Twenty

Dear friend,

I want to write the hallmark letter of having figured everything about myself; of saying that there are many things you learn at twenty, of having extricated myself completely from stupidity and delusion to embark on wise retrospect – when, to be honest, I can’t even figure out the latter part of this sentence. You think you have a grand metaphor of love! And then. You think you know! And then. You think your actions constitute beauty! And then. You think you know the difference between intending for yourself and intending for the world! And then. I do not really arrive at definite knowledge, but much more to think about, because things get re-named, re-arranged, somebody’s laughter splices through one of your strangest ghost-thoughts and comes apart. The ghost may be a costume. 

The thick of life, we can call it. But, and, however, also, I feel the collapse of boundaries in accumulated wisdom. Sometimes I know I can trace the boundaries of my limbs and find comfort in things I am yet to learn. The universe is also home to my mistakes, all of them, days charging over me sequentially like I have a duty yet to the life I have to live. This knowledge of body is new-found though; some days it is crushed, some days it is growing. 

And the life that we have to live. I am trying to align myself to an honesty, an honesty towards what I feel and what I know as opposed what I would like to feel and what I would like to know, so that I can navigate around you, about you substantially, and not like a dream of my own self. 

Seismic shifts; adequacy, achievement, glory are still our dreams. Some days when the coherence of things does not hold, I want to write to you about the things we grew up with; so we grew up with wind filling up our clothes, so we grew up with staying to the side of the street, so we grew up with eyes concentrating on details of pebbles and stones that will not matter, so we grew up with millions of undocumented moments of breathing. Maybe this cannot be constructed into beauty, or consequence, but they also register as crucial moments of life as we have known it. The durability of the in-betweens. 

So if I say to you that we born in both decay and in vitality, and in combinations of both, then that is my offering to you of comfort. An assurance that things and people and we have not been beautiful in constancy, and an assurance that continuity is not broken by decay. Things continue to grow, and so do we. 

May you bloom. 

Love,

Me. 

A Letter To No One.

 Dear friend,

I drowned my 7 AM bones and daydreams in a soft lullaby about forgetting. And that is when I miss you and love you. When the world stalls on Sundays and morning light sifts through into our rooms, and it stalls the sleepy darkness giving way to day, and I am hidden by blanket, bed and bones, and the universe rakes through our hair, and I am awake to see it, I want to cry that we can swallow everything whole, cement into fate while defying city dreams still flit in our eye-lids behind the back of our minds, like how the night before we were driving home and a stream of headlights bore into my eyes to give company to stray thoughts and dreams backpacking across our skins. 

Dear friend, did you know that sometimes humans forget the memory of their pains, so they don their aches over and over again, and if you ask yourself, would you readily give over everything that makes your prayers your prayers? So I build from the pits of our stomachs, and from days that leave nights in our eyes like someone’s streaming mascara; we can be sad summations of our skins, but I swear to God, when you break, you will flow. The most beautiful songs were written for someone, because of someone, so there’s something to be said about how things will live in other ways than now. 

And I don’t know how to say that the world intervenes, and that things will make us cry, and that some dreams don’t come true, and that happiness is fleeting; I only know how to know that, I only know how to recognize in other words and other hearts the same knowledge and we don’t say, but everyday we dive heat-first into things that are blurring at the edges, and the things that are simply leaving. And I don’t know how to fix that, and the biggest thing I’ve ever learnt is that I can’t fix that, not on the pragmatic side of the scale, nor on the positive side of the scale. I only know that we will be, and we will be, and we will be. And I will love you for it, I promise you. 

Love,

Me. 

A Letter To No One.

Dear friend,

I think I will always choose you over the impossibility of you, I think I will keep choosing you over the weights in my skin, and I think I will keep choosing you again and again. Some days we are lined up against the shore, and everything is still for a moment, and the sun has clawed a few strokes across a sad, black sky and the ocean rushes forward and my eyes collide with the horizon and I am suspended in the universe’s ways for a moment in time, and then I can feel almost feel the earth shifting, the courage of time to plunge into night-time darkness, the Sun always the impossible suitor that coaxes the earth out of the black again and again. And so I will learn from the Sun and the earth, and so I will always pluck out my metaphors from the space between the sky and so I will keep finding you in everything.

I’ve been learning to save the sunshine in my pictures, and goodness in my pocket, so there is never dearth of things that keep me alive. Sometimes my head is bent over a book and I am sitting into a niche cut into the wall of a building with a friend, and calls to prayers and distant cries echo in grey columns, and a summer wind is consuming me entirely, and suddenly I am in love with everything again. Suddenly I almost reach out to trace the sunwashed streets of my city, suddenly tree leaves are leaning sideways to say onwards, onwards and suddenly in a burst of sunshine, my eyes see the world half-dipped in sun, and I want to brush away the furrow in the eyebrows of a street stranger and lend a woman a prayer and it is okay to be what I am, whatever I am. 

I think I love you broken, I think I love you whole.

Love,

Me. 

A city girl's take on chaos.

dear friend,

there could never be enough metaphors for our cities — we are sweet children of afternoons where there is more smoke than sky and evenings where there is more wind than air, sweet children of lessons in breathing, in rolling up the windows when the smoke gets too black, bringing them down when an orchestra of night plays across streets and the Sun trusts us with our streetlights so it sinks in relief behind neighborhoods made out of clay

friend, we will always understand when we are eighteen and the pages of our books tell us that some people believe that chaos breeds in order and it’s not a bad thing, that when mismatched skins and non-polar voices brush against each other, there are sounds that we can make poems out of.

so we will always know we can melt into mess, descend into anarchy within our ribcages, wage war against our silence, and that while we break we will give way to rivers of broken faith, we will give way to light and the six’o’clock grace of the breeze, and howl so that the universe will never be the same again, because it shook in places where we went and broke our fingernails, knees, bones, and hearts.

friend, don’t you see that our cities might well be the universe’s snark at the human proclivity to set things in order, to set things straight, to dress up and head there, and get here and have that so when rain accidentally trips over our streets, we are flooded, and when some things strike, we have no cover, and that the paint is always scraping and that the walls of my favourite places aren’t tremor-proof.

friend, we are sweet children of cities that never learnt to place reason above love, that never learnt how not to malfunction in places where it matters most — friend, we are sweet children of chaos, spewing infinity from our mouths in places we break, in places where we couldn’t have reached to kiss if they hadn’t broken.

friend, when we fall face first into our destinies, we collide with language to produce the world how it has never been before --

and this is my collision.

this is my love song.

