li was thin. His eyes had sunken in, and his cheeks clung to his face. When I met him, he hadn’t seen or spoken to another person in over ...
li was thin. His eyes had sunken in, and his cheeks clung to his face.
When I met him, he hadn’t seen or spoken to another person in over three weeks. His house was dark and dilapidated. All the windows were closed and sealed, and all the light was snuffed out. Old newspapers were stuck together and plastered onto the windows; another thick layer of duct tape held these papers together and sealed any gaps around the edges. The darkened windows reminded me of photographs I had seen from wartime Sarajevo. The borderlands had become a different kind of a battlefront.
Ali was fighting the light, and he had lived in this darkness for almost two years now. He refused to allow candlelight inside his home, so we sat in blackness. His house had nothing except a worn-down mattress, and two shirts and a pair of dark grey trousers that hung right next to the main wooden door.
Ali’s childhood friend Jamshed ran a small hardware store, and convinced me to travel with him to see Ali. He had heard from the local teacher whom I had interviewed days earlier that I was “speaking to people about the border”. So Jamshed found me at...
