In truth, there was no blood relation between my father and President Daoud, but our families were so close that Neelab and I had been raised as cousins. My father was the president’s most trusted adviser. We often stayed overnight in the palace, especially when the president hosted evening functions. Neelab and I would find a corner of the palace to hide in on those nights and talk until we fell asleep, the sound of music streaming up from the garden. We exchanged secrets that bound us together more profoundly than blood would have. Neelab knew of the time I had taken one of my mother’s pearl rings and traded it with a classmate for a doll with eyelids that opened and closed. And only I knew that General Jamshid’s pimply-faced son had penned a love note to Neelab, song lyrics on a sheet of lined notebook paper.

Over the years Neelab, her brother Rostam, and I had explored every square foot of Arg, the name for the presidential palace. We would walk the perimeter, summoning moments from history and inserting ourselves into them. While Neelab and I fired imaginary bullets from our fingertips, Rostam pretended to be an invader trespassing the deep trench that was now filled in with green grass.

We conjured the silky voices of the king’s concubines in the building that was once a harem, then popped into the structure once used for army barracks and marched, high-kneed and saluting. Rostam read stories of Genghis Khan’s conquests in this land while we sat in a vacant turret, our eyes tracing the sawtooth mountains that guarded Kabul like palace walls.

If we could have moved through time, we would have visited every decade of Arg’s history to see how accurate we’d been in reenacting the signing of treaties, the betrayal of trusts, the never-ending fight for our country’s independence from foreign invasion.

One day we sat in a copse of trees in the orchard with one of Boba’s history books. Rostam had watched me thumbing through the pages in search of a conflict or period we had yet to stage.

“Whoever wrote this must have gone through his days with his eyes closed!” I’d said as I slammed the book closed and searched the spine for the author’s name.

“Here we go. And what’s wrong with this one?” Rostam had asked, one eyebrow raised. Neelab had been lying on the grass, one leg crossed over the other. She rolled onto her side and propped her head on her hand.

“Think of all the people in the palace,” I’d said, waving at the grand buildings in the distance. “Are there only men in there? Or in Kabul?”

“What are you getting at?” Rostam asked.

“There are no women in the book,” Neelab had said, taking pleasure in explaining to her older brother something so obvious.