Dear friend,

Did you know, when you are sending out words into the air everyone else breathes, your shadow is making just as much of a point as you are; when you raise your hand, the sun falls behind you and you are reflected in everything that is looking back at you - whiteboards, people, eyes, that sort of thing. When your charcoal silhouettes under darkened evening skies set smiles free, and relief sinks in, and there are bits of you given over and taken in, I am grateful for you.

You as you are, and you as you will be. And we, when we come together and become voices. This is for when the strength of our words and the contours of our voices come to life, and are just as alive as we are. This is for you leaving an imprint of your soul on somebody else's; this is for you being you.

I caught sunlight in my hands, and sunshine in my eye; I caught winter in my limbs and everything in me trembled when I was first making my way towards you. But there's nothing much to be afraid of. Not now, when I know there are times when you can feel complete in your skin and when you are at the spotlight in some corner of the city, and you are being heard. That is how I know that all our times will come.

I hope you always give home to somebody's words; you are wonderful for giving home to mine.

Love,
A friend. 

A Letter To No One

Dear friend,

November is cool at the finger tips; the wind is as surprised as I am when it leaves the beginning of winter on our tea coloured skins. Rosa Rabinowicz chose six words to scream when the Nazis hung a noose over her neck and disfigured face. "Tell everyone what happened here! Tell everyone what happened here!" So I wonder who is going to write about this after-dark November sky, our befuddling, bewildering cities, and the quietude of the beginning of summer settling within our homes. Today it might just be me. Tell everyone what happened here.

I walked right through the yellow shadow of a streelight, and for a moment I might have been that night light stranger to someone else. The universe's spotlight turns on us, the evening is spilled onto the streets, and we are the eyes and we are the ears and we are the hands assigned to this part of the world. And it makes us think about our hearts and how men and women, even the skins bagged with wrinkles, are home to somebody and somebody thinks of love in them. Maybe it is love that spurs heroes out of men.

I spilled the memory of you all over my city so it glistened a bit more. I looked right into the streaming headlights on an adjacent street so it looked like the entire light of the universe was heading towards us. And I found you spilled over the shadows of streelights, over the evening sky, over the moon-earring of a Karachi sunset and over the star that the barely-moon was chasing. I found you spilled in the shadow of a stalled rickshaw, the eyes of a stranger that met mine momentarily, and the guise of contemplation that the city takes on when it comes to rest.

And while we turn into the caretakers of our own histories, we will be as we have always been. And in letters and in love and in memory and in days, and in words and in our youth, we will be the proof that the world might need that we were here and we were alive.

Love,
A friend.

Mango Season

Dear friend,

It is mango season. The wood of the door smells like it. Do you know the smell? It is sickly sweet. It is the sweetest you'll ever taste. Mangoes here aren't similies, they are metaphors. They are smelled, they are looked over and the police isn't good but the mangoes are. Sometimes my brother accelerates when there is a body sprawled across the road at 1 AM but he stops at a mango stall. The mango-seller knows the art of selling mangoes. They are piled on top of each other like pyramids on flimsy wooden stands and sometimes mangoes at the bottom of the pile are not-sweet but never bitter. There are fleas but the mango-seller whips his ragged cloth and they fly away momentarily.

It is mango season. It means the sun is high and when the temperature rises, the sweat trickles down the face of the man with too many wrinkles and chocolate brown skin. Air-conditioners feel like a lie, because the girl in the street and bangle clad wrists doesn't live inside cool air, the man on his motorbike is letting the sun seep into his skin, and somehow my skin knows that. At one point, you have to switch it off and let the air out and the hot air barges in. It is very hot here but the mangoes are sweet. My friend says her summers were punctuated by mangoes and that you could slurp mango pulp and it could be all over you and you could bleed mango and her father would take a water pipe and wash it away. I sit in my kitchen and someone offers me a mango after a fight like a peace offering and my hands bleed mango in the middle of the night. They say no mangoes taste sweeter.

It is mango season. There are a few ways to measure summers in Karachi. One: when you need a bath after every thirty minutes. Second: when you spot the mangoes on stalls. Third: with the monsoon rains. Summer is loud and ceiling fans roll like spinning tops - it is a busy season for the cieling fans. But you can sing in the bathroom because nobody will hear. There is no silence except yours. Sometimes God decides that the Sun needs a break so the clouds pillow fight and scream grey and come pouring out. Some people think rain is the kind of time when you write poetry, other people pile up on motorbikes and drive away to the seaview road and find the beach where they find more water. Some people stand in their doorways and update their statuses and some are grumpy because they don't understand why everybody is excited about rain. There are no rules here. You just are. Teachers form human barricades to drag students into corridors from the open ground so they don't go wild in the rain but when the bell rings for the last time in the day, armies and armies of girl come thumping down the stairs in Viva la Vida fashion, and there is a noise, it is a "Whoo!" and a "Haa!" combined. It is nothing and it is everything and it is chaos just because it rained. But there are flip sides. There are sides of the story when water stalls in the street, the transformers explode, the ceilings fans dawdle into lifelessness. The electricity leaves and somebody shakes their head with a resigned sigh. The next morning the water will stand still, you have to roll up the windows because someone will zoom ahead and splash water all over you. There are sides to the story when you are reading in the glow of an emergency light for your entrance test because there is no electricity, there is no generator, and the silence is dead because the water still stands and the car engine died and your grandmother is at the hospital. There are bad times. There are good times.

