It was 4 AM and Salma couldn’t sleep. She had walked over to the kitchen twice already, in search of water to quench her non-existent thirst. Salma felt guilty going back to sleep, because thousands of miles away, her Abba would be up scrubbing every corner of the house clean. 

He followed a three day ritual. He would start with the prayer room and finish cleaning all corners of the house in time for Nowruz - the Persian new year. 

“Just as you clean before Diwali in the fall, in Afghanistan, we clean during the spring,” she had told Mala the previous evening.

Two years ago, Salma and Mala met at a South Asian journalists conference in Kathmandu. It didn’t take the women much time to bond over Bollywood music, well-cooked mutton and colourful bangles. 

When they were binging on momos in narrow streets of Thamel, Salma had no idea that Mala would be her lifeboat out of a capsized life situation later in life. 

****