A driveway conversation between an Afghan writer and a Bengali neighbor over Binoy Majumdar’s Phire Esho, Chaka opens a meditation on translation and exile: what is carried across borders and what is permanently lost.
Kabul is geographically closer to Kolkata than to North America, and somehow my Bengali neighbor and I have carried that geography onto our street. We regularly check in on each other, sometimes with a quick hello from a distance, sometimes through generous plates of Kabuli pulao and bowls of mishti doi, and sometimes through stories from back home.
Last week I found him washing his car in the driveway. He had just returned from Kolkata, where he had gone for an immediate family matter, and not a happy one, so I stopped to catch up. He told me he had brought back a few books he wanted to show me. He disappeared briefly into the house and returned carrying a small stack. On top was Phire Esho, Chaka, a collection by the Bengali poet Binoy Majumdar.
He translated the title for me as “Come Back, O Wheel.”
He smiled.
“See? Something cannot be translated. There is always something that cannot be carried into another language.”
He told me that Majumdar had fallen in love with a woman who left Kolkata and never returned, a story, he said, that everyone in Kolkata knew but did not speak about too loudly. To my neighbor, the poems were about leaving, longing, and the possibility that some people never come back.
Immigrants translate themselves each morning before stepping outside, and perhaps that is why I have never been able to think of translation as merely a question of language.
He spoke about him in the tradition of Jibanananda Das and Rabindranath Tagore, writers whose work is inseparable from Bengal itself, where rivers, fields, forests, and weather do not merely surround people but participate in their lives. To understand Majumdar, he said, required more than knowing the words. It required knowing the landscape from which they had come.
I reminded him of Rumi.
English readers can encounter an extraordinary poet in translation, I told him, but not quite the Rumi I know in Persian. Something changes in the journey. The words arrive, but cadence, humor, vulnerability, silence, and the peculiar music through which emotion becomes inseparable from language do not always arrive with them.
My neighbor nodded.
Majumdar never married, he said. To imagine that love could also sometimes mean waiting for someone to return is terrifying. More terrifying still is returning and discovering that the people you expected to wait for you are already gone. And what language could explain that?
Majumdar was still alive when my neighbor left Kolkata for the United States. Since then, his life had unfolded across two continents. One part of him became a scientist, built a career, raised a child, and settled into the routines of American life. Another seemed never to have left Kolkata at all. It still spoke of Majumdar in the present tense. It still called the city Calcutta.
It seemed to me that he carried the place as he had known it.
I had encountered this before in people who still said “Leningrad” or “Yugoslavia,” and I had always assumed it was nostalgia, perhaps habit, the harmless persistence of an old name. But listening to my neighbor, I began to wonder whether the old names we carry are not simply names at all, but pieces of a world that no longer exists in quite the same form.
He looked down at the ground, then back at me.
“I used to write poetry,” he said. “Back when I was young, in Kolkata.”
He paused.
“I forgot everything.”
I could not write poetry, I told him, but I had always wanted to understand what other people had written. I still remember buying a small pocket edition of Shakespeare’s poetry for eight dollars, a considerable sum for me at the time in Kabul. I never told anyone because I worried they would laugh at me for spending so much on a book I could barely read. I believed that if I learned enough English, Shakespeare would eventually reveal himself to me.
It has taken me a lifetime to realize that I am still learning. Yet I had another way of loving poetry.
In Kabul, I practiced calligraphy. Most of the time I copied love poems in elegant handwriting. When people still wrote letters, girls I knew, friends and acquaintances alike, often asked me to write theirs so they could impress the boys they hoped would fall in love with them.
In the Kabul of those years, as one war gave way to another, calligraphy was widely considered a man’s art, even though the patience, discipline, and precision it demanded were qualities women were expected to possess. Whenever I wrote someone else’s love letter, I felt quietly triumphant. I was shaping words that did not belong to me, carrying someone else’s feelings from one person to another.
