life is so short - a glimpse, a glance, a fleeting moment. from the moment we are born to the moment we die, we flip through our moments like we flip through pages of a very thin and very endearing book filled with hurt, love, pain, joy, sorrow, success, failure, and...

The world is the same all over when you are 35000 feet up in the sky, enclosed in a capsule with a hundred others, tired, cramped, happy, sad, excited, nervous, sleepy, exhausted. Whether you are flying over Europe, or the vast expanses of Africa, or over the rugged...

Today, I sat outside after a very long winter and touched grass. The breeze was cold but the scent of soil and the swish of sycamore trees allowed me the sanctuary of warmth in my heart: it felt as though my entire being was engulfed by my small, beating heart. It...

when the plague is over when the dead have been forgotten when the locks are broken come meet me by the water under the sycamore tree

There is a graveyard of lost friendships in my mind that I often visit. It is always there, very much in close proximity, but in the rush hour of life, one seldom gets to sit down and say, "Come now, let me visit the graveyard of forgotten friendships. Let me wander...

"Don’t tell my father I have died,” he says, and I follow him through blood on the road and hundreds of pairs of shoes the mourners left behind, as they ran from the funeral, victims of the firing. From windows we hear grieving mothers, and snow begins to fall on us,...

dear child, don't haunt me with your big, kohl-lined, black doe eyes, with those fluttering lashes that drape upon your cheeks as you blink in timeless motion. you have left in your wake empty hands that still extend outwards, towards you, stretched in hopes that you...

October has this beautiful melancholy about it, even while it is a month of leaving: migrating seagulls, parting leaves, chilly winds that separate the warm months from the cold ones. It is not just the colors that emerge during this month - the reds, the oranges, the...

Strange isn't it, how we can imagine perfectly the scent of things we remember, or are familiar with — though, if I were to ask you now to write in words what a rose smells like, you'd find it impossible to do that? How do you describe the scent of roses, or jasmines,...

This world has a strange way of making you fall in love with things that die... flowers, hopes, people. One day, the flowers are blooming with color. The air is filled with the scent of rose, hopes linger in the glitter of sunlight, falling from the heavens in sheets...

When people leave, never fixate on the one who is leaving or who has left. There were people in your life who were there before this leaving happened, and there will be people in your life who will be there after this leaving happens. Leaving, like staying, requires...

Life is like a train, always on the move. The landscapes change as you watch them through the window of your cabin, and as they do, so do you. Soon, when you look back, 50 years have passed. 50 landscapes, 50 of you, 50 graves for 50 of your buried selves. What did...

If you take away the memories, what is left of a person? People are made up of their smiles, the lines and creases on their faces, the wrinkles that form on the corners of their eyes. People are made up of the way they laugh, and the way that laughter echoes; how does...

By Guest Writer [@FelicityAndElixirs] Dear all not-so-perfect humans, Do you remember that Snow White fairy tale that we all used to love in our childhood? If not, let me give you a quick summary. It was a story of a woman who was reminded so very often that she...

The world was torn asunder with war, plague, famine and utter loss, so I decided to sit with myself one day and write my own eulogy. I decided that whatever I was going to write about the dead me, the me who was no longer on this earth, was going to be free of poetry,...

Picture Credits: Hassan Talal Tiwana (Twitter @hsntalal_tiwana) When the white man in the dark uniform shot him in the heart, many little things flashed before his eyes, things that were dear to his heart, things that were not things but entire segments that made up...

If trees could speak, I wonder how much they would have to tell us? I wonder how many humans they would have spoken to, how many weary a traveler that rested under their shade would have emptied out their hearts at the bottom of their lofty barks. I wonder if the...

Pain has a strange way of healing you. Strange, isn't it, how the entity that hurts you, heals you. That the very thing that makes you shed tears, wring your hands in despair, curl your toes, and that shoves a ball of barbed wire into your throat for you to swallow,...

The lies we tell ourselves are often a reflection of our innermost cry for help, the one that rarely ever has the chance to become vocal, to escape the crevice of our mouth. If these cries for help were to ever make way outside of ourselves, out into the open, we...