It is mango season. I can mark the calender with the kind of drinks blending in the blender. At first it is lassi, sweet and frothy, complete with a white moustache across your face. Then there are juices made out of unripe mangoes and then mango milkshakes and then the moustache across your face is yellow. The sunset is dressed in Khaki, the clouds always form a different pattern and the heat dies down at five-o-clock, now you can feel the wind. We are not silent. My city is ridiculous. Humour is plastered across phrases at the back-side of a rickshaw. It says, "Ab ham kidhar jaein?" Where do we go? June-july is said together, like a couple, married by sunshine. I have never seen a tourist in my city, white-skin people don't stand on roof-tops and take pictures. Maybe because no one has ever seen the places like we have. Nobody except us has taken the wind for granted, because nobody except us has called the chaos of the city home. The streelights burn yellow, and on the rooftop there is always room for another poem, another letter, another song. Sometimes I like that we are alive. Sometimes I don't understand why we know the sound of ambulances better than we should have, sometimes I don't understand why people are stolen as much, if not more, than things and sometimes I don't understand why the night cripples into fear. Sometimes I find the answer in the gardener who always returns to water the flowers, sometimes I find the answer in the man who stalls his rickshaw and looks at the sun setting behind the clusters of houses somebody calls home, sometimes I find the answer in someone selling garlands at the traffic signal. At one point the garlands take up the entire stand. By night time there are only one or two left.

Love,

Me.

A Letter To No One.

Dear friend,

I learnt in Chemistry class that when you feed the shriveled pride of a raisin, it blows up to become a grape. And that our skin colours are different because of proteins in our bodies called Keratins and Melanins. And in history class that the apartheid was a system of racial segregation that governed relations between people with white skin and those who didn't have white skin. And something I learnt on my own was that people will find reasons to fight and one of them is Proteins.

Your Keratins and Melanins gave you desert skin. Rugged and young and beautiful. And someone else gave you a perpetual smile behind your mustache. You fix the drips on your grandfather's deathbed and shrug off any concerns with a wave of the hand and a "kuch naheen hay". It's nothing. Somebody said doctors lie very well.

My father bent over the kitchen counter this morning re-arranging tablets and they could have been a picture taken from a google search somewhere. And I looked at them and I wondered about how we find ways to stay alive even though we say we can almost taste the metal of the gun inside our mouths.

Orange eyes, tired smile, skin the colour of dusk, feet that hurt from wearing heels, sentences that curse the food that doesn't go down a loved one's throat, a math sum that you just can't figure out - everybody marches on.

A single tear ran down my teacher's cheek and she kissed a student on her head. The girl with the hole in her heart is twenty and everybody is sad about how she is beautiful but how she cannot live long. And how she could have. She hears everything sowed in the whispers and she keeps her head down low and offers to massage the old man's head. Her voice breaks when the old man says he doesn't have much time. She tells him to stop talking like that and there are tears well spent. Somebody shakes their head because she is beautiful and because she is going to die.

Aren't we all? Like McGonagall's chess pieces. One wrong move and you are in the right place and shot down one by one until the game is over. I don't know what the game is or who is playing it or why it is there but it is. I don't know why we have memories and fragile hearts and I can't tell you why because I do not know. I can only tell you what you already know. That while you continue to breathe, you live. You touch and you scar and you are touched and you are scarred and the ink that you spent all your school life staining your arms and hands with didn't seep into your blood and kill you.

You are alive and I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. The fire was in the other part of the city and not yours. You only heard the ambulances and you weren't inside one. You can wonder about why nothing happens to you and why everything happens to you but you look outside and it's daylight and the day is alive for everybody. When there is no insomnia, everything falls asleep with you and you wake up and you are alive once again.

I don't want to leave you confused or sad so I will tell you that I don't know what the colour of your skin is and I don't know what you find to stay alive and who eggs you on. You are my friend because my heart breaks the same way your heart breaks. Into two. And I want you to know that I was searching for something to end this with and something came along. The six year old boy in my house came excitedly upto us to show us a kite he had pulled from a tree and it had a broken string. Everything was in his eyes and he knew he couldn't fly it but he'd found the kite. So there's that to believe that everything will come our way and happiness can be broken sometimes but we've felt it to know that is there. And there's a text message I'd send you if I had your number and it would have three words: hang in there.

Thank you for listening. 

Lots of love,
Me.

A Letter To No One.

Dear friend,

I'm still trying to understand the day. I am still trying to understand life. I feel alright. But I think we don't remember that we've felt alright when we don't feel alright. We don't remember the day we felt invincible singing a Bryan Adams song. We don't remember these things. But I want you to know that these things exist. And I hope you find them.

I want to tell these people how important they are to me. How important it is to me when a friend fiddles around with her glasses and another friend wakes up and looks at the mirror and pulls an ugly face and says, “Today I woke up being beautiful.” I want to tell these people that it is important to me that they laugh and their smiles spread across all their skin and I laugh with them. I want to tell these people that it is important to me when I see them around college and that they help me see things. I don’t know why it is important. It just is. It’s the little parts of my day that string it together and then everything comes to life and I feel alive. 

It’s like what my teacher was saying. I think even though she loves to tell stories about herself, being alive has brought an unusual kind of wisdom to her. The raw kind. The one that’s just there. Dark-skinned wisdom. She said that when people are around, you don’t really feel it. And it’s a simple thing but then you forget you love them when they leave the door open or when they tell on you or get on your nerves. And when they leave, it doesn’t matter. You just want them there. You know? It’s a simple thing but it was so true that I didn’t want to hear it.

So many things keep happening. I love so many things and people in a secret way. Like my friend said. In a secret way that I might forget them later. But it’s just a good time. It’s a good time when someone tells me that legend has it, the Quail loves mangoes and comes back every season to sing for it. Things end but the world doesn't. A judge in an oratory competition last year looked up from his laptop screen after announcing the quarter final results and said, “Guys, this isn’t the end of the road.” Maybe it really wasn’t. 

