Noa remembers dead Taliban fighters, innocent civilians, children, and his own friends, dismembered,
scorched, wounded, bleeding. The deafening silence after an airstrike, followed by the piercing screams of
the wounded. And then the clean-up, a macabre jigsaw puzzle of putting together dismembered body parts.
“I had to put my friends into body bags, man. It’s not easy. I am just lucky to be alive, but sometimes I wish
I wasn’t. For 10 years I didn’t sleep well.”
After being discharged from the army, Noa returned to the UK in 2012 with nightmares, insomnia and a
permanent residence card. He would wake up at odd hours, sweating, the noise of explosions, gunfire and
screams ringing through his head. He would crawl under his bed and stay there for hours, till the phantom
noises receded into the darkness of the night.
“Sometimes, I would just go to sleep under the bed. It will sound strange, but it was comforting”.
Only after he signed up for a postgraduate programme in psychology at a university did he work out that he
had post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Like the dismembered body parts he once had to put
together, Noa now pieces together fragments of his life. He married his Polish girlfriend in Edinburgh, and
now has a three-year-old daughter.
“You are lucky, you know, daughters are a divine gift.”
“You telling me, bro? I tell you, I stopped going to the therapist ever since I have had her. She helped me
heal more than anything else.” Ten years of living with ghosts was finally coming to an end. Except for the
smell of burning flesh. That still lingers in his nostrils.
Noa can no longer eat grilled meat. It brings back memories of viscid horrors he has tried to wash off
himself. Summers in Edinburgh are particularly painful. Under a crisp blue sky, and on the lime green grass
of the Meadows and Bruntsfield Links, people assemble around disposable charcoal grills. A cloud of smoke
rises from parks and lawns, carrying with it the scent of proteins combining with sugars, and wafts in the
city air. For me, it was the smell of summer. For him, it was the smell of death.
“Take care brother,” I said, as we shook hands before I got off the taxi. “Don’t make it a long night.”
“You were my last trip,” he said. “Now I am heading back home to my wife and daughter.”
He turned his cab around the bend and disappeared down Montpelier Park, towards the lilac afterglow of
the evening sunset.
Amitangshu Acharya is a Leverhulme Trust PhD candidate in human geography at the University of Edinburgh