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.

Spotted on your starlight skin:
One single vein
One stroke of blue

From the window I could clearly see
the branches of the forest trees
I’d go if you went too

God grant you the light of day
God grant me the words to say
The world looks good on you

Tonight will you go to sleep
And become somebody’s far off dream
A shade in heaven’s hues

Will you carry on in bones and skin
And melt into the wayward dins
So I can write you again
In spelled out words, in piano tunes

A Letter To No One.

Dear friend,

Sometimes poets hold their hands to each sides when they are talking about hearts. I find wonder in you. You are not a number. You are not somebody's measure of probability, you are not a bar chart, you are not somebody's statistics. You are flesh and skin and bones and heart and a mess of ribcage and fragility and strength and emotion. You are alive the night when the weight of the world collapses and you roll over and fall into the third dimension of existence, the space in between life and death where dreams are constellations and where we learn to fall asleep. You are not your subject assessment tests, you are made out of the flips in your stomach and the knowledge of how to hold a pen in your hand.

You are the universe's first and last. Your name and your story and your heart and your love and your joy and your pain and your nostalgia is yours and yours alone. You are your broken voice and nobody else is going to sound the same way when they sing your favourite song off tune.

I think it's beautiful how the universe thought us worthy of being created. You are one of the only gazillion things to have ever existed. And I hope when you are writing your best poem or looking at the mirror or seeing a photograph in a moment that you're not going to take, I hope you know that if you are capable of existence, you are capable of anything at all. The possibilities are infinite and so are you.

And in between so many eras, and in between all of every documented human encounter and in between the pages of our history books and in between the creation of a star five hundred years ago and in between the light on the night sky and in between seventeen hour flights from this country to that and in between oblivion and the end of world, and in between being nothing and being this - I am honoured to have known and loved you at all.

Lots of love,
Me.

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.

for a food court stranger

I don’t suppose you
write your alphabets like I do - maybe yours are alphabet domes and alphabet temples with alphabet men bending their backs in prostration -
my alphabets in my Urdu notes are curved and dotted and the alifs adorned at the top with a cape of their own because I give that to them -
but we exchange money on opposite sides of the counter and our words match because they sound similar on both sides of the border -
I don’t know if I can trace your chocolate skin to smell of spices and saris and a decade of street cricket and now we are here - polished floors and air brushed pictures for perfume ads that say “euphoria” - but for us it means something different, it means the first drop of monsoon rains and the first sight of mangoes and secret love letters that feel forbidden even inside our hearts -
the food court doesn’t smell of your amma’s favourite recipe, it is modern, it is all this it is all that and you can see your face on the slab of the counter and it doesn’t feel like our streets because no one is being ridiculous -
they give you stares at airports, did you know? i feel nervous at customs and what they have seen of our kind, when bad drives you crazy and crazy drives you bad but it would be so sad to have
become what people have thought of us -

i pledge to wonder about you, i pledge to write you letters, i pledge to think of you as a hero, the hero of your room, the hero under the blanket at night who goes to sleep thinking about childhood streets, i pledge to trace your skin back to the smell of jasmine and garland clad wrists that you fell in love with, i pledge to paint with bare air with my fingers the family portrait you carry inside your wallet, i pledge to read the book stowed away at the end of the shelf untouched for weeks or months, i pledge to find a hand and look for graffiti on walls and take a blurry photo of someone on a chingchi, i pledge to point out places in street corners and the obscure coffee shop and the bakery that looked a lot like the one in a story book, i pledge to reach out for stardust of fallen stars and the patchwork that still remains on broken dreams

because everyone can see you towering, but would you see me cowering? In an alleyway with a notebook and downsized dreams because dreams are expensive and my voice can be small - i want to hear you from miles away, the moment of making before it becomes victory, the time of your life before it becomes a memory, the memoir before death, the epitaph before you are gone - we are now, we are this, wrapping aluminium around Arabic food so someone else can have a better life - and you tear your gaze like you are not an infinity, like you do not have dreams and like the universe would ever be complete without you - how could it be? it is the universe who decides who is beautiful enough to be showcased under nights skies and sun lit days that hover above us - the universe decided on you. the universe decided on me.

isn’t the light in the nightsky from stars that have crumbled away? we are crumbling stars with fallen lights but ones that make the darkness lighter.

for the strangers of my city

dear stranger,

i looked through the crack of the window and you had let your hair down and the six o clock Karachi winds make me want to close my eyes and examine the sunshine patches on my hands and trace out the syntax of how your jaw clenches when you have bad news over the telephone and how the freckles on your nose don't give your red nose away and how you stare out at something in between cups of tea and you look down and swirl the liquid and it matches the colour of your skin -

sometimes my poems are what you were on a Wednesday morning - nightsky hair tied up into a hair bun with a red ribbon, one to match your heart. i see you on the sidelines, i write you down in words and everything that doesn't matter to you, matters to me. it matters to me how your eyes dart nervously and how the moon of last night left its traces on your starlight skin while you hold yourself and think of something and thoughts that breathe in between the surprised distance of your chapped lips -

you are the poem in my head because i write it down with how your smile digs into your cheeks and how your hair sticks out and you are the character from a book in the London rain but someone fit you into the wrong story so you laugh it out and are the girl who does not belong because her skin is too white for too much milk in her cup of tea - you glance at me in passing and i have already written you down in miles and miles of invisible ink

and i don't quite know how to deal with it, how to make you understand and grab you by the shoulder and explain to you that you are in my poetry and you are in my prose and they are both seventeen year old but seventeen means being young enough and foolish enough to fall in love momentarily and eternally with strangers and how they laugh and what they sing and how they see me seeing them

i see you, i see you - i see you right now because i asked myself what the patches of sunshine on my skin remind me of and it was you because my bones and my skin take you in and i find reasons to stay alive

so i pray to God that he takes your hand when the gravity of linoleum pride wants to take you west -i pray to God you break free, ride the wind and the wings of the sparrow someone told you were too far away, i pray to God you grease your hands trying to fix things someone said you couldn't and i pray to God that when the six o clock winds displace your hair and you turn your head slightly you find me and i am smiling and i have already written you down and prayed for you and held your hand inside my head and smiled for you in the quick moment i shift my eyes from you to something i don't quite see

love,
a friend

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.