Yeki bood, yeki na bood. Once, there was, and there was not. This is how stories begin in Kabul, my hometown: With an acknowledgement of ambiguity. Believe me if you will, or don’t. Maybe this is a true story, maybe it is just my version of the truth. Maybe it is not even my story at all — me being Laila, an Afghan woman living as a refugee in Delhi for nearly a decade. Maybe it’s a story of other women, from other times.Yeki bood, yeki na bood, once there was or there was not, a girl named Laila who dreamed of riding a bicycle. Maybe that girl never existed. Or maybe she did, and she simply grew up, left Kabul, and carried her unfinished dream with her.AdvertisementAlso Read | Five years on, the world’s Taliban dilemma continuesI woke to the beep of my phone. It was a message from my friend Sagar, an Afghan woman now living in Canada: “So have you learned yet?”“No, not yet. I’m trying. It’s hard.”The difficulty wasn’t in learning to ride a bicycle. Every time I lost my balance and fell to the ground, I told myself: I at least have the right to fall; many girls in my homeland haven’t even been given that right. I felt I was carrying the weight of all their dreams on my wobbling shoulders, each time I got on the bike.It is August, a time of short-lived remembering of Afghan women by people across the world. For me, it is a reminder of a month when millions of Afghan girls were forced to stop dreaming. In January 2026, UNESCO warned that by the end of the year, over two million Afghan girls will have spent their entire adolescence outside the classroom. Over 1,605 days have passed since the ban on girls’ education. Once, I used to keep count. I stopped when I realised the number would only keep rising.AdvertisementA few days after the Taliban took over Kabul once again in August 2021, I had a long phone conversation with Bibi Jan (my grandmother). We talked about schools closing and girls being denied education. Suddenly she went silent. I thought the call had dropped, but after a few moments she said in a quiet voice:“Laila, do you remember the story of the bicycle I told you once?”I remembered it, but I wanted to hear it again in her own words. She said, “When I lived in Shiwaki, I used to walk to the city every day to go to school, because there was no high school in our village. Most of the girls at the school came on bicycles; 14- and 15-year-old girls, in neat uniforms, their hair in ponytails. I always watched them from a distance. I wanted to ask one of them to let me try her bicycle for a few minutes, but I was too shy. I was afraid they’d say I was a village girl. I didn’t have the courage to ask.”A long silence fell between us. She continued, “Riding a bicycle was a dream for me. I always asked myself, ‘Will the day ever come when I too can ride a bicycle?’” Long after the call ended, I held the phone in my hand, not knowing what answer to give.That day, I didn’t understand that Bibi Jan wasn’t just sharing a memory from her past. She was entrusting her unfinished dream to me.I never learned to ride a bicycle as a child. But now, at 34, every morning before sunrise, in Delhi’s heat of nearly 45 degrees, I go to a park to learn. My teacher is Mehran — a 14-year-old Afghan boy who left Kabul with his family at the age of eight. When I told him I didn’t own a cycle, he borrowed one from an Indian friend.The first day, I was more anxious than excited. Mehran kept saying, “Just keep your balance.” But every time I put my foot on the pedal, I heard Bibi Jan’s voice in my ears. At the same time, I felt as if every passerby was watching me and laughing. I lost my balance and fell hard to the ground.The first thing I did wasn’t check my wounds. I only looked around to see if anyone had seen me fall. For years we had been taught that certain things weren’t for women. Perhaps that’s why I feared the gaze of others more than the pain of falling.Mehran helped me get up. We sat on a cement bench. My elbow was burning, and the heat took my breath away. “I told you not to be afraid! Everyone learns this way. I’ve fallen many times too,” I heard Mehran say.That day I understood that the pain of falling is never as heavy as the regret of not trying. Mehran brought the bicycle back to me and said, “Slowly this time. Don’t rush.”This year marks five years since the Taliban’s return, a “victory,” as they call it. But for the women of Afghanistan, these years have been a story of silenced voices, of schools and universities closed, and of the loss of the simplest freedoms. For every choice, they must fight and pay a price — a price that is sometimes public flogging, sometimes forced marriage, and sometimes being sold, while their childhood has not yet ended.A bicycle, a book, a classroom; things that are an ordinary part of life in many countries of the world. But for millions of Afghan girls, these simple things have become distant dreams.I began looking at people riding bicycles more closely. In Delhi, bicycles are mostly working-class vehicles. I often see older men riding through the streets to get to work, or to sell milk, vegetables or other goods. For them, the bicycle is not a symbol of leisure or freedom; it is a means of survival. I rarely see young women riding bicycles, except occasionally in better-off neighbourhoods or areas where they can move around with greater security. I see even fewer men from wealthier families using bicycles as a means of everyday transport.In that sense, Delhi reminds me of Kabul. Back home, too, bicycles were mostly seen in the hands of working men. Perhaps that is why learning to ride a bicycle in Delhi felt strange to me. I was not simply learning to balance on two wheels. I was stepping into a space I had rarely seen women occupy.One morning my friend Sagar told me about learning to ride a bicycle in Canada. She arrived there with her family from Kabul in 2021, and has lived there since. Within a few months, she had learned to ride and had started cycling to work every day.you may likeShe laughed as she told me how easy it had been, not because riding itself was easier, but because everyone around her encouraged her to try. She learned with the help of women at the care centre where she worked as a nurse.“Laila,” she said, laughing, “do you remember how, back in Kabul, people would make us feel ashamed when we tried to learn something new? It was almost as if they wanted us to fail before we had even begun.”I think about her words as I return each morning through this long, hot summer in Delhi. I think about my Bibi Jan as a child, watching her classmates from afar. And I think of the little girls in Kabul, watching the boys go to school and leave them behind. I return to the same park, where Mehran waits for me patiently beside the borrowed bicycle. I get on the cycle, I pedal, I fall, I get up again. Every time I set the bicycle in motion, I feel that I’m not only learning a skill. With each attempt, it’s as if Bibi Jan’s unfinished dream and the wishes of millions of Afghan girls move forward with me, here in another country.The writer is an Afghan refugee in India