He kept looking dreamily at his white sneakers left to sundry on a green plastic armless chair on the roof of his fatherโs one-storey house. Jibraan looked at them yesterday as well, even a day before, too, with varied curiosity, but today he sat on his knees and blew on them twice to remove a…
You see, Snow White was chosen. It could have been anyone, couldnโt it? But it had to happen to Snow White, and it did. Mirror, Mirror on the wall. We often thought what if, in the parallel universe, Snow White was born in Kashmir? Someone would put a bullet in her. โZoonieโ would be her…
The durood were heard from both the local and distant mosques. It sounded as a viscous amalgam of voices to me, in which, if listened with the ears of heart, one could quickly lose himself. It was strange how it awoke me, even though it had never done before. I went to the kitchen where…
โGo back to your country! We donโt want you here!โ The words still echoed in my mind as I crossed through the carpeted lobby of the Student Union building. Students sat in huddles on the floor, others sitting lazily on the arms of couches occasionally laughing at something someone said. When I walked by, the…
On the bulge of Amira Kadal, I stare at the fish in their basket, murmuring between themselves about their estrangement from the Jhelum that flows underneath, belligerently. Or, maybe, they are just gasping for a few extra breathsโ as many as they canโ before it is all over; as all of us try to do…
It was time. The time; when I fell in love with the fall of darkness, when dying light of the day slowly yields to the devouring darkness of night. It was the time when I fell in love with the sensually unabashed darkness, silently nestling the verdure fields of rice and the far and wide…
Reclining against the mud-plastered wall, Gull Khanโs soft-natured wife Noor opened the copper lid of the samovar, blew a mouthful of air into its chimney, and after adding a pinch of salt in the tea, she dropped the lid back with a shrill clank. The steam that leapt out spread a milky smell across the…
Zendburgh Zevane is buried under a three-inch-thick sheet of fluffy white snow; it is snowing hard and silence weighs down the air, save few faint and intermittent dog barks. A rigid tall man scurries through the Thallstreet, crackling the snow beneath his feet, making the sound akin to a mouth chewing on a thousand grains…
Salmaโs father shivered with cold as it was raining outside. He wore a tired look and lazily stroked his unkempt beard. Seated on a wooden bench he began biting his fingernails. When called in by the doctor he signed the papers with his trembling hand and marked the date (1/12/1991) under his crooked name and…
I am coming for you, riding on this black stallion, in this moonlit night, and I am wandering at the hill, just a few gallops shy from your resort. Do you remember that cursed night, when I beheld you on the furthest of the churchyards, on the bleakest of nights when the wolves howled and…