When you leave your country as a refugee, what can you take with you? A few objects. Many memories. And recipes.
In a room in Khirkee, a densely packed neighbourhood in southern Delhi, Ifat, a teacher from Kabul displaced by war, described her search for senjet. The dried berry is an essential ingredient in her recipe for haft mewa – literally, seven fruits – a syrupy mix that is traditionally prepared for Nauroz, the festival that marks the spring equinox. The holiday is celebrated as a harbinger of the new year across Central Asia, Iran and parts of India. Families go outdoors for picnics, and celebrate with poetry readings and music concerts. Through the room’s open window we could hear the afternoon cacophony of the neighbourhood: the hum of tea stalls, shoppers and hawkers, dogs and pedestrians. But in Ifat’s voice was the coolness of the Kabuli spring.
Finally, Ifat said, she had managed to locate a stall in a nearby market frequented by Afghans where a version of the fruit was available. It was not perfect – nowhere as good as the real thing in Afghanistan – but it would have to do. The young man who ran the stall was called Feroz. He also stocked the kind of tarkari – vegetables – she needed for her stews, and the kinds of pots that she needed for her cooking. For a while, Ifat had been able to cook as she wanted to, as she used to. But then Feroz had been relocated to Canada, and her kitchen was once again deprived.
I heard Ifat’s story at a writing workshop I ran in the summer of 2022 at the Simurgh Centre, a cultural space for Afghans living in the Indian capital, where I was working at the time. (The centre is run by the Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan New Delhi, a German cultural non-profit.) The participants comprised seven women and one man, ranging in age from their teens to their sixties. Each of them had lived in Delhi for years, and had gone through at least one, if not two, cycles of displacement due to war. The previous year, the Taliban had taken over Afghanistan for a second time, two decades after the US-led invasion that pushed them out of power in 2001. The change in government seemed to make the idea of home even more tenuous for the group. And yet, in our weekly sessions over that Delhi summer, it emerged in gleaming, loving detail in their stories of food and belonging.