Windows of Home

I have been told that I was born as an immigrant, but I do not remember anything myself.

Home keeps changing shape: a courtyard, a ruined street, a camp hallway, a phone screen, a city where my children sleep. I have lived across borders long enough to know that home is not one place, but a series of windows I keep looking through.

My birthday has many versions. I was born in 1988 in a hospital in Mashhad, Iran, where my family lived as Afghan refugees. My father recorded Sare-Pul, where my parents were born, as my birthplace.

Over time, my date of birth was changed by different people. April 1, 1988 is the date a relative wrote down through a mistaken correction at a Kabul passport office. It has remained in all my passports ever since — a typo that became part of my identity.

My mother sometimes took small jobs to help the family. She would bring home saffron flowers, and I helped her separate the red stigmas to earn a bit of money. Other times we broke big sugar cones into small pieces with a hammer, so people could buy them in plastic bags and have them with tea.

One of my earliest memories is running through a crowded bazaar in Shiraz, where my father had gone for a construction project. I got lost near a poet's tomb and somehow found my way home. Years later, when my father's homesickness brought us back to Mashhad, he called leaving Shiraz one of the biggest regrets of his life.

Between 1998 and 2001, life became very difficult for Afghan refugees in Iran. My school stopped accepting Afghan students. My aunt, who managed most of our affairs, paid monthly bribes to public schools so I could keep studying. The fees grew. The atmosphere worsened.

The house was full of ants from the sugar dust. Our hands were yellow from saffron. Some days I skipped class. I felt intensely lonely — and that feeling grew stronger when my family decided to return to Afghanistan after the Taliban fell in 2001.

My family left Iran first, and I stayed behind. My uncle had once registered me as his son so I could receive a refugee identity card while my father was away, so I couldn't travel on my mother's papers.

For four months I waited for my uncle to return from the Netherlands. Sleep was a stranger to me in those months. Almost every midnight I woke up from nightmares and walked until sunrise. The films I had watched were the only thing I remembered on those long walks. I imagined myself into them.

We crossed the border at Herat. Suddenly the roads and buildings looked older and ruined. Darkness had replaced the light, and people walked at night carrying oil lamps.

Two days later we took the road to Kabul through Kandahar. Halfway through the desert, gunmen entered the road and stopped the car ahead of us. The driver told us to bend down and pressed his foot to the gas. I caught a glimpse of a man, a woman, a child climbing out of the front car. Then my uncle's hand pressed my head down. I heard a few gunshots.

We slept that night in Ghazni, on the floor of a hall — ten minutes' walk through the dark to a toilet I never used because of the stray dogs.

We reached Kabul in the afternoon of the next day, and the taxi stopped at a house with a big blue door. My uncle told me we were in one of the best and most famous parts of Kabul, where the rich and well-known people lived. I looked around. Except for our house, only two or three other half-destroyed houses were still standing; the rest were ruins, filled with animal and human waste. The marks of bombs and the fires soldiers built to keep themselves warm were still visible. No building had been spared from bullets. The holes on the facades gave Kabul a distinct appearance — as if they had become the city's defining symbol.

My uncle knocked on the door. After a few moments the door opened, and an old woman appeared — the same wet eyes I had seen on the bus four months earlier when my mother had left for Afghanistan. I couldn't believe she had aged that much in four months. My anger faded.

Just after I had found a few friends in Kabul, we had to leave again because of my father's financial troubles. We moved to Mazar-e-Sharif in the north. I spent the loneliest days of my life there.

My father kept changing jobs. I walked the alleys until I had no idea where I was. At school, my attention was always outside the window. The school had a small library, and I spent most of my time there. The crime novels attracted me most — stories of an inspector who traveled the world.

My father used to tell me, while I sat in the shade of someone else's construction site, 'One day, while I still have strength in my hands, I will build a nice house for us too.'

