The Notebook I Left Behind

The mountains around Buner in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (Pakistan) always felt huge, like they were shouting at the sky. Back in the 2000s, everything else was shouting too—guns, rumors, news on scratchy radios. Good guys, bad guys? Impossible to tell. My village felt like the edge of a war map. But I had two things nobody could take: a short pencil that kept snapping and a beat-up notebook with pages falling out. They weren’t for fighting the outside mess. They were for the mess inside my head.

We were just kids, really. The big worry of the day was finishing science homework so Mr. Ashraf wouldn’t cancel recess. Recess was gold—running wild on the cold fields while the grown-up world took a break from scaring us. The classrooms were freezing anyway; who wanted to stay?

Still, you couldn’t ignore what was going on. Grown-ups argued over land, over God, over who should run things. The noise leaked into everything. I learned early how to pretend to be asleep so my mom wouldn’t force another glass of milk mixed with medicine down my throat. Tiny rebellion, huge victory.

This was also the time I started drawing. We couldn’t hit the fields, playgrounds, or rivers anymore without looking over our shoulders, so I sketched them instead. Kept Amjad Khan, Ibrar Ali Shah, and me alive on paper—sprinting across grass, diving into cold water, building forts the chaos outside had stolen from us.

Everyone had their trick to feel safe. My friend Amjad swore nothing bad could touch you if you sat in your mother’s lap. I believed him, but I couldn’t do it—too old, too awkward, too “what will people say.” So I stuck to my corner with the pencil and notebook. Sometimes I’d sneak behind the toilets and light an old cigarette butt I’d found. Tasted awful, felt like freedom.

In the notebook I made lists. Serious ones: how to stop the fighting, step-by-step peace plans, timetables for when the bombs would quit. Then the silly stuff that never changed: Marry Madhuri Dixit. Never drink medicine-milk again.

I wrote them like instructions somebody important might actually follow.

The lists never fixed the real world. The next morning the mountains still echoed, and the radio still crackled with bad news. But for a little while, fear had somewhere to live outside my chest. The chaos turned into neat lines and bullet points. When I shut the notebook I could breathe, fall asleep believing maybe—just maybe—tomorrow would read my list and behave.

It never did. Didn’t matter. The writing was the point. In a place where everything felt out of control, those smudged pages were mine.

Then, in 2008 or maybe early 2009, the shouting got too close. Army trucks rolled in, helicopters chopped the sky, and word came: pack one bag, leave now. We fled to Peshawar, a city that smelled of diesel and strangers. No mountains, no river roar, no friends yelling my name across the fields. Just concrete and silence where my notebook should have been. I’d grabbed clothes, a sweater, my mother’s hand—but in the panic I left the notebook on the windowsill, pages fluttering like it was waving goodbye.

Two months later we came back. The house stood, but it was hollow. Doors kicked in, cupboards gutted, even the lightbulbs gone. I ran to the windowsill—nothing. Searched under the bed, behind the rice sacks, in the yard where the chickens used to scratch. Gone. Someone had taken my rivers, my peace treaties, my Madhuri Dixit wedding plans, every stubborn sentence I’d scratched into those pages.

I sat on the bare floor and cried like the little kid I thought I’d outgrown. Not for the clothes or the radio we lost, but for that cheap, dog-eared friend who’d listened when no one else could. All my tiny victories, all the nights I’d fallen asleep believing paper could fix the world—they were ash in some looter’s pocket.

Years later I still look for it sometimes, in second-hand book stalls, in the corners of my mind. I never found it. But I kept writing anyway—on scraps, in margins, on whatever wouldn’t run away. Because that notebook taught me the one thing the chaos couldn’t steal: as long as I can hold a pencil, I can still draw the river, still plan the wedding, still quiet the thunder—one sentence at a time.