Like my neighbor’s abandoned poetry, my calligraphy disappeared after I left Kabul.
“I, too, have forgotten everything,” I told him.
Since then, I have wondered why leaving home so often means abandoning our gentlest habits. We leave behind the things we never imagined we would lose: the handwriting we practiced, the names we continued to use, the foods we cooked without thinking, the streets we knew by instinct, the people who remembered us before we became whoever we were elsewhere.
I can only imagine my wedding taking place in my parents’ house in Kabul, with every ritual observed as it had been for generations. I can see the rooms crowded with the people I love, the rice, kofta, and sabzi prepared for the guests, my hands covered with henna, and, like countless brides before me, myself being driven through the city where I was born in a car covered with fresh flowers.
But what if I never return?
Would any wedding elsewhere be a translation of that dream? Mine, too, had once been there to return to.
“I’ll go back when I retire,” my neighbor said, with complete certainty, as though returning to Kolkata were not simply a hope but an eventual fact. A childhood friend still looked after the house and everything else he had left behind. After all those years, returning remained not merely a dream but a plan.
I listened to him and thought about what it means to have somewhere to return to.
Most of my best friends were killed in different wars in Afghanistan. With them disappeared the people who had known the different lives I had lived in Kabul: my childhood in the basements of northeast Kabul, my school years beneath shelling, the teachers we still celebrated, the lipsticks we secretly passed around, the letters I wrote for boys.
They had known me before I became a reporter, before I learned to describe explosions for people who had never heard one, before Kabul became a place I had to explain to strangers. They had known me when I was simply myself, and perhaps this is another kind of translation: becoming legible to people who did not know the original. Then I thought about all the other things I had spent my life translating.
During the years of international presence in Afghanistan, translators became indispensable intermediaries between foreigners and the society they believed they had come to understand. Early in my career as a reporter in Kabul, part of my own work consisted of translating Afghan voices for English-speaking audiences. I thought I was translating words.
Only later did I begin to understand how much more was being carried across that distance.
In 2023, a woman who had worked as a translator at Bagram Air Base told me about a group of boys detained in Kandahar on suspicion of Taliban affiliation. They were frightened and crying, she recalled, but what they wanted most was not freedom. They wanted someone to tell their families where they were because they feared the humiliation of being mistaken for common criminals.
They did not want their families to think they had been arrested for petty theft, a street fight, or stealing from a shop. In their minds, they had not been caught committing a crime. They had been detained.
The distinction mattered profoundly to them. The words that proved most difficult to translate, she told me, were almost never military vocabulary. They were ordinary words: honor, guest, shame, family, home.
Each seemed simple until it entered another world, where its meaning depended on history, obligation, and relationships that could not be carried across by a dictionary, and what stayed with me was the distance between how those boys understood themselves and how they were understood by the people questioning them.
In war, I learned that a mistranslated word can become something much larger than a linguistic mistake, and I began to wonder whether this was also what happened to people who left home. Children translate their parents into a changing world. Adults translate childhood into memory. Lovers translate one another into stories they can live with. Immigrants translate themselves each morning before stepping outside, and perhaps that is why I have never been able to think of translation as merely a question of language.
If I lose my childhood friends and retain only the memory of them, what happens to the lives they knew me through? If a poem loses its music but gains a wider readership, what exactly has survived? If a place remains vivid in memory but changes beyond recognition, which version of it is home?
I don’t know.
I only know that something is always left behind.
Ever since that afternoon with my neighbor, I have thought about reading Majumdar in English to see what he had to say about longing and never returning. Yet I never quite do. I am afraid that I will find that the translation has carried too much. Or not enough.
But, I continue visiting places in my dreams that I am told no longer exist, and speaking to people I know are no longer alive. There is one scene that returns again and again. I am somewhere in the middle of my own wedding, trying to make sure everyone I love is there before the music begins. Every time, I see that my dress is still unfinished.
