A vision of a city that was the place I was born in, and sometimes the fugitive corners of all the other streets I’d ever wandered down, called to me insistently night after night. I walk the deserted routes of my childhood at dawn towards something unnamed. Then there is darkness and a full moon, a bright neon moon.
Short Stories
Once upon a time there was a quiet little mosque in the middle of a business park. The mosque occupied the ground floor of an office building, and the other three floors were devoted to an import-export business. The mosque was a busy place on Fridays, when Muslims from the west side of town would gather, but other than that, it was fairly quiet.
Unlike so many of my ‘people’, I am not steeped in family, culture, religion, a past. While everyone I knew growing up was wrapping themselves in what was expected of them, like naked souls dressing up against the cold, I was cutting myself free.
Crossing the dense opaque haze of three thousand years appears the figure of a woman whose name was Akhit Jadoo.
Kiratpur: a city hundreds, hundreds and hundreds of miles away from Islamabad. A small, modest city – from what I hear – in the Bijnur district of UP, India, where people gladly drink goat’s milk and eat only khaalis ghee and paneer.
Once upon a time there was a king who had only one daughter. She was beautiful and accomplished in every way and famous for her horse riding skills. The king and the princess were keen on acquiring horses. Whenever any merchant presented a pedigreed horse the king would buy it for the asking price.
Julian takes purposeful strides through the street. He is desperate to reach Anika’s house so that he can see her and, more importantly, speak to her uncle. Evening has fallen and the pavement glitters with frost, creating a fine cushion that crackles beneath his trainers. His walk soon breaks into a run and his breaths become sharp, forming cloudy bursts that reveal the chill in the night air.
Desert, white sand rippling, reddish sky. A figure, on a white horse, head wrapped in a scarf and covered in a hat, wearing an assortment of Western clothes: boots, jodhpurs, a short jacket.
When I abuse I do not know I am abusing. This first happened when I was at school. I have protruding teeth and because of this, everyone called me parrot, parrot.