It was strange that while we drove home, two intersecting flock of birds made a canopy over the car for a moment. They just took flight. Just like that. A prompt from the wind, a sign from the heavens. Moments like these, I just feel drunk on sunshine. There were empty plots, too, where workers were hard at work and cementing bricks or just napping for a while. I don’t know, I just like to think that this is all going somewhere. That these people are all going somewhere. Some place forward. Because a flock of birds soared high and a different flock of bird soared low. But there was still flight. And I hope we’re moving forward. I hope we don’t stay where we are no matter how alright we feel about it. Heaven is a place, after all. I like to believe that. 

And that's life today. 

Love,

Me. 

A Letter To No One.

Dear friend,

I am writing to you to tell you that I am doing good in life but I am confused. I am confused because I spent a lot of time thinking about how there are so many broken homes in this city and all over the world and bad things are happening out there and I don't know how to fix that. I don't know how to help fix it except promise myself that I will never let myself give in to the desire of doing bad things and maybe that isn't humanly possible so I promise that I will try. And I don't know why people think that what they do doesn't matter because it does. Every inch of it does. All the pauses in the universe and all the time we take up forming our sentences and the little seconds I start walking just a little bit slowly to see the night sky and the moon sandwiched in between two tall buildings, it all leads up to something such as now and such as today and such as the time somebody shouted at me because I was late. 

So I know the things that we do matter. And it mattered when the robber shot somebody I loved in the head and a whole house fell apart and this sombody I loved had gray hair and he never completed his last poem. And it matters when a bomb goes off in the city and everybody misses the eyes of the person who goes away. And it matters when your sister cries or your brother cries or you mom cries or your dad cries because you feel things for people you love too. And I think it's just a colossal mess and everything is a chain of events and we come somewhere in between that chain. So we matter too and when the ball is in our court, I hope that we find the strength to direct it the right way. 

There is war and there is hatred and then there is this. My hands are cold today and I am trying to find comfort in my favourite book that I bought only a few days ago. And I know that somewhere out there, there is fear and there is anguish and I am quiet in respect for that. So I'm trying to figure out how to do something that will stop another bad thing from happening and right now all I can work is right here with me, it's my own hands and my own eyes and my own stomach that sinks at the thought of other things and other people. 

So this is my life today and I live in a broken world but there's always a but and maybe that's because there are things like hope and dreams and a thing called strength to counter all of this so I will try to do that today. It's like they say, it's not over until it is. And I'm trying not to say things I don't mean, not even to a little girl so last night I just read things from her favourite book to her and she liked it. I liked it too. Things sound good when you mean them. 

Thanks for listening. I am infinitely grateful. I am infinitely blessed. 

Love,

Me. 

A Letter To No One.

Dear You,

This is a good time in my life. I am so thankful for that, you wouldn't believe. This is my favourite part of the day because there is the six'o'clock sunset I can see every day through my window and if I crane my neck I can see the Sun dip slowly. My best friend is asleep beside me and I can only hear things like my fingers striking the keys - I wish this was a type-writer - and the crows squawking for the last time in the day before they come back tomorrow. It's a good time because every thing feels exactly as it should. Sunday chores, a laugh with my best friend, hitting her for no reason at all, my sister going about her day like usual and talking about things like silence over lunch but sometimes I go overboard and I am told to shut up but that makes me laugh. "I love winter because it's so..." My sister and I finished that sentence with "silent" at the same time.

But I know things won't stay like this forever and I am wondering how that could be. It makes me want to collect everything that is happening around me and it makes we want to write about how my favourite part of a drive around Karachi is the highest point on the KPT bridge and I can just look down on so many neon head-lights from hundreds of car rushing forward to some place they can call their home and that makes me feel better about everything somehow. It makes me nervous that things change and it makes me nervous that time will grow with me and it will cause an uproot of all these times I have now. Everything's going to change soon.

I'm finishing high-school soon and I want to do so many things and it feels like being a part of Oxford street again because everyone's rushing past so quickly and I'm still staring at the billboards and the signs trying to direct myself. I think it's the same courage that I wanted to have when in tenth grade the class was playing a game of charades at the back of the classroom and I wanted to join them. But I didn't. I think it's the same courage I wanted to have when my friends had to leave for something and I wanted to talk to someone else. But I couldn't. But I stayed around and I promise you that I am learning. I am learning that fear is the biggest burden but courage will help me carry it if I am brave enough. Sometimes I feel so brave in my silence like I am ready to take on the world. I want to feel and I want to feel everything from heartbreak to nostalgia and I am going to, just like you. And when I feel it, I'll feel it wide and I'll feel it good and write to you about it. I look forward to that. I always will.

But for roughly four to six months, I think things will be okay. Like one last turn on the merry-go-round before we have to step off. I'm going to enjoy it, okay? I feel sad about things sometimes but I am fine. And it makes me smile when I say that. I'm doing fine. Thank God.

I was reading up on J.K. Rowling and she said, "And rock-bottom was the solid foundation that I built my life upon." I hope you keep going no matter what it is. It's important to be alive.

Love,
Me.

A Letter To You.

Dear You,

I'm writing this to you tonight because I feel like talking. It's strange but sometimes I feel like my words slowly die down as background noise in someone else's life story so here I am, writing to you so that you hear everything loud and clear. I like to be heard but I hope you believe me when I say I like to listen, too. I like to listen to everything you have to say to me and everyone else has to say to me and for a moment I start to live someone else's life, someone else's joy and someone else's day-to-day doings in between conversations. I like conversing once I get over the initial shock of it. I love to speak but sometimes I can't. I've never told this to anyone before, but one time in this oratory competition, I walked upto the podium - and I blanked out. I stood and stared at everybody while an image of a dusty road crossed my mind and an old man crossing it. And that was that. I stood and stared until my time was up and walked off. It was embarrassing.

