Once we were walking in Chandi Chowk and someone was opening mandarins and handing them to me and they were small and sweet and we passed a movie theatre that was showing Krrish 3 and there was smoke in the air and noise on the streets and my head was […]
Dear Abbajaan, When I was a little girl you would tell me about the apple trees in Jannat. In Jannat anyone could wish for anything you said. If you wanted an apple, an apple tree would just appear and the fruit on it would be so sweet and so juicy, […]
Once, on our way to a funeral in Johannesburg I was sitting on my mother’s lap and my head was full of all sorts of normal things, not funeral things and I made a joke about my friend and asked if we could visit her and my mother, her face […]
At her daughter’s funeral she repeatedly banged her head against a wall in her grief. On seeing my mother she clung to her and said, ‘Why? Why? Why?’ Her grief, like her joy, was a tidal wave that nothing could contain.
Once at Aunty U’s funeral, her grandson, almost 8 walked into the sea of grieving women and standing at the end of her body he looked at her and wept silently, until one of the grieving women grabbed him and held him to her chest as his sobs shook his […]
The bones are alive with hurting every moment every day A dull thud in the jaw from a punch that never landed An aching skull from teeth too tightly clenched in sleep scapulae, pinned together waiting for release
Osman Khan and his wife, Zubeida Ballim
At breakfast as I am about to bite into toast, my father, passing by, kisses me on the top of my head; on the crown. I pause, toast hovering mid-air. I put a hand to the top of my head and touch the spot gingerly. I am suddenly overwhelmed.
My mother said they called her 24 and when I asked her why, she said the woman lived at number 24 Something. She said the woman visited my grandmother and went on like an LP record. The woman, my mother says, said that at sehri, she would throw open all […]
It is raining and outside on the street, a man is shouting to a woman down the street that yes, he has strawberries and they are very cheap. My mother, no longer with a washing basket in tow (for that, was for the old fruit and veg man who she […]
