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Through My Window

I spend a lot of time in my kitchen doing the dishes not in any piecemeal fashion, one or few at a time I let the sink be filled with soiled plates and then some till a faint foul smell come from the ones at the bottom. I then stand over the sink, little crouched scrubbing the grime and oil clean with a sense of purpose and immense satisfaction. On most of the days, it is the most meaningful thing I do. There is a window over the sink, to a few apartments across. In one of them, I see a woman living mostly alone. I know I would not enjoy living alone still her life from the window view is aspirational. She wears a lot of black dresses and bakes a lot. I amble through the dark and quiet of my apartment in the ungodly hours of Insomnia and see her watching TV, munching something from a big red tin. I see smile and calm on her face. The smile and calm are my projection, I barely see her face I imagine her happy to ...
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Memory

She realised it within minutes she turned her back after the hug goodbye. Her last memory of him being locked in the way he smelled. Of Hamam and a musty sweater. She knows that the retrieval promise for memories burned on smells can be very tentative. As the RW drive for our memories, they are more susceptible to erasure and overwriting than sights and sounds. She paused her steps and put her nose breathing on hold. Before plunging into the miasma of smells from the swarming bodies and everything else on the street.
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A Tasbeeh

I have a Tasbeeh in my possession. It has 100 big round wooden beads. Occasionally I use them to do my chants. I do the Dhikr exactly as I was taught when I was a child. I go through the chain repeating the chants 33 times. I do not do them less or more. I do not question the logic behind it. I am just glad that I have something to do during the times I cannot recognise myself. During the times I stand failed in my own rationality. During the times when it is only the air I breathe that has any meaning. The Tasbeeh I have, the one I carry along everywhere with my migraine and anxiety medicines, belonged to my father. It belonged to my father during that period in my life when I could love him and before I lost that ability. Before I stopped needing his hugs to calm to me down after a bad math test paper. Before I learned that love entails hate and pain. Before he turned into someone else under the weight of his failed marriage and ambitions. I constantly play spot-the-simila...
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Insomnia

The sleeping pill bottle on my night stand throbs loud and then louder  Stewing in its failure,  the proud produce of a successful industry. I lie on the bed, eyes closed feeling for that girl in the movie  She loved being fucked by her father Her daddy cried when she committed suicide. I saw the Ramadan food bazaar He was alone, an old man Something else in place of his nose, or nothing The terminal cancer board hung over him. I took deep breaths till I am in that hotel room There I get up from my peaceful sleep The muezzin from the Blue mosque, calling the faithful to prayer. The gay muezzin from that Malayalam classic He died in a government district hospital, opposite the Top Notch bakery  I buy sweet buns and cream cakes from there. I have been there as a 6-year-old, product of a brittle marriage I weep with my brother, over our parents we grew up to dislike. Hungry, I get up and make an omelette ...
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