The hostel had the particular smell of temporary things: boiled water on a coil, soap that never quite matched the room's effort, the faint musk of someone else's spent shoes. Our room was small two narrow beds, a shelf with chipped paint, a single window that looked over a courtyard where laundry moved like small flags. It was not a home; it was a waiting place. Waiting, I had learned, can be a kind of work.
That night, after Tooba had tucked a borrowed blanket around her shoulders and Farid had walked to the stall to bring back tea, I sat on the edge of my bed with the notebook in my lap. I had not wanted the book to be the first thing I carried into this new life, but perhaps that was backward thinking: memory wants company when the world is new. I opened the cover and the pages smelled faintly of dust and the ink from previous hands. I smoothed the first page and set my pen to paper.
The first line was absurdly mundane: date, place, who is with me. Then the second line found shape: the photograph's brief description, the roof where it had been taken, the names I could already not forget. Writing the names is a small, evasive ritual. It turns a hurt you fear will diffuse into something you can hold steady. My handwriting felt clumsy at first, as if the pen and I had to reacquaint ourselves with the job of keeping fact.
I wrote not to indict as much as to remember. There is a difference. Indictment wants to feel the fury of a moment; memory wants to trace consequence until it is visible. Each name I penned was a small stitch in a map I could carry without shouting. The book was not a weapon in my hands; it was a compass.
Outside, the hostel hummed doors opening and closing, a radio from somewhere down the hall playing a song I half-remembered, a woman sweeping in a tone that matched the rhythm of her broom. In the adjoining bed Tooba counted stitches aloud as she mended a hem by torchlight small, careful arithmetic that steadied her when talk would have undone her. Toora murmured once about a patient she would see tomorrow and then fell silent; even in small rooms, the work of bodies and care insists.
I wrote the first entries slowly: what happened, where it happened, who watched and who laughed. I dated every line. Time matters because it makes patterns legible. When you watch an injustice replayed as casualness, dates help you show the shape of repetition. The notebook would be the place where the casual became visible.
There was a strange cleanliness to the act of recording. It made me feel less like something played upon and more like something that would answer back. That was necessary. People who break other people's days often rely on the noise of forgetting to keep their habits. A page that names time and witness is a small, steady resistance to forgetting.
The hostel life forced other kinds of cataloguing too: the price of flour at the corner shop, which bus goes in the right direction at the right hour, which tailor does reliable small repairs. Practicalities anchor plans; you cannot press small pebbles into political gears if you cannot get your sleeve mended. Tooba laughed once when we discovered a woman two doors down did excellent stitching and charged little; laughter in that moment felt as important as any plan.
That first week our routine settled into small certainties. Farid found a piece of work that paid for bread; Tooba began to visit an institute where she would ask about enrolling; Toora walked the nearest clinic and left a calling card. Ufaq mapped which office windows opened early and which clerks drank tea late. Each of us was doing the work we knew: stitching, healing, asking. My own work was different but no less urgent catalogue, remember, wait for the right place to press.
At night I wrote in the small book until the ink left a faint pool at the edge of the page. I noted the names we met at the market, the numbers of phones that passed across counters, the first little fatigues in Farid's face as he carried new routines. I wrote down the photocopy man's tip about a clerk who kept neat files and the name of a woman who ran a neighborhood women's meeting once a week. These were not grand discoveries. They were pebbles.
After I closed the notebook I slid it under the pillow and lay awake for a while, counting the sound of the room like stitches. My life had been moved by men whose comfort had been the first priority; now the work of making meaning would have to be our own. The notebook felt like a small companion faintly bulky, stubbornly warm. It would not whisper promises back to me, but it would keep facts honest.
It is easy in exile to imagine an ending that will arrive if you only push hard enough. I do not believe in neat endings. I believe in slow, patient pressure the sort that happens when people learn to answer questions instead of hurry past them. The notebook, opened on that small bed in that small room, felt like the first honest piece of our strategy. It would not give us victory, but it would give us a shape.
Sleep finally came like the worn blanket Tooba had brought thin, practical, and entirely necessary. In the morning we would rise and count small tasks: find a tailor, locate a supplier, check which classes Tooba could join. The city outside our window would not know us yet, and that anonymity would be both shield and a kind of erasure. We would work, stitch, and write. The first lines in the notebook were only the first of many, but they were the start of something that refused to be smoothed away.