Return

Kabul smells different and I can't figure out why. The same dust, the same diesel, the same bread from the same kind of oven. But something underneath has changed, or I have, and I can't separate the two. Fourteen years. I left at nineteen with a backpack and my father's disappointment and a seat on a flight to Istanbul that cost everything my mother had saved in a jar behind the rice. I did not plan to come back. That was the point of leaving. The house is smaller than I remember. This is the cliché everyone warns you about and it is still true. The courtyard where I played football with my cousins is barely large enough to park a car. Someone has parked a car in it. A white Toyota, newish. My cousin Farooq's. Farooq has a mobile phone shop now. He shows me the inventory with pride. Cases, chargers, screen protectors in little plastic bags. Samsung, Huawei, the occasional iPhone. Business is good. Business is always good when people need to talk to each other, and people here have a lot of talking to do. "You look thin," he says. "They don't feed you in Munich?" I have a master's degree in mechanical engineering. I work for a company that makes parts for wind turbines. I eat fine. But I am thin, or thinner than Farooq, who has discovered contentment and the kebabs at the place on Chicken Street. My mother is alive and smaller. She holds my face in her hands and says nothing for a long time. Her hands are rough. They have always been rough. When I was young I thought all hands were like that. She feeds me. Rice, kidney beans, the lamb stew that I have tried to make in my apartment in Munich exactly once. It was not the same. I used the same spices. I followed her instructions over a video call, my phone propped against the spice rack. Still not the same. She watched me eat it on screen and was kind enough not to comment. This one is right. I eat too much and she is pleased. The city goes on. I walk through it the next day, alone. The mountains are still there, brown and enormous, ringing the valley like the walls of a bowl. New buildings have gone up. Old ones are gone. The bookshop where my father used to take me is a phone card store. The school I attended has a new gate. I stand outside it and feel nothing special. A guard asks me what I want. I say I used to go here. He nods. Lots of people used to go here. At night, on the roof, I can see the city lights spread out below. More lights than before. More generators, more solar panels, more people doing more things later into the evening. Farooq brings tea and we sit and don't talk much. "Will you stay?" he asks eventually. "No." He nods. He knew. "Will you come back again?" The tea is sweet and hot and tastes exactly the way tea is supposed to taste. The stars over Kabul are the same stars, dimmed by the same dust. "Yes," I say. And I mean it, which surprises me more than him.