Author Archives: Shubnum Khan

This is what the shopkeeper asked me: I don’t mean to offend you but can I ask you something? I’ve worked here for a while and I’ve noticed something strange. Why do Muslim people buy so much pistachios?

Aisha, she of the pink cheeked, butter-eyed expression with two scarf tails closed around her face like ship sails. Aisha, of the oversized plastic chappals that are her ‘walking shoes’, up and down the mountain, through mud and sunshine. Aisha, who smiles cautiously through big glassy eyes, head bowed, middle […]

She fears it, The return of the moment, of stooping low,a dish in her handspouring out her heart red splattering in the silver her back turnedheaving in acorner and nothing is left

This is what she dreamt: She is riding across a sunset, skimming the surface like water. There are delicate sentences as fragile as the bones in her wrists slipping through the sky. They are swimming though the desert and all around them there are clear liquid words that they can […]

“I wonder what my generation will do with what we know of marriage. I think of a married person as a kind of specialist. It’s tempting to have faith in specialists – to assume that barbers know the essential properties of hair and have studied it so thoroughly they can […]

‘After a month in Cairo she muted, read constantly, kept more to herself, as if something had occurred or she realised suddenly that wondrous thing about the human being, it can change.’ (The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje)

This is what I wanted to say: It is a cliche for a man to be in such fascination with the youth of a woman. An age-old cliche.  I knew it then, and I know it now. Do you know you are falling into the ways of old men? How […]

I recently travelled to Pakistan and through to Jammu, Kashmir where I volunteered to teach at a school in in a village in the mountains for three months. It was the first time I have stayed away from home and I’ve written a little about the experiences at this blog. […]

With three handshe beats back the distractednessin his heart. It is not so much that he is alone.But that he cannot shake off the feelingof wanting to be with a stranger. He looks around for a sturdy handhold,one that will not come away from the wallif he grabs it with […]