sidewalk scribbling

  At any one point in time, an infinitude of human experiences fold out, like an undulating silk blanket being whipped out in the skies by robotic angels, a galaxy of bright stars exploding in unison, giant infernos in themselves but so, so tiny from afar. At any one point in time you’ll have an array of events and emotions occurring simultaneously – a worker in an ill-fitting black uniform at a salon, looking up from the calloused foot of a client who is flipping through Instagram pictures on her phone; an old man sitting at the side of his four poster bed, his wrinkled fingers resting on silken sheets, his head bent; a baby being born, slippery, crying, silencing his mother’s screams; a young woman dying at the side of a road next to a smashed car on a highway; a veteran staring at himself in the mirror, a loaded gun gleaming in front of him on the dresser; a wife staring at her snoring husband, wondering if she would be happier without him; a toddler taking his first st...

Sometimes it is really hard to break out of your own self.  Maybe humans are selfish by design, maybe it tickles god to see us so wrapped up in our little lives and our even littler thoughts while the great oceans flow far and wide, waves cresting and falling like the even breath of a sleeping baby, regular and peaceful, or toiling and rolling angry tumultuous dark like a heart broken by someone you loved more than perhaps you should have.  And while we huddle in our beds, worrying about bills and wrinkles, about how staidly tiring it is to have to think about what to make for dinner every day, the world goes moving on, revolving at a tilt, careless and nonchalant, beautiful and grand and terrible... And while we drive to work every day, stuck in our personal webs and mulling over everything from the mundane worries of piling laundry to the more grave fears of our parents growing old, from the little irritations of overbearing bosses or stains on the table mat that...

Is it like the ocean with its never-ending gray, blue waves, stretching as far as the eye can see, cresting and falling, persistent, enough to cover most of the globe? Or does it run out, like water in a tap that’s been running for too long? Like puddles of rain drying up under the scorching summer sun? Does one person have enough grief inside to mourn the loss of 3 people? What about the lives of 30? 3,000?  What about 5 lives every day of every month in a year? (That’s how many people died in terrorist-incidents in Pakistan in 2016 – see source at the end.) Can grief peter out, like a stream in a drought-stricken village? Or can we be more generous and dole it out as, when and where it’s needed? Does anyone really need your grief? Can you offer it like a tissue to wipe someone’s tears? Maybe cancel out a small part of their grief by showing them yours, like same signs in an equation? When people point out that a tragedy somewhere is equally tragic as those...

From where I’m standing Right now, It’s not really clear; I see some clouds And a grey fog Perhaps I can lean over And draw Some silver linings Around The dark A box of crayons Always by your side Reds and blues and greens And the brightest yellow And while it may be Too easy To let the box drop And drown In the gray It might be better To lean over And draw silver Around The dark. Hello, new year, another year. I think at some point I stopped owning the years – you know, how when we were younger and in school, we’d start off the new year by always writing down last year in the blue and red margins of our notebooks – but then eventually, we’d grow used to the actual date and our margins would stop being all smudgy.  For some reason, now when another year steamrolls into me, there are two thoughts that come one after the other (like a race between two close runners, with one leading and then the other overtaking and you don’t know wh...

I wonder if they’re taught the rules in school or is it one of those talks that your parents (and by ‘your’ I mean the parents in movies because face it, Pakistani parents never have ‘talks’ with you...) have with you when you’re 10 years old – is there a book that is handed out for free in shopping malls and grocery store, and if so, how come I didn’t get it? Maybe the Brits are just born with an instinct for proper bus behavior, just something that runs in their blood so that they don’t even have to think twice about falling into their place in the queues at bus stops and giving up their seats to the elderly, making their way down the moving bus so that when it finally pulls to their stop they don’t make the rest of the passengers wait and just hop out – a polite ‘thank you’ to the bus driver who bats it right back, ‘cheers!’. I’ve read those Facebook posts about racist people on the bus or at the underground/subway but so far the most kindness I’ve seen is on the bus (an...

It could be a song or perhaps a photograph, or maybe someone else’s story.  But it’s usually out of the blue and it grabs at me like a strong hard tug on my arm.  Kind of cool how a thought can have such a physical impact.  And so it may be that my eyes glaze over during a Zumba class because that song reminds me of a friend who deleted all Avril Lavigne tracks from my laptop and had a playlist titled ‘Aisha’s playlist’ on her computer, which she would put on for me while I lay on her bed and she sat by her desk, letting me angst out my blues. Or it could be a random photograph of the university library that some random stranger has posted on Facebook, and it pulls me like a rolling whirling black hole into memories of blue sneakers (that I would sneak out of Mariam’s cupboard and probably wore more than she did – and the gray t-shirt which she just ended up giving to me), and the feel of the concrete sidewalk against the soles of my feet, the sidewalk that I wa...