There’s a man without a giggle. He comes to work every day.

i lie a little in all my stories, but you wouldn’t know the difference.

so there i was, sitting very huddled in a corner of the enormous leopard-print backseat, with the two daughters standing in the front seat, their tiny backs to the windshield, staring staight at me. i sputtered out a conversation in monosyllables, talk about the weather. A nontwin dozes off, and I suddenly feel an ill-advised need to address the sister I’m still talking to by her name.

Eyes widen, shywhispered sentences stop midway, and stunted human proceeds to stare wordlessly at me for the rest of the drive while i stare out at pretend-trees. We silently rumble through potholes.

When we screech to a asphalt-scratching halt, the babysitter lifts the addressed infant, clearly pronouncing the right name, in teeth-clenched disdain followed by much hair-flipping.

we’ve been far
far away from here
put on a poncho
played for mosquitoes
and drank till i was thirsty again

things that i am going to miss about lahore

• s
• the wonderful, ecstatically wonderful dryness…never been big on karachihumidity
• whimsical dustthunderwindstorms
• the lums lan, which over the years has coughed up wonders like waking life, which i haven’t seen in any moviestores ever.
• spontaneous meetups with fez, which sometimes result in bike riding lessons
• ecs
• driving down clean smooth roads that never wobble your car with a single ditch
• it’s a futile attempt at chasing ones demons away through confrontation. it’s doomed not to work.

like an old nickname that someone used to call you in class 3, and no one’s called you since. white oleander makes you feel like long fingers trailing through water, like drawing yourself up to your full height and gliding through tiny spaces that belong to you alone.
my mother has started wrapping up the house in pieces of string and old cardboard boxes that viciously gobble up tea sets and blankets.

it’s like everyone in that movie bursts into their innermost narrative spontaneously
so it’s like garden state, only better
i want to walk into a vintage car showroom and take every single car in it out for a testdrive. i want to blow up a picture of us and make it into a jigsaw puzzle, so that when you put the pieces back together you get confused between which eyes go where.

sunshiny gleamy roads, summers on its way.

when i was fourteen, i used to write on this mirror with lipstick. i used to trace out hearts and smear initials of cute celebrities in corners.

i don’t like taking pictures of leaves and flowers.
unless they’re dead ofcourse

glass and metal
you turned my hand to look, glinting in the 11 am clean sunshine. it’s one of those carnival rings,

metal on skin, and it still smells of 15 rupee fun and i-HAVE-to-have-this. it shouts out “look at ME!” from a hand, never belonging to anyone but itself. it has never had to learn silence, keeps singing away crumpled at stifling computer tables far far away from circus clowns and muddy feet dragged through makeshift stalls.
love it, quite.

I recently saw my high school english teacher on tv (a feeble but angry nun’s voice protests in my head at calling sjc a high school, what? we’re not a high school!). She looked exactly the same as she did seven odd years ago, maybe more grey in filmsywavy hair. She once had a theory about how barbie girl was actually a sarcastic comment on popculture. And ridiculed people who ate rice with spoons to no end. We all believed her when she told us stories of how fastfood joints’ve cheapened the sparkly-clean-many-forked dining experience, till one of us almost ran into her at a kfc, shattering myths glossy and porcelain-like.

(the cardigans) were perhaps too dark…they had this dark European way of seeing things essentially…for mainstream america, so instead we focused on other things…oh look at the pretty blonde lead singer, sing to the catchy beat, lets pretend this song is about something entirely different from what it is
a tv show, on lovefool.

maybe i’ll run into you at a one-hit wonder sighting someday.

The story:
“After photographing the tiny isolated Amazonian village of Nazare do Mocajuba, the residents asked Alexandre Romariz Sequeira to take their picture. The ensuing photographs were printed life-size on the villagers’ old tablecloths (which the artist then replaced), and hung on the bushes by the Mocajuba river for the community to enjoy.

Some of them had never seen a photograph before. One old man said ‘had I this stuff before, I could now have the face of my lost child. All I can remember is him moving around, not his face.’

The photographs will never be sold. They will return to the people of Nazare do Mocajuba.”

i looked a little lost in that picture too.