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This is mywatan

I’m standing on the edge of our village, looking out and away. Shouldering the skyline are the mountains: arid, donkey-coloured, monumental, and for all I know repeating to the end of the earth. Below, nearer to hand, are the fields where my father and uncles work. A river runs between the fields, and closer to where I stand, down the slope, by the side of the river there is a tree. And in the tree, I can see a woodpecker. I am, I would guess, four or five years old.

It’s strange, what our minds choose to remember. There’s nothing especially significant in this postcard from the past, but of the many hundreds and thousands of possible memories from my childhood, this is one that comes back to me. Why? It is neither typical nor atypical, and I cannot read any symbolism into the tree, or the woodpecker. But it might, perhaps, represent a moment, a turning point, in my growing up. Nobody told me to look at the woodpecker in the tree. Nobody else saw it. It was a strangely personal moment – my secret – and so perhaps I locked it away in a special place in my mind, a place to treasure those things I alone knew: my discoveries.

If the woodpecker had flown away (which I don’t remember), or I had given up watching it, and had turned around, I would have had pretty much the whole of our village in sight. Aral, the only place I had known in my short life, was a settlement of about twenty households, situated roughly halfway between Kabul and Herat, in the mountainous Bandar& Sang Takht region of Afghanistan’s central Daykundi province. The houses in Aral were traditional Afghan mud houses, with walls of clay mixed with straw, reinforced with a framework of wood. The walls, especially those in guest rooms, were sometimes painted, using coloured stone crushed into powder and mixed into an emulsion. Ceilings were spans of horizontal wooden poles, finished above with mud and straw to make flat roofs, where crops or fabric could be laid out to dry.

Ours was a farming community, and one of the most important rooms in the house was for the animals: cows, sheep, goats and chickens. Everybody also kept dogs, but they were not allowed in the home. The animal room connected to the living space with a fireplace in the middle of the house. There was a hole in the roof to let out smoke, with a cover that could be removed in summer for ventilation. Fuel was not easy to come by. We used to go out gathering brushwood, and in summer people would collect animal dung and dry it in the sun to burn on the fire in the winter.

The main room in the house – the living room – had no sofas, but in the evenings we would sit on big sturdy cushions set against the wall. The whole household slept here, too, or in the guest room, on futons. There were always plenty of spare futons, in case we had guests. In the daytime they were piled in one corner, to keep the room tidy. The guest room was the most elaborately decorated room in the house, with big curtains and embroidery made by the women.

As a little girl, I used to spend a lot of time with my mum, watching her at her tasks and learning to help out. Like all Afghan women, my mother worked a long, hard day, filled with routines. The household would wake before sunrise, when the adults took prayers, then Mum would make sure the fire in the bread oven in the kitchen was lit, and mix some dough. Next, to milk the cow, and the sheep and goats. Back to the kitchen to bake the bread, then prepare a simple breakfast of sweetened tea and the warm bread from the oven. By now it was time to send the animals out to graze on the mountains. This was a job often entrusted to children, and became one of my responsibilities when I was as young as four or five years old. While I was herding the animals up the hill, I’d watch the men heading out to work, to tend the crops in the fields.

Meanwhile, with everyone out of the house, Mum would get on with cleaning and sweeping the floors. Her next task was to go down to the meadow to collect fodder for the animals. This wasshaftal, or Persian clover, a nutritious crop that we cultivated for the purpose. It could be eaten fresh, or batches would be spread on the roof to dry, and be stored as a winter feed. There were other plants that we foraged in spring a