One evening, back when the days were longer, the nights were young, and a perpetual rosy scent lingered in the air, back when my grandma was younger, back when my grandma was very much in this world amongst us, my grandma spoke to me over the phone. Her voice crackled...

Have you noticed how the streets lay barren, soundless, and entirely dead? Have you noticed how the intersections look haunted, devoid of any cars or pedestrians as the light turns green, yellow, and red over and over and over again? Have you noticed also the way the...

  The SUV's clock reads 11:40 AM. It's Tuesday and we are headed to Medina. I hear the melodious recitation of Sudais softly coming through the speakers and the sporadic Urdu translation after every few verses. The road is smooth and the air conditioner is just...

I never knew something as unimportant as black powder could have the power to formulate an entire mental manifesto. That, coupled with a photograph, and perhaps some genetic element in the blood that throbs and makes waves as soon as motherland's calling echoes and...

  Old streets, old people, old times. There's a pleasure in old that seldom gets explained in words. Old is gold, they say, but old is not gold, love. Gold is strong, sturdy, and ever-relevant. Old is old, crippling, falling apart, hazy, broken, and faded. Old is...

الطَّارِقِ  (Al-Tariq): The Science Behind Pulsars (Neutron Stars) Guest Writer: Syed Ubaid...

The sun sets in Istanbul, he once told me, and I never thought to question his claim. To me, it was subjective, like many things in life. The setting of the sun, the passing of time, the leaving of people, the changes in seasons, the loss of love. Many things - except...

Every Friday, there used to be a bouquet of fresh flowers on his grave. His brother would walk up to the gravestone, the crisp leaves of fall crunching under his shoes. He would first read his brother's name, engraved on the grey stone. He would dust it off with his...

  She watched the transparent fluid feeding into her veins through the thin IV pipe. Her limbs felt alien to her, jelly-like and useless. Her throat was dry, her thirst unquenchable. She felt restless but there was nothing she could do about it. She would picture...

The door chimed as I walked into the dimly lit café. It was empty, and the overhead speakers were playing a sad Arabic song on love and war. The mourning, thick voice of a female singer dripped through the violin. A woman soldier shouted: Is that you again? Didn't I...

Its a humid Tuesday and as the dust in my mind settles down under the sharp blow of the air conditioner, I am reminded of the Sundays of my childhood in Peshawar. Sometimes, these were days spent well flying kites and roaming rooftops. Sometimes, these were days spent...

  Recovering from a heartbreak is like recovering from a long, excruciating fever. She was left weak, trembling, shivering and vulnerable. She needed nourishment and warmth, company and healthy conversations. The lucky ones find those elements of complete...

Alarm. Legs dangling off the side of the bed. Sudden pounce, stepping into the washroom. Stepping out of the washroom, towelling my face dry. Changing. Running downstairs, grabbing car keys, half a granola bar in my mouth. Garage door opens, car reverses, garage door...

I remember sitting in the back of an old, grey Corolla eating mango flavoured ice cream out of a transparent cup. The windows were down and the cool, jasmine-scented night-time breeze of Peshawar was sweeping into the car. The stereo was playing a song on rainy nights...

these are not memories, my love. these are crushed petals of dried rose infused with a thousand million rays of sun and precisely three hundred and sixty five specks of happiness. these are the remnants of lost hopes transformed into more hopes, gathered into waiting...

  like characters from sesame street, my brother and i posed in granny sweaters that smelled like mothballs. those are innocent eyes staring back at us, pleading their older selves to stay true to their roots. those are genuine smiles stretched in joy, imploring...

  In the city of my birth, the houses have rooftops. Standing tall on one of these rooftops, one can see the mountains in the north. Closer, a keen eye can catch a kite. Closer yet, one can see other rooftops. Down below, streets meander around bungalows. A lone...

I was using my fingernails to crack open some cardamom seeds while the green tea leaves boiled in the water on the stove. The sun was setting and the sky was an eerie shade of blue green. The first rain of the season had cleaned the roads and whatever little snow that...

This morning, as I packed my books away into my bag and walked out of the classroom, I happened to join a friend in the hallway as we headed in the same direction. "How're you holding up, S?" I asked. