“Qo qoqo barg e chinar, dukhtara shista qatar. Kaash ki kaftar mey boodam, da hawa par mey zadam.”
(“Qo qoqo under the tree, all the girls sit in a line. I wish that I was a pigeon, so I could fly in the sky.”)
In a courtyard in the Indian city of Delhi, Breshna, 30 years old, leads a group of 10 children through this song, a well-known nursery rhyme sung across schoolrooms in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. It is a song that Breshna — whose name has been changed to protect her identity — never got to sing herself when she was a child: When she turned 4, the first Taliban government that had taken over Kabul in 1996 had closed schools for girls. Years later, she and her mother, who goes by Sadaf — also a pseudonym — teach it to Afghan children growing up in Delhi as part of the refugee community, in an attempt to pass on the Dari language to generations displaced by war.
For both Breshna and Sadaf, books have been their most reliable companions and their most constant source of happiness in lives that have seen significant flux and trauma. While their classes focus on basic language skills and exercises with the children, they see their daily efforts as part of a larger project: to connect Afghans to their own stories in a bid to mitigate the cultural amnesia that typically befalls a generation born in exile.
A tall, assured woman in her 50s, Sadaf exudes the authority of a longtime teacher. For over two decades, she taught Dari — the form of Persian spoken in large parts of Afghanistan — at a prominent girls’ school in Kabul. In 2017, she moved to India with her two daughters and son. They settled in Khirkee Extension, a neighborhood in southern Delhi often called “Little Kabul.”
For the past four decades of war and unrest in Afghanistan, the Indian capital has been home to Afghan refugees — from those fleeing the civil war of the 1990s to those escaping the first Taliban regime to those escaping the first Taliban regime of 1996 to 2001, Their numbers are far smaller than those in Iran and Pakistan, but the community has made its imprint on the city. And while certain localities have housed Afghan families for generations, in Khirkee, many arrived in the latter years of the faltering republic, as security conditions deteriorated across the country.
Its narrow lanes bustle with activity, lined with money changers, travel agents and restaurants, their signboards written in the two major languages of Afghanistan — Dari and Pashto. Across the street from a large private hospital, the area is also dotted with pharmacies, once serving the many Afghans who traveled to India for medical treatment, until the Taliban’s 2021 takeover halted commercial flights.
Listening to the snatches of conversations in the neighborhood or the Afghan music playing from restaurants, Sadaf’s efforts may seem out of place. Delhi is not often considered an important location in the transnational culture of the Afghan diaspora. This is partly because most people in the country are waiting to be resettled, and India is a part of their journey to countries like Australia or Canada. But the wait can take years, even decades, and until then these families live in a bureaucratic limbo, officially not allowed to work and struggling for a sense of stability and belonging.
While it is not unusual for immigrant communities to try to hold on to their language and culture, the scale and the circumstances of this effort mark it out. With a history of wars stretching back over more than four decades, Afghans are among the largest protracted refugee populations in the world. And with the return of the Taliban government in 2021, the very idea of a home to go back to has become even more tenuous.
For these reasons, Sadaf and Breshna turn to books and reading as ways to preserve the rich cultural and literary traditions that are often part of the everyday lives of ordinary Afghans. Mainstream portrayals of asylum-seekers tend to focus on integration — on the need to teach them new languages, new customs and ways of life. But Sadaf and Breshna’s story challenges this stereotype. For them, reading is their resistance to the erasure of exile.
After she arrived in Delhi in 2017, Sadaf joined community programs in Delhi run by refugee organizations in an effort to fill her days. Soon, she was asked to volunteer for outreach sessions, making connections with families. “Watching the children, I realized they were losing their relationship with our languages and culture,” she said.
Often, they were fluent in Hindi and English, languages they learned in school. “But they didn’t know how to say ‘hello’ to other Afghans and had no idea what our festivals were. It really disturbed me. I wanted to find a way for them to feel connected to their own language and culture.” It took her six years but, in 2023, she was finally able to do something about it.
With the help of a grant from a refugee aid organization, she teamed up with Breshna and started a day care center that doubled as a language school from a room in a friend’s home. Both mother and daughter speak Dari and Pashto. But because of their fluency in the former, they chose to focus on it in their classes. Last year, they moved to a larger community space. It was here that I found them, tucked away on a winding road, between shops selling biryani, cellphones and scrap material.
The metal gate opened into a narrow courtyard. On the walls, I saw painted logos of different aid organizations, as well as “Smile Books School” written in English and Dari.
Sadaf’s class was in a room adjacent to the courtyard. There were colorful posters on the wall and games and flash cards laid out on the floor. There was a mix of Dari and English picture books on the shelves and the children, aged between 3 and 5 years, were perched on small plastic chairs. All had been born in Delhi. “They know they are Afghan,” Sadaf told me, “but they don’t know what that means.”
I watched as Sadaf led the students through exercises in a mix of Dari and English: how to greet your parents in the morning, how to get ready for school. “These are the kind of things that children would learn quite naturally at home in Afghanistan, but here their family situation is not normal,” she said.
