection after the cemetery. The buildings are very similar here, and she wonders if she is lost. But hope drives her on. With every step now, the neighborhood grows busier than the ones she’s left behind. There are cafés and shops on both sides of the street, but she doesn’t raise her head, only her eyelids, just enough to avoid bumping into someone. She’s adrift in her imagination when suddenly a drop of rain falls on her lips. Bahar sucks it in and savors the bead of liquid but still can’t name its taste: to her, rain is sacred weeping from the sky. She wonders how a drop made its way to her lips while her head was bowed.

Then, suddenly, she smells grilled meat and hears a hum of voices. Without looking up, she knows she’s passing a café just a few steps from her next turn. A faint smile comes to her face and she quickens her pace. She turns right through a narrow arcade. On both sides are high windows, flowers filigreed on their glass: behind the windows are more cafés. Bahar’s steps are picking up; the closer she gets to her destionation, the more deeply she breathes in the world around her. Her body is firmer, her eyes glow with excitement, and her heartbeat accelerates. She finally reaches the street she wants and enters it.

The street is deserted. On both sides are trees, some of which have been pollarded, their branches exposed in mourning. But Bahar is no longer afraid to look up. She takes off her glasses and, like a lover who has not seen her beloved for a long time, searches even from a distance. “Here I am,” she says, and counts her final steps aloud.

The door stands next to a laden lilac tree, now rain-soaked. Bahar stands in front of the door, neither smiling nor sad: this is what she came for. She sees but does not see. Hears but does not hear. Like the tree itself, she does not move. She simply stares again at this door, as if for the first time. A black door with a rusty lock and faded walls around it, it looks like a door in her homeland. And so Bahar stands in front of it for half an hour every afternoon: this door leads her back to her life in Afghanistan. She stares at the door unblinking and speaks to it the words she has said before, as if there were a person standing there. 

“Oh, door! You’re the only beautiful sight in this strange land; you alone give me a reason to look up and see not only with my eyes but with my mind’s eye. Perhaps you have no tongue but to me you speak most eloquently amid this deafening silence and strangeness. See, I’ve come again, I’ll come back. I’ll always come back. I promise you, one day I will meet you with a joyful heart and smiling lips. One day, when I’m not lost between everything and nothing. I make you this promise but I am afraid of this promise: how will I keep it? Is there a refugee whose heart is happy, whose lips are smiling—who isn’t absent?”

As she says this, her eyes blur with tears, and a lump forms in her throat. Bahar stays her half hour: she stands there motionless. So still that if it wasn’t for the rain, a bird might build a nest on her head and shoulders. She is drenched; a statue marking the memory of another time. In complete silence, she envies her former self—the hard days of being a woman, the struggles, the sorrows, the joys, the setbacks and the prosperities of her homeland. Its beauty, the ties of family, and a thousand and one memories. She murmurs to the door: “I drew breath from a grassland that was both green and brown, was wet with dew and set on fire, grew plums and bullets. That place was both my home and my homeland. I lived in its embrace. Who am I now in this nowhere?” She asks the door these questions, wiping her tears away with the back of her hand, feeling like a child who has lost her mother.

She does not wish to be ungrateful, but why must she experience this separation and this grief? The street is still quiet. For a moment, everything works to give Bahar a brief peace. She shifts from one foot to the other and remembers a summer afternoon from three years ago. She had just come to her new house in Kabul. She hurried through its tall black garage door, through the courtyard, and up the stairs to her room. As she was about to enter, her attention was drawn away by a reflection of sunlight on glass. She turned toward the balcony and stepped out on to it. She reached for the railing and leaned out toward the sunset. She gazed at the mountains: one range behind the other. The snow on the slopes had not yet melted and was jewel-bright in the day’s last light. But Bahar turned indoors, telling herself she need not linger, she would see this view every day.

With this thought, she proceeded to her room and took it in as she opened the door. The room was still bare: just a bed on one side and a small bookshelf and desk on the other. As Bahar stepped inside, the low sunlight threw her shadow onto the wall.  She felt like dancing with it. Letting the breeze catch her hair, Bahar danced and the shadow danced. After a few moments, she stopped abruptly, fixed her headscarf, and looked around to make sure none of the neighbors had seen her. She quickly hid herself in a corner of the room and laughed at herself: she and her shadow each envying the other’s freedom. She stayed in that corner for a few more moments, breathing deeply, refusing to let any worry ruin her joy. She laughed again. Her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes smiled. At that moment the world belonged to Bahar: her dreams were coming true.