The Past in My Backpack

A Reconnection with my past through a photoshoot with Vinesh.

Photographer Vinesh Kumaran

The Peran-tumban (cloths) was last folded by my mom

With a thread and needle she too

Embroidered love on it.

With soap and water she too

Washed it

Folded it

All these years, it’s been sitting in my backpack

I couldn’t touch it

Just like myself, it’s been waiting for the right time and place to feel belong to.

Thank you Vinesh Kumaran for reconnecting me to this Peran-tumban. However brief, the photoshoot felt like reliving a past that was alien to me for a decade. I highly recommend checking his work. He is an artist of true vision bringing the right material to the world. Thanks again, my friend!

I wanted to write about my graduation from the New Start program, but this portrait-shoot with Vinesh came and it feels more right to post about it. The poem says all there’s about my feeling about the Peran-tumban that was made by my mom. I want to talk about the embroidery practice itself.

Embroidery is a common practice among women in my village. I don’t want to generalize it to all women in Afghanistan but many women do embroidery out of necessity, few out of desire. Women whose freedom is limited to the confined of a household. Whose right to education is taken from them. The rights, if were given they would become doctors, artists, engineers, politicians, athletes, and actresses—whoever they wanted to become. The confinement of the household limits their freedom to needle and thread to show their voices and capability however limited it is.

My mom is one of the few in the village who holds the extra skill first to draw the pattern on the fabric. She does it for all the women in the village. But the embroidery itself every woman and girl can do and is expected to do. Starting as young as 6 or 7 years, the girls sit next to an elder and mimic a destiny that defines the rest of their lives.

However, the norm started to change with the girls’ education opportunities under the previous government. I saw the first distaste of embroidery in my sister who preferred pen and book in her hands rather than needle and thread. She saw the liberty that came with education and wanted to do more and become more.

With the Taliban coming to power, all women and girls were pushed back to the confined of households. An imprisonment that is now over 1000 days.

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