But this other time, I was reading out a piece from "Charlie And The Chocolate Factory." I was narrating the part where Grandpa Joe miraculously bounces off his bed and onto the floor and I had so much fun doing that because I felt like Grandpa Joe's happiness. I felt like the "spark of wild excitement" dancing in his eyes and I was the spitting image of it. It felt like the story was pouring out of me right, left and center and I want to tell you that this boy in the audience was smiling, just this great big grin on his face and I looked at everybody else and they were looking back and a girl was looking back at me with smiling eyes. It was such a good day.

I was home then, I am home now. I want to tell you that my city is unorthodox and beautiful, unconventional in its beauty to me. It's not the prettiest place in the world but you cannot imagine my fascination when I look out of the car window when the Sun is blushing profusely and the sky is a dancing crimson lullaby. A girl with chocolate brown skin on a motorcycle was just as enchanted by the spectacle as me and she was looking around her and I was looking around me and there were so many people just staring out into the distance. A boy in a taxi, half smiling at a joke I did not hear. Someone on cold, dusty grounds resting upon a charpai, someone outside a utility shop with their arms folded, someone inside a rickshaw at a stand-still and someone with smoke-figurines erupting at the end of their cigarette. My city looked so contemplative and it was beautiful to me.

Sometimes I feel like people are fresh off The Potter's Wheel, the clay of their skin fresh from the wheel-head and God, the eternal craft-maker. The little embellishments on their face like a pea-shaped nose and a half-smile, that's what makes them special to me. Inside the Physics laboratory, my class was spread out across the room and they were all fresh off The Potter's Wheel. I remember thinking how everyone was a masterpiece and if that sounds exaggerated then I just want to tell you that there never could be another You or another I and I hope we can make the best of that.

Don't be a stranger. Talk soon.

Thanks for listening. I am infinitely grateful. I am infinitely blessed.

Love,
Me. 

A Letter To No One.

Dear friend,

It's really silent now and I keep saying that in all of my letters because I love breathing it in. I guess silence runs in my blood and it's good to see the chaos quietening down, almost asleep but gently breathing because I can hear everything clearly and I can hear myself and I just find it fascinating. I've been up since the crack of dawn, but I don't mind. I love the cold and I love my city and I guess on some days, it's just good to be alive.

This may sound silly, but I wanted to tell you that I wanted the world to be beautiful again. Not the everything-is-happy, nothing-is-wrong kind. Just in the way it is. Broken and empty sometimes, but alive all the same. And gradually I'm able to see that. I'm able to see that in long-sleeved sweaters and beautiful smiles and just watching two friends having a laughter fit at nothing at all. And I joined them. I laughed and they laughed. But the universe keeps contracting in my stomach and spins round in circles sometimes when I think about what is to come. Sometimes it's just as simple as my eleventh grade result that seems to be on everyone's mind. While my stomach lurched at the very though, I looked around and I guess I smiled a little to myself because I was reminded how it felt like to still be alive, to still have something to worry about, to still have a weight at the back of my mind and the future laid out before me like the stars lining up on the night sky -  it's dark but it still holds the greatest things in the universe.

I suppose I'm getting a bit carried away here. It's just that I was thinking this morning how I could not quite understand how people believed how precious life was. I didn't understand why people thought it was meant to be lived and not merely exist - if that makes sense. And then I thought about how the biggest irony of life was that the most tragic thing that could happen to it was death. And the death of things was always sad - whether it was love, life, hope or friendship or even memory. And I guess I don't need to explain to you how that feels because you know what it's like. To not want to get up and to not move on and stare at the traces instead and believe it is still there. Maybe you know that feeling. And I think that's when you realize how important it is to know about how important it is to be alive. You matter to a thing, a person and a part of the universe that could never exist without you. Without you, it's always going to be incomplete. I guess why I believe we're miracles is that we never know just how many lives we've found our places in - we never know how far kindness goes. A good thought could travel down a generation and a good letter could be found by the most random of people and leave its mark on their memories.What I'm trying to say is: if you're alive, then to the universe, you are just as important as anybody else. The story would never be complete without you.

If you're wondering how I'm doing, I'm still the by-stander. I still watch everything from sidelines but the best part about that? I've started to like it. All the things that will go on without me, will do exactly that no matter how much I want to change it. So last night, I was in a grey chair while everybody played cards and I laughed a lot. Accepting myself is the greatest thing I've ever done.

I've been reading this book and it says that when you stop looking for something, it shows up. But it turns up, it does. And it always takes you by surprise.

For laughter, for oreos, for pretty book covers and friendship, I am infinitely grateful. I am infinitely blessed.

Love,
Me.

A Letter To No One.

Dear You,

It's been a while since I wrote to you. So much has happened in between this letter and the last. It is already the seventh of October and I won't be sixteen for long. But I want to write to you while I still am. I want to tell you that the world is still beautiful as it was when Summer had just begun and so many stories have grown by the end of it. The wind at my window is an introduction to winter and I know I will learn to love its silence. But for now, I am alive and I am breathing, I am what I am now, I am quiet and I have three unread books by my bedside and they are friends.

Last night the sky was alive. I lost count of the stars and that's when I knew I didn't have to hold on to everything. I didn't have to take a picture of everything and I didn't always have to remember. You can sit under the night sky and stare out in the distance and you can be a part of a painting nobody is going to paint, a poem nobody is going to write. And that's alright too. Because it's all the words I don't write and all the words I don't speak that overwhelm me and sometimes they can just rest in my memory. Like last night's moon and how I could almost reach out for it. Almost.

It's a good day if I can see the sunshine. It's a good day if I can still speak and it's a good day if I can still hear the littlest of sounds that let me know that there is still life around me. It's a good day as long as I can believe in it. Sometimes the faith slips away, but I try to go looking for it. And when I go looking for it, it comes back to look for me. And if I can just learn to love it, we can always keep finding each other and it will help me pull through. Again and again.

