[Zakhm]:It was the strangest of wounds. It was from a bullet, no an arrow, or was the bow as yet half drawn? It could have been pure fantasy. Whatever the source, it hit two targets, simultaneously and at once – two men, distant and distinct. The wound lived and died with them, constantly finding residence on different parts of their bodies. It had no regard for those two erstwhile masters of men, time and place -- it lived for a decade on each of their left elbows, but on their foreheads for just a day. The day the two gentlemen crossed the precipice of death, the wound moved momentarily to their hearts. They passed at the same tick of the same hour, miles apart, a final riddance of a lifelong ache. But as they breathed their last, a woman now old and frazzled, but once charming and serene, felt a delicate pain on her abdomen. She shifted her eyes about the room to confirm her seclusion and lifted her kameez. She saw there, under her belly, was a wound, the strangest of wounds.

[Cambridge UK May 15, 2016] 

* * * * *

[Jaam]: I was in the hands of Romulus when the barbarians were at the gates. I would be brought out after dark in the battle camps that swept through Europe under the command of that great belligerent Corsican Emperor. But not just in war (be it for elation or defeat) am I to be found for I often hide behind the great poets too. Sometimes they even let me have residence in the words of their poems and ghazals. I exist in concert with both what I carry and those that carry me. Without the two I am but matter, useless and without purpose. But here I stand to ask this of those of you that hate me, and wish to do away with me -- would I too not be dancing if the inebriation were really in the drink I carry? Are the crimes you accuse me of mine, or those of the mortal that carries me?

[Harvard May 19, 2016] 

* * * * *

[Nishaana]: An author always has an intended audience, usually a specific person. The challenge however is to mask that person’s image in the words. That is a delicate art. The form must be such that the person in question remains oblivious even after reading, while the rest are led to believe it has been written with them in mind. The content must be laden with half-truths and embellished too with a few lies to doubly reassure that the arrow misses the target. The clean hit to the bull’s-eye must be measured and administered with care. It needs be dealt in person. This charlatan act is half the joy in writing.

[NYC May 24, 2016] 

* * * * *

[Mo’m aur parvana]: The cloudy, dense, thick droplets rolled down the curved sides as the temperature grew ever so slightly. The candle lay horizontal; the tracks on the wax, like mighty canals, each charted their own elliptical path to the centre. The candle burnt from both ends with the vanity of a prideful woman. True were the poets when they said such a candle gave off a lovely light. Truer yet they were in pronouncing it not fit to last the night. She, the candle, had a beauty that was both profound and rapid. With haste the candle consumed and subsumed itself. So vain she was that the beauty of the flame clouded her dire need for caution. Beautiful creatures often act the same way. With a final burst of smoke all that was left was but a shapeless puddle of hot wax. But there in its midst, in the throes of its clutches, lay fossilised the remains of a moth. Was this death by vanity, or blindness; suicide or homicide? Only the deceased would know.

[NYC May 24, 2016] 

* * * * *

[Jalsa]: Lahore: Civil society organisations, alongside student unions and faculty from various art colleges and undergraduate programmes in the city, jointly staged a demonstration against the Orange Line Metro Train project. It was the biggest gathering of its kind yet and took a page out of the recent swathe of jalsas that have become the lingua franca of political discourse of late. Leaders of the movement and prominent architects shared the 10-foot high platform to give impassioned speeches impelling the zinda-dilane-Lahore to raise their voices against, according to one speaker, ‘the wanton defacing of the city’. The crowd of a 100 or so that had gathered chanted slogans calling for the government to halt or amend the overhead rail project. Amusingly, the workers from the Parks and Horticulture Authority (PHA) designated to clean up afterwards joined in the sloganeering as well. After the conclusion of the jalsa the PHA staff cleared the public square post-haste to allow for the resumption of traffic on the Mall Road. Later, the workers were seen tying their green vests over their heads and embarking on the Lahore Green Line Metro Bus towards their homes in Gajjumatta.

[Abu Dhabi Airport May 25, 2016] 

* * * * *

[Bahaal]:As the train moved out of the platform two coolies jumped off at the latest possible moment, clearly having left the negotiation for services rendered too late. The weight of his luggage had warranted the service of four additional hands. How many more hands would be required to carry the weight he had lugged alone the last 10 years, he wondered. The train gathered pace and moved in strides, leaps and leagues toward his long-lost home. He had hoped for a quiet entry, but that was not to be. The village was small and the train station abundant. It had remained the main source of news from the world for the last century, and to this day. The lambardaar who was a distant relative spotted him first. As soon as their eyes met he knew there was no turning back. His many trunks and suitcases, which still carried the stale musk of the desert they were returning from, were put on a tonga and without a word spoken between all present they started moving. He was dropped off at his maternal grandparents house, not 10 feet from the spot from where he had pulled the trigger. The breeze seemed to have informed the village of his arrival for they were ready for him. The brothers of the deceased, his cousins, then became his assailants. And with each kick to the hamstring, with each blow to the head, with each punch to the spine, he felt the weight lift ever so slightly. Just before he breathed his painful last he was finally, after a wait of 10 years bahaal.

[En route Abu Dhabi to Lahore May 26, 2016] 

* * * * *

[Deewaar-e-Zindaan]: I am told I was birthed here, here in these walls. Among an assembly of women I grew up. My mother carried me in her belly when she came here. When the others told me she could not leave these walls for the rest of her life, I thought, how strange. Why would anyone want to be on the outside? There were no other children and I was told to hide whenever the Vaddi Bibi came. If she were to see me she would inflict on me the cruel tortures of what lay outside the walls. Take me away from my mother, and take me away from my home. But when theVaddi Bibi was not there, I was free to roam and run around without abandon.

I must have seen all the walls, and all the tiny creatures - ants, bats, mice - that lived on them. But there was a wall there on which lived the strangest of all creatures. It was red and covered almost the entirety of the wall, like a mural painted with bare hands. The day I first saw it I slowly crept up to it. It reeked of a foul stench. My mother’s friend with the tan coarse hands from cell C-3 walked up with a rag of similar colour and smell. Upon seeing me she scolded me, and admonished me with a slap. I was taken to my mother who repeated the treatment only this time with an explanation. Every inch of my slender three-foot frame listened to the horrifying encounters that took place during the night when the demons would return from their battles with angels and cough blood on to the wall. I was forbidden from it from that day on.

And yet I saw the other women visit it, as if a shrine, with pious regularity. Overtime the docile logician in me figured the demons must be resting during the day considering they were up fighting during the night. And so when no one was around I would quietly tiptoe over with feline guile. I would go there, and smell how the smell was foul, and shuddered at the red that bled. And I don’t quite recall when, perhaps around the time my body first started to ache without cause, but one day I too joined the ranks of the demons.

[Lahore May 29 2016] 

* * * * *

[Dastaan]: There were three fathers, all three tasked to put their kids to bed. What better cure for wakefulness than a good story, and so each resorted to this most suburban nocturnal activity. The first father told his children stories of money, but when they grew up they were penniless. The second father told his children stories of love, but though the spans of their lives were long they knew not what it felt to be in love. The third father, either lazy or prescient, never told stories; instead he delegated this task to the children themselves. But they too never rose high above so as to be deemed moneyed, nor were their passions so inflamed that they be subsumed by a searing love. But through the course of their lives they constantly concocted and told stories, to those around them and importantly to themselves. Stories of love in the face of despair, stories of pride in moments of hurt, stories of remembrance and happiness after the pain of loss. Or so the story goes.

[Lahore May 29 2016]