In another room at the end of passage, I saw an adult literacy class in session. It was packed mostly with women and a handful of young men. “This is for people who could not study earlier because of the circumstances in their past,” Breshna said, referring not only to the conflict but the social and economic barriers faced by ordinary Afghans in accessing education. In this small space, between these two rooms, the impact of the country’s decades of war was evident across generations.
I asked Sadaf why the children didn’t simply learn Dari at home from their parents, who still speak it as their first language. “In school, the children speak Hindi and English. Sometimes, their teachers also instruct the parents to talk to them in English so they can adjust to their surroundings more easily,” she explained.
From understanding pop culture to making friends, speaking in the languages of refuge was their way of dealing with the uncertainty that dogged their lives. Even in Kabul, Breshna added, some mothers were emphasizing English rather than Dari in their children’s education. “They know they will have to leave, and it will be easier for the children then.”
Breshna helped her mother set up the classes when she realized that even older children, who had studied part of their lives in Afghanistan, were forgetting how to read and write in Dari. The idea that they would be cut off from Afghan writers and poets was unacceptable to her.
When Breshna was barred from attending school, she spent the next four years studying at home. With Sadaf’s help, she became an avid reader — a habit that continued even after 2001, when girls’ schools were reopened. “My grandmother had a beautiful library in her ‘gulkhana’ (a conservatory-like room with large glass windows) where she would sit each afternoon and read, with a cup of tea beside her.”
Breshna began devouring all her books, from the iconic works of Rumi and Bedil — both influential Persian poets — to contemporary writers from Afghanistan and Iran, as well as translated books. “Stories protected me,” she said. “They made me believe that things could never be really too bad, because there was bound to be a happy ending. A hero would appear who would banish the dark times and rescue the characters.” Like her mother, she loved the oral myths and folktales passed down in the family, imbued with poetry, fantasy and humor, changing with each telling.
Arriving in Delhi as a refugee, she told me, was difficult in many ways. “I felt like an outsider for nearly a year. The language was not very familiar to me and everything about the city seemed large and forbidding.”
Among the many losses she mourned was having to leave behind her grandmother’s library, and her own books. “I knew Delhi had many beautiful libraries, but as a refugee I lacked the identity papers or the visa to get admittance.” She found some solace in English books, but missed reading in her own language. “I felt like I was losing myself,” she said. “And the distance from my own literature added to that feeling of being lost.”
In 2020, Delhi was placed under a strict lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. The city’s population faced massive challenges. The vulnerable refugee community was also deeply hit. “People had no way to make their living, and we often had to struggle even to get rations or medicines, let alone vaccines,” recalled Sadaf.
Stuck at home, mother and daughter turned to e-books to pass the long hours. One evening, tired of reading the small type on her mobile phone, Sadaf asked Breshna to read out the book for her. Inspired, Breshna sent a recording of the chapter of the Dari novel over WhatsApp to other Afghan women. “I had no idea if anyone was listening,” she said. “But when I finished the story, I immediately got many requests for more.”
A year later, Breshna began volunteering at a community library near her home that had Dari and Pashto books on its shelves. “It felt like a homecoming,” she said. What made it even better was that the staff didn’t require any documents from her. All she had to do was turn up and start reading.
Over the past three years, Breshna has created a literary community for herself — a luxury she says she didn’t have in Kabul. “I couldn’t visit the library there because it was far away from home and there was too much street harassment.” In Delhi, she set up a book club for Afghan readers with over 30 members. “Sitting in a circle and talking about books with men and women, this was unthinkable for me in Afghanistan.”
It is this vital bond with literature that she wishes to transfer to the children in her mother’s center. The day I visited, she read out to the children from an illustrated volume called “Padar e Man,” or “My Father.” I watched the kids repeat the words after her and laugh in delight at her dramatic gestures.
“The first time I told them I would read a Dari book for them, they had negotiated with me to also read an English story, because they felt they would get bored,” she smiled. “Now, they ask me to find more Dari books to share. That made me feel like our efforts were working.”
I asked Sadaf how her efforts differed from those of other large diaspora communities, such as Indians in the United States, who also strive to preserve their culture far from home. “Because these places have had a stable situation, they have not been through decades of war,” she explained. With violence having taken a toll on much of Afghan culture and civil society, losing the connection of language will make it even harder to preserve what is left.
In most media stories about Afghan women, the focus is on their exclusion from education, emphasizing the loss of literacy or functional skills. But for Sadaf and Breshna, their motive extends beyond reading and writing, to protecting the rich cultural lives of Afghans.
“People often talk about refugees as if we don’t need or deserve beauty and joy in our lives,” Breshna told me. “Like these are luxuries that are not for us, because we should only be thinking of survival and be grateful to be alive. I want these kids to learn their mother tongue not just as a way to remember their homeland but to remember that they are part of humanity, and are part of its stories.”
Breshna’s read-aloud ended and it was time to go home. I watched as parents came to the door to collect their children. There was the universal language of hugs and scrambled goodbyes to the teachers, the clamor of children wanting to recount their day to their mothers and fathers. Sadaf and Breshna hung back to clean up the room, placing the toys back on their shelves, stacking the books.
As she was putting away “Padar e Man,” one of the kids asked Breshna if there would be more stories tomorrow. “Of course,” she said, “lots.”
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