Whenever a Serb bled or was buried, they would claim the land as their own territory. Such was their fervent nationalism.

How long can I mold my identity in the changing world around me? Sometimes, I feel that I am a refugee in exile whose life has been smashed into pieces by many ill facets of ghastly wars.

At one point in time, I had thought that my writing was a product of my circumstances and the uncertainty around me. There was a human vulnerability in combat journalism, wherever I was reporting on the continuous war. But it also made me love the poetic beauty in words.

Someone had told me that the Taliban reserve was limitless and there were never huge causalities in their organisation.

Bullet-ridden bodies were not saved easily. For these fallen soldiers, it wasn’t a sort of accident that happened unexpectedly, it was rather an ordeal of fate that had to come one day. Death made them lose in its surety.

For immigrants, nothing was simple, ever.

Veiled women were often found begging on the streets. Street hustlers made a living by pickpocketing. There was poverty around where some people could kill each other for bread, there were orphanages that were abundant, where young boys and girls were sold off to their novice masters, for imposed drudgery, that would continue for a major part of their lives.

The pain did hurt me like a knife and agonised me. A dejected nostalgia inundated my heart but I had to stick with the realities that were sunk in the quagmires of differences.

There were very few panaceas in a war-torn society.