God was always kind. I do not think prayers are God's promises. I do not think we will always get what we pray for. If you ask me what is going to fill the gaping hole that disappointment leaves and if you ask me what will help you fill your voids and if you ask me what to do when the silence gets too loud, I would always ask you to Pray. Those prayers don't magically untie knots you're struggling with, but they do give you strength to try to figure it out yourself. And there are so many miracles around us that we could never recognize if we do not find the strength to believe in our prayers. And I think while sometimes our prayers don't bring us what we want, they bring us better things. Infinitely better. And that's enough reason to keep going.

For life, for hands and for a good Sunday breakfast, I am infinitely thankful. I am infinitely blessed.

Thank you for listening.

Love,
Me.

A Letter To No One.

 Dear You,

I thought I would start off this letter with some kind of memory that was so beautiful, it'd hurt to remember it; of clear, grey roads and the windshield coloured with melting raindrops holding blurred images of daffodil fields (and I must tell you that I feel beautiful that I have lived to see the sight and have a distinct image of it in mind), but I will tell you instead that I like this red dress and that I just laughed harder than I have done in weeks. And I am grateful, believe me I am.

And I will admit I've been trying to put together some words but all they've seemed is second-hand and half-hearted. Like the staler version of truth and a shadow of me. But moments like these make me whole, they make me feel like I belong here, I belong here in this red shirt, these black buttons, in the silence that is walking gently into this room at 12:08 AM after a day full of sounds and summer. I belong here and there is a song in my playlist that tells me I will always find my way back home. How can I not, when I walked into the kitchen to a fully occupied table, long lost sounds holding each other close for they'd come together as one after a long time. How can I not, when I can hear the love in your voice through a half-broken telephone line and grinning from ear to ear. How can I not, when you add the two extra o's to my name when you say it so that I feel loved. How can I not, when I find myself speaking so easily to you when everybody else just knows me as the quiet girl. How can I not, when you tell me I am special and your favourite. How can I not, when you pull me into a bone-crushing hug and squeal with me. How can I not, when you are as little as three years old and you say, "I want to stay here," and I hold you close and you add, "With you."

"Why are you so quiet? Why don't you speak? Kiya kuch zindagi main kuch aisa hua hay keh tum nay kaha yar ab nahi, ab kisi say nahi bolna?" Classroom floors, a game of truth and dare, my surprised face and her curious face. "I just can't." Maybe that answer did not suffice but it was the truth. I am grateful, I feel blessed. And to tell you the truth, I am the safest when I stand on my prayer mat during the last prayer of the day and it is dark and nobody can see my face or hear me and I am safe still. And I told a friend that I am a Secret. We are beautiful, golden secrets. I wish I would've answered, "I love everything from a distance." My greatest strength is love, I tell you. I can love and I am grateful.

I will tell you the truth, my life is not about pretty scenes and neat rooms and sweet dispositions and phone calls or even friends. But I know yours isn't too. Ours is something more intricate, flawed, imperfect - beautiful. My life is about the buzz that Friday creates, about lovely hands dripping with mango messes, about being out of breath in the summer heat, about walking under roofs where generations of memories have lived and about living something that is entirely mine, about living a page of my own story book in the loudness of Karachi and the haphazard happenings of summer. I wouldn't change this, I wouldn't be anywhere else because I am living something beautifully flawed and I love summer, I love summer because it comes along with so many colours and stories and sounds and clenches them firm in it's palm so that there is cacophony and the photograph reels and the voice recordings are mine, entirely mine, forever mine. There is greatness in Memory, and there is greatness in living it. For now, there are so many that I am breathing them in and I am thankful for everything, the good and the bad and my story for it is mine. All praise is for God.


Suppose you ask, "Why don't you speak to each other anymore?" Suppose you ask why I hesitated answering the call. Suppose you ask why I am different than before. Suppose you meet the version of me that grew over the past year and I meet the year-older version of you and we look and suppose we tell each other in tones of surprise that we've changed. In the end, there is a clock in your room, there is a clock in my room and it ticks and it tocks and the minutes melt into the days and the days into weeks and the weeks into months and the months into years and the clock in your room carries the weight of all this time. Of all that it brings and all that has happened. Because moments happen when moments happen and it is beautiful because it is not our doing; moments come together when stories collide each other and it is overwhelming just to think that they happen - that they happen and that they are for us and ours and things happen in minute, days, weeks. Things happen, things change, people grow, I grow, you grow, moments happen - and moments later, you are at a different stage, in a different setting and things keep happening. So words fade and my moments changed me and your moments changed you and that is alright. And in such a state, when things start fading you know that they were brittle, temporary. And the permanence of unconditional love through it all is what is beautiful, and to carry all those moments inside you under a roof you can call home is also beautiful. I have faith in the permanence of unconditional love, and in the beauty of things that were always mine.

It is late, I should sleep. The good and bad thing about all days is that they end and so this one ends too. I am not happy that it ended, but I am not sad either. So I will be grateful that we made it through another day and tomorrow is a new task. I have learnt to not under-estimate the magnitude of 24 hours. So much happens. No matter what, our life is beautiful, complete with it's flaws. I believe it is and I see that it is. I am infinitely grateful, I am infinitely blessed.

Thank You for listening.

Love,
Me.

A Letter To No One.

Dear You,

I am not afraid to tell you that I have been afraid. It has been strange, but I only know how to bear the strangeness and wish it away through prayer. I only know how to sit up wide awake and wait for Fajar, and feel for a few tiny seconds the Medina air kissing the walls of my room awake. I only know how to feel the relief of seeing the morning winds dust off last night's fear.

I will tell you this: I do not believe in fairy-tales, I do not believe in happy endings, I do not believe in perfection and I do not believe in a perfect life, I do not believe in happiness that ache is not a part of. But I believe in loving regardless, loving despite; I believe in forgiveness, and loving again and again and again with the broken pieces dearer each time. I believe in miracles, I believe in breaking down. I believe in being beautifully flawed. I believe in forgetting the burdens of the Present upon looking at the blue of the sky and wondering about the things and people still to come and that it could never be easy, it could never be perfect, but what I feed from is the infinity of the universe, the infinity of my own being and the infinity of my prayers. Because I swear to God there is no moment more fearless than putting your hands together in prayer and how incoherent words said with a tear in secret and in fear could change the course of fate, and to say a prayer is a beautiful, beautiful thing.

