Author Archives: Shubnum Khan

‘I am disappearing.’‘Don’t worry, as long as you have us, we will never let you disappear.’

I see it better now. The threads. Not so simple. Stodgy. The voices run, make patterns in the paper, I see the shadows, the parts where dark deepens and light comes through. I feel more. My sincerity is sincere, the water is in everything now. Half drowned. How can you […]

Standing before a mirror in the wet bathroom something in the music playing makes me recall how I was before. Remembering the past differently now, I no longer recoil at myself, shy away from it, I remember it, embrace it all; how I was, how I gave and I was […]

Last night we nearly missed the train. I ran so hard up all those stairs that I could not breathe. Something deep inside my chest shifted, I thought like a clock, I had broken some spring inside. I could not run anymore. Slowed down. It was a long day. A […]

And finally these pictures go and these dry little questions just sit there without any answers and you’re left with this large heavy pain in you that you try to numb by reading, or you try to ease by getting into public places where there will be people around you, […]

(For my beloved aunt, who passed away this week) Don’t Forget To Take Biscuits Our Gorikhala ate green chillies, popped them in her mouth like sweets When I was 6 and my parents were away, she looked after us for a month, and I watched in wonder as she popped green […]

The Realisation, Ink on paper, Shubnum Khan 2016

My grandfather,passed away, kneeling before the kabah,arms raised in prayer, he left behindseven daughters, small strong women,sisters who struggled,long hours in factories sewing clothes,bringing up children in foreign cold countries,sisters who worked long hours,selling dresses on the street,long days frying potatoes,pickling atchars,making sticky sweets to sell,counting the money,raising the kids,losing […]