He kept the promise and was finally able to use his skills to build a house. He built two: one for us, one for my uncle. Many of the bricks he also made, firing them in a kiln nearby. I was fourteen. I like to think I helped build the house, but I mostly watched.

The house became our home for many years. Now it is abandoned. In August 2021, the Taliban captured Mazar-e-Sharif. Nobody was there to defend it.

I packed my things and left my family. In 2005 I was admitted to the Faculty of Fine Arts at Kabul University. There I was introduced to The Godfather, to Hitchcock, and later to filmmakers like Abbas Kiarostami, whose films I had never seen in Iran.

I spent my time with new friends who were as obsessed with films as I was. We watched movies from the university's archive until it was almost dark, and the guard would throw us out. We called ourselves The Seven, even though there were only four of us, and one of us was barely ever there. I felt like a grown-up.

In 2009, as I was walking down a street, an older man stopped me. He asked for my name and wondered if I had made the film Angels of Earth. 'Yes,' I replied. He began to compliment me. I had a strange feeling — it was the first time I felt that someone had heard me. I felt that I existed. I was proud to be me.

In 2012, my short film Outpost was selected for the Busan International Film Festival in South Korea. In 2013, I worked with a large German crew on a feature film. We were attacked several times by religious extremists and had to finish filming the scenes inside a military camp in Mazar.

We held a small wedding ceremony in the basement of my uncle's house in Kabul. All my friends were there, and my mother too — but my father's absence was heavier than anyone's presence.

A few months later, Laila and I came to Germany. Leaving wasn't only a change of location but a change in how I acted and spoke — a change in my personality. Leaving, for me, was abandoning all I had built. Leaving meant not seeing my mother anymore. It meant I could no longer feel the safety of my father's voice.

It was my second time in Germany. In 2011, I had come as an artist. In 2014 I arrived as a refugee.

I was the same person, yet people's behavior had changed completely. The heavy looks of others made me ashamed of myself. I felt bad for being me.

The camp smelled like metal doors, and there were languages I could not place. We did not feel safe there, not even in Germany. But Laila and I were together, and our expectations had fallen so low that a room with a tiny sink and fridge felt like fortune.

The men's toilet was always dirty, so many used the women's. I had to walk Laila there like a bodyguard. My father didn't speak to me during that first year. I missed him so much. I spent the days in long lines for refugees. The lines got longer, especially by 2015 as waves of refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq entered Germany. Attitudes toward refugees got harsher. We were not allowed to study, not even to learn German. Our first son was born.

My mother says my eldest son, Amir, is the mirror image of my own childhood: as thin and delicate, as sensitive and easily hurt, as deeply attached to his father. When I leave the house, he interrogates me. While I'm gone, he questions his mother until I return.

I try to keep yogurt always in the house. He eats it with everything. I refused yogurt at his age. He refuses meat at mine. At night, when the day finally slows, I sometimes miss him. I don't know if I miss him, or if I miss my own childhood — because he is so much like me. Maybe both.

Days following the Taliban's takeover, the first picture I got from my family in Afghanistan was of my siblings tearing up our photo album. 'The Taliban should not get their hands on these photos!' was the comment my father wrote.

Among the pictures being torn, I recognized one of myself and my grandmother in a park. We were in exile in Iran at the time. It was her last outing before she got sick. For the rest of her life, she longed for the home she had lost. In 2002, a few days after her death, the Taliban were overthrown. She didn't last long enough to see it.

After August 2021, home became even harder to imagine as a place I could return to. My family moved again. Fear spread again. The history that had shaped us once before returned in full force to shape us again.

In September 2021, my parents arrived in Le Tréport, France. In December, I saw them for the first time in many years.

All I have are the pictures my family took and sent to me before they were torn up. What do I do with them?

Maybe I will print them out and create a new family album — one my children can use to watch my family's story. A story about a home that has been lost again and again. The rise, fall, and resurgence of the Taliban are woven into our history. The new album will have pictures of my grandmother, my father, and me. And the picture showing my siblings tearing up the old album.