In Afghan and Pakistani homes where Christina Lamb shared so many meals, there is no table: they spread the dastarkhan, a long cloth laid directly on the floor or on a carpet. Everyone sits in a circle, legs folded. The dishes arrive together — rice, bread, tea, dried fruit — and you eat with your right hand, helping yourself from the communal dishes. Hospitality is sacred: even the poorest offer the best they have to the passing stranger.

The scent that returns in every house along the Kabul–Peshawar corridor: you crush it into tea, you slip it into festive rice. It is the smell of welcome, the one that floated in every room where Christina Lamb set down her notebook.