Numbers alone can expand or shrink the meaning of existence. Yet they condense life into a simpler shape—like a person’s age.

Moonlight had long since yielded to the sun. Mursal lay on her bed, her hair, uncombed for weeks, spread across the pillow, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. She could no longer tell how long she had been awake. For four years now, instead of rising for school, she had risen only into this silence, staring at the ceiling and breathing the smell of dust and books that filled her room.

There was a gentle knock at the door. Behzad, her brother, put his head inside.

“Aren’t you coming to breakfast?”

She had stared at the ceiling so often that she knew every crack by heart.

“Don’t be long,” Behzad added. “I don’t want to be late for school again.”

Mursal nodded without speaking.

The air grew warmer with each passing day. It always reminded her of the last summer she had spent at school—the anxious days before examinations. Yet summer had possessed another beauty too: the holidays. The afternoons at her aunt’s house, when her cousins would play songs and try to sing along with the singers, laughing whenever they lost the tune. They would clasp one another’s hands, spin in circles, dance until they were breathless, and their laughter would fill the rooms. In those moments they believed, with all the certainty youth permits, that they were truly young.

“Are you coming?” Behzad hollered from the living room. 

Mural rose. Reaching for a hair tie, her eyes fell upon the books that had unsettled the order of her room. She went to the bathroom to wash her face. As the water ran over her hands, she was reminded of her father, a man of sixty-two who stood along the road selling potatoes from sunrise to sunset. Mursal, meanwhile, was only twenty-two and had not left the house in four years. In some places, the skin on her hands had begun to pucker just like her father’s, marred by emerging dark spots. Her throat tightened. She did not dare look into the mirror.

At breakfast she sat a little apart from their mother and Behzad, hiding her hands beneath her sleeves. Her mother, while listening to Behzad speak, leaned over and placed a cup of tea before her.

“I was having trouble with biology last night.” Behzad passed Mursal a familiar brown notebook. “I borrowed this. You were asleep. I didn’t want to wake you.”

Mursal took the notebook and set it beside her. For a moment no one spoke.

“I better go,” Behzad said, but before leaving he rested a hand on Mursal’s shoulder, and added, “Sometimes I wish we had both been girls. Then at least we could have cried together.” He waited for Mursal to respond. When she did not, he added, “You know, if it were possible, I’d change places with you.”

Mursal merely inclined her head. Their mother rose to walk Behzad to the door. Leaning close to her at the door, Behzad whispered something.

“In a country at war,” their mother said in a low voice, “giving birth to a daughter is the beginning of another war.” Then she leaned against the wall, and added, “What am I to do? Every day, she speaks less and less. If only I had had another son.”

“Don’t cry, Mother.” Behzad embraced her.

Mursal got up and went back to her room and lay in bed.

A little later, her mother came to the doorway. She paused for a moment, then let out a sigh. “Don’t you want to rid yourself of these books?” 

Mursal went on staring at the ceiling. 

“I’ve left five potatoes on the kitchen table.” Mother wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Cook them for lunch.”

*

Mursal went into the kitchen. As she washed the dishes, she heard the voices of boys walking to school. She shut the window firmly. When she let go of the latch, her hands were trembling. She cleaned the house and prepared lunch. Just as she was turning to go back to her room, her mother called out after her. 

“You forgot your biology notebook here. You shouldn’t be so absent-minded at twenty-two, my dear.” 

Mursal took the notebook and went to her room. Across from her unmade bed stood the bookcase, and beside it the desk still crowded with textbooks, some open, some closed. It seemed to her that the room grew smaller each day, as though one day it would become so small that it would turn into her grave. 

Outside, boys could be heard. School had ended, and they were making their way home. She stared at the notebook for a few moments before laying it beside her on the bed. A dry leaf slipped from between its pages, bringing back the day they had begun studying plants. They had been told to collect leaves of every kind and examine them beneath that curious machine. Their teacher had not spoken of how the leaves changed color in autumn.

“No,” he had said. “Today we shall look at leaves as scientists. Then you’ll see how intricate and beautiful the living world truly is.”

She vividly recalled the first time she had looked inside that leaf through a microscope, utterly awed by the infinite veins running through it. 

“The veins,” the teacher had said, “carry life through every part of the leaf.”

She had wanted so badly to become a biologist—to wear a white laboratory coat, to work in white rooms behind large spectacles, tracing the hidden currents of life within living things.

Had the universities remained open, she would by now have worn her graduation gown and completed the fourth year of her degree. Instead, like a dry leaf severed from its branch, the current of life within her had come to a halt. 

She let the leaf fall and walked to the bookcase. Since the Taliban had closed the schools to girls, she had never once found the courage to go near those books. She stood for a moment with the notebook in her hand, meaning only to return it to the shelf. Instead, she let it drop. The sound echoed through the room. For a second she was frightened and drew back. Then, almost without knowing what she was doing, she picked up a book and threw it down. Then another, and another. 

Her mother rushed into the room. “What are you doing, child?”

Mursal swept the books from the desk onto the floor as well, then ran into the kitchen. Her mother followed. Mursal pulled a black trash bag from the cupboard and carried it back to her room. With shaking hands she placed the first book inside. Then the second. Then the third. When she reached the fourth, she could go no further. She fell upon the scattered volumes, gathered one against her chest, and held it there.

Her mother took the trash bag away, sat beside her, stroked her hair, and said softly, “Don’t cry, my dear.”

“I… I’m not twenty-two,” she said, her breath suddenly hitching. “Eighteen…” She gasped, fighting for air. “I’ve only lived eighteen years, Mother. Those four years… where did they go?”

This story was produced as part of Paranda, a writer development programme and global network for women writers in Afghanistan and the diaspora, facilitated by Untold Narratives, a development programme for writers structurally marginalised by community or conflict, and supported by KfW Stiftung.

This story was edited and translated from the Dari by Qais Akbar Omar.

Qais Akbar Omar holds a BA in journalism from Kabul University, an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University, and was a Scholars at Risk Fellow at Harvard University in 2014–15. Qais is the author of A Fort of Nine Towers, which has been published in more than twenty languages, and the co-author of A Night in the Emperor’s Garden, which has been dramatized by BBC Radio. He has published short stories in The Southern Review, AGNI, The Hopkins Review, The Markaz Review, Guernica, Arrowsmith, Literary Hub, American Chordata, and elsewhere.