Living in London, my elder brother – someone I have always looked up to – makes good use of his relative proximity to our ancestral home in Afghanistan. He travels back and forth so often that, from my base in Melbourne, I sometimes joke he has visited our village more times in the past few years than I have visited any other Australian city.

His most recent trip, however, did not go as planned. Flight disruptions linked to escalating tensions in the Middle East left him stranded in Istanbul for several days. Eventually he gave up and flew back to London, missing both the anniversary of our mother’s death in Kabul and the Eid celebrations many of the family members had hoped to mark together at the end of Ramadan.

While waiting at the airport we spoke on FaceTime and our conversation drifted back to what remains of our ancestral home, which has been largely reduced to ruins now sitting in a mountainous valley in Paktika province in south-eastern Afghanistan.

Time and war have stripped the walls but the memory of what life once looked like inside them remains vivid. What strikes me most when I look at photos he sends me is not the amount of destruction but what endures.

The house played a central role in hosting guests and allowing for community consultation – a process known as the jirga – which was part of our family’s and village’s way of life. The bala khana, the........

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