A Cry in the Wilderness: Male Homosexuality in Pakistan
Prolific Brazilian writer, Paulo Coelho, once wrote, “Human beings can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness. It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings.” If there is something like ‘the biggest truth of life’ than this...Read More »
Promised Lands
Unblinking like the dead
goldfish floating
He stands staring
with his one good eye
at the neighbours
through
their bathroom window.
Tied up, mouths stuffed
his envy turning
into a slow concern
The thieves are having
fried eggs for breakfast
on the patio. Three
Young boys with
happy eyes thinking
Of Sex, Love and ...
This evening I thought I would take stock. With markets crashing all around me, and people intent on scaling back their financial portfolios, I thought that I might participate in the only similar way I could, not by reassessing monetary investments, rather it would have to be my time investments,...Read More »
Number Ek Sau Chawalees
This is my monologue about a two way street which, by tradition is supposed to combine somewhere down the line into one warm fuzzy blurry road. Well, in my case, the two way street has always led to two different places. One of those roads inevitably leads to me, single,...Read More »
Fairground
Her face was smarting from the slap. But as soon as palm had landed on cheek and humiliation set in, bitter rebellion was set into motion. Ivana received many slaps in the course of each day. Every day since she was 3 and on special occasion perhaps a few...Read More »
The House Yawned
a creamy white yawn
of the unsuspcting
then
woke up
startled.
The bill boards
blocking the façade
peeled away
like an onion skin.
Just a tenth of
opaqueness between
you and the world
of the mall road
outside
dear house
Where millions
of humming
cancerous cars
conspire.
We played together
The Predicament of a Polygamous Lesbian
Love, to many is a complicated word, I define it in very simple terms, ‘Love is an emotional space’. Now… how many you share it with depends on how much you can handle.
With experience I know I can handle two at a time but clearly with complications.
The two parties that...Read More »
Review: And the World Changed
And the World Changed
Edited by Muneeza Shamsie
The Feminist Press: New York, 2008
I read fiction to be reminded that my experience of the world both is and is not singularly mine. I read it to experience the pain and joy of others, to be moved by their stories, and...Read More »
An Affair with Porcelain Turtles
a/ I am looking for my lost voice
for telling a story of my secret love affair with porcelain turtles and …
I do not know what to keep
Love friendship or sex
It’s easier when it’s trivial
like stitching papers with a stapler
or...Read More »
Calculating
Not even in footnotes can I encompass
my sense of expansiveness since
you left. Funny
I stayed away from writing countless
when we loved. It wasn’t merely
friendly antipathy
to low kins of romance – it was how much
you wanted that representation.
That I scratch tree
barks has more to it than...Read More »
A Desi Queer
My inability to articulate the alternative of Queer in my own language, often results in anxiety. Why is my queerness so un-desi? And why am I presumed to be an advocate of metropolitan gay culture when I identify as queer? (I cannot perhaps entirely detach myself from it....Read More »