Dear friend, I am heard. It does not matter to you, but it matters to me. It matters to me how I stood outside the Physics laboratory in college desperate for a miracle and being handed with one. It does not matter to you, but it does to me. It matters to me that I know I am heard. And dear friend, losing hope is a terrible, terrible thing. They tell me how unfair life is, but I wonder also how unfair I am to life. When it brings me the winds and the evening skies and moments of silence, darkness, happiness and infinity - and all I see is despair. No, not this time. This time despair is not loud enough to distract me from what is rightfully mine and that is Hope. How unfair I am to life when I curse it for all the bad it brings when the rain can wash it away and I have heard somebody say, dear friend, that rain can wash it all away if you let it.

I may not be wise, but I mean to tell you that with a white bracelet on my hand, I can't help but believe in good things. They come and they go but they happen and that is enough. Good things, good people, and prayers. What is mine will always be mine, and what never was, never will be. And that's okay.

And dear friend, I have only told you it's going to be okay because everything is temporary, just like you and me. I have faith. And for faith, I am infinitely grateful,  I am infinitely blessed.

Thank You for listening.

Love,
Me.

A Letter To No One.

Dear You,

We wait all day, all summer, all year for the perfect moment, the perfect time, the perfect day, the perfect summer  - and here it is, tapping us on the back of the shoulder but we wait and wait. For a moment today I saw it. I saw that here is the breathtaking summer I wished I would have. More on that later. And while winter is serene, calm, flicking it's fingers through the pages of fate almost effortlessly - summer is heavy-set and big. It's all around, with that stench of Eventfulness. Pungent happenings of summer that sweat with me in the sweltering heat. Oh, cacophony. And winter is the long, deep breath taken in - summer is the scream.

I grow with my story. I grow while I loiter on this particular summer day and take in the wonder. The wonder of it all. The ceiling fan buzzing with my thoughts and words, a blender grinding noisily, the only sound I heard while I fell in and out of love with silence and things. And welding dreams made out of evening breezes in the summer heat, all in my head. An exasperated sigh, an almost-scream, frustrated words, all giving into the noise of it all. Karachi letting all voices loose as summer gallops through the city.

A lot has been happening. I told you. I told you I would grow. And so much more to come. My God created summer and everything beautiful and full of stories. And I take in other people's words, trace their outlines with my fingers, taste the words in my head and I know why there are cracks, why tears and sobs and desperation are trying to speak through them. I know because I link it all back to where I know all the Solutions reside - the heavens. I believe, I do. So I take it all in and resolve to remember that I have two hands and they are powerful when they come together and pray. My friend says that hands fascinate her. She says they can do things. She is right. I am fascinated too.

Lend a ear and listen. To the wind and to the people because they were all created wondrous. A stray word, the possibility of comfort out of nowhere (but we all know it's God that makes us listen). I bundled up everything that happened yesterday with some words and snippets of a conversation I overheard by the sofa. My ears registered some things: The Battle of Badar, things happening before that - bad things, constant struggle, never losing hope, glory. Mayooosi. Disappointment. Chase it away. Good things happen. Have faith.

For goodness and for wonder, I am infinitely grateful - I am infinitely blessed. It's a wonderful life. Colour. Noise. Summer.

Look around.

Thank you for listening.

Love,
Me. 

A Letter To No One.

Dear You,

I've been meaning to write to you for a long time. I will make no excuses, and tell you that I only just built up the courage. Today has been good, it brought me laughter. Wonderful, warm laughter, the colour of love and of hope. And I took it all in, in large bites and breathed in the air while it was still ringing with joy and the winds were kind today because summer has taken to suffocate with me with words that I do not want to belong to me. And they take up the most space in my head and I dive head-first into the madness of my own being and I shed myself away until only I can hear me. I've always been quiet, serene to watching eyes and I will always will be. The chaos is inside and it will forever live there.

And I'm still trying to catch up with fate, while it brings me new stories and new people and other such universes. But I am thankful, I am, and I find infinity everywhere. I find it while resting my head against the window in a moving car and the infinite stories and secrets bundled in a corner of the roads, the houses, the very air that I take in. Then how could I be ordinary? How could you be ordinary? When we carry words at the tip of our tongues, and stories within our souls and gold carvings of love on our hearts - no, we could not be ordinary. Oh, these eyes have so much more to see and this soul has so much more to say and there is beauty in life, extra ordinary beauty, tragic beauty, and it is all for you and me. And don't you see the beauty in even our End being infinite? Oh, our ends, these words, our stories - praise be to God. This beauty can only belong to Him and it does and I am glad because I know He will keep it safe. And we will be alright. There is hope still, there is time still - it'll be okay.

Oh, I'll grow and grow and the heavens won't send down to me too great a burden to bear. What comes my way was always mine. Lingering piano notes in my ear and they let me hear what I want to, just like the wind. I'll be alright tonight, I have enough happiness to feed on. And I thank the heavens that I do and that there are beautiful people still. My prayers won't die down, no, they only grow stronger with time and with life. God will take me as I am, complete with my incoherence - I know He will. And I will grow and grow, and these hands will hold different things and touch different skins until they grow old and frail, but they'll still be mine and I will smile because I know that we made it through all of this madness and I was me all along. And I know now, that I will know then that I have strength and you have strength and it is great in magnitude and before you know it you'll be nearing the End, still breathing, still alive. You will smile and I will too, because we made it through all of this and we were always meant to get out alive until death greeted us with open arms. Oh, there is a greater plan - for you and for me.

Right now I do not care, for once I do not care if I sound beautiful but all I know is that I feel and I feel greatly and you've felt what I've felt, and I've felt what you've felt - and you're not alone because I know, I know that what it is, whatever it is, it is temporary and people can damage your knees and your elbows and even extend their reach to your heart. But they can never damage your soul and our souls and our sounds and our thoughts and our actions - that is what infinity is and God's infinity shall return to Him and Him alone. So it is alright. It's alright. There are mornings and there are sunrises and sunsets and plenty of words. And rain too, the smell of rain.

I am exhausted but my mind does not feel like it's going to erupt anymore and I have you to thank for that. For words, for prayer mats, for faith and for laughter, I am infinitely grateful. I am infinitely blessed.

Thank you for listening.

Love,
Me.

A Letter To No One.

Dear You,

If I was not afraid to say it, I'd tell you that I dream in little pieces, in little secrets that hold me together and my fixed gazes at nothing at all, when even the clatter of hammer and bricks and drills cannot drown the sounds out  - my sounds. And if I was not afraid to tell you, I'd tell you how I cannot stop wondering about the wind because it is nothing at all and I can still almost see it and it takes my breath away. And if I was not afraid of sounding insane, I'd tell you that the colours - the blur of red and blue and silver and even a sudden stroke of yellow - they've come to stay and with grace, because there are some of them that do not go away. And I see them, some of them - the red and the blue and the silver - even in the lazy shades of summer.

Dear friend, you can call upon me when you need me but call, so I know. Because you will look and you will look around and wonder where I am and what I am up to. And I'll be right there, hiding in the warmth of my own thoughts, needing to be called upon and afraid that I will never be. And I could tell you that I look into words like I look into the mirror, and that I taste them again and again, and that I look, I search for the splits like stubborn cracks on dead earth. So I can know. And decide. If they were meant for me or not at all. But I will choose to be silent because I am afraid that you will walk away and never call upon me. And I will feel as if I chased away those calls along with you. And I will be still and take each wonder and take it as my own. For I am of the world, I am of the heavens, I am of destiny - and what will always belong to me is my wonder. Dear friend, no one can take away the wonder from me because I will find it. It will always be there to call upon me. I need not be afraid.

Yes, I need not be afraid. But I afraid I am. Although I have come to accept that what does not come my way was never mine and there is goodness in God's decisions. Sometimes I think destiny is only a matter of where you and I will get - and how we get there will be ours, and only ours to decide. Perhaps there and only there lies the struggle and our choice of choices. And in the end, it does matter. Because no matter what anyone tells me, what ever I may bring upon myself - even the slightest bit of emotion - it is mine to give to myself and take it away as well. I choose to harbour it when it is a part of me, and I choose to be okay when I let go of it. And God? God will give me the strength to hold on to what is right.

You must forgive me for my incoherence, dear friend, because I have wanted to shed some of these words so that they do not weigh me down. If I could paint, I would paint for you a rose, patiently sitting on a  window sill somewhere in the city so that when the rain would die away a little, you could go out in your rain coat and boots with a telling smile and find it, because it would be meant for you. And you would, after searching and searching - a lot of searching - you'd find someone kind enough to open their apartment door and examine you strangely, then burst into a smile. And they'd tell you to walk right in and get what was rightfully yours. Have faith. There are people out there still. Meant for you and me.

Dear friend, there is a page in my notebook that tells me that you and I, we are life's little jars. That life will pour into us a mix of smiles and tears and cries and laughter and red roses and sunshine and it will pour it all in. In different proportions, at different times and different mixtures but we could all be the same size. Jars. And when I find a friend like you, I will pour some of my rainbow-coloured-life-in-a-jar in yours, and we will share and share to live. We will be okay.

I have a lot of hope still. I am infinitely grateful, I am infinitely blessed. And this time, dear friend, truly - I thank you for listening.

Love,
Me.

A Letter To No One.

Dear You,

Things have quietened down a bit for a moment, because there are no thumping sounds of hammers and bricks and drills hard at work outside in the summer breeze anymore. And I feel good again because I have been part of this Friday's colours and I have smiled and collected laughter in return. So I must write to you once more because I have been wondering far too much for me to be at peace, and I trust you to keep these thoughts safe for me.

There have been a lot of moments lately when I have found myself looking at what I have never seen before and listening to what I could not have imagined. And it frightens me for the most part because it is like being handed a new thread altogether, to untangle and make a pattern out of even though I am unfamiliar. I do admit that unfamiliarity makes me squirm, especially when I find it in people and things I've come to know by heart. And how it interferes with how I have painted them with colours and words and lingering images. Then there is distortion. But I must not be ungrateful. I have come to know that you and I, we are infinite. And that there will always be a lot to find, a lot to make sense out of, but that's okay. Because there will be so much more to find wonder in, and so much more to learn to love. And I will never grow tired.

Yesterday night had been silent so I'd been thinking. About April Letters. Because it sounds fascinating to me. April Letters. To hold a soft, brown parchment - the colour of Patience, and to read and to keep reading, in the light of the piercing sunshine by day, and beside a quiet lampshade in the evening. To read of Lady April, as she pulls in the summer heat behind her and stops at the sight of you at the window to smile at you, and how with a graceful wave of a hand, she reminds you that she cannot, she will not stay for long. Dear friend, I cannot cease to believe in beauty and you mustn't either. And if you'd like to, we will go looking for it to find us. In April and always; forever more.

I have something else to tell you, too. That I have found a lot of power in prayer. And while that may not sound too profound, I must tell you that I have felt like I am listened to. Incoherent as my prayers are, I have learnt to mean them and believe in them before they come pouring out on the prayer mat. I have learnt to believe that I will be given what I was meant to be given. And then they work. I may not get what I want but things happen for the better. And I am grateful. Maybe I just had to learn to believe in my own prayers. I do now. I feel at peace.

And I do not believe that life is unfair. God is good, because what I do not get, was never mine. You must understand that life hastens to bring good to other people too and there are so many people to take care of. You must understand and you must never lose hope. Your time will come when your time will come.There is a lot of justice still. The floor beneath my feet, the roof above my head. You and I, we're infinitely blessed.

Thank You for listening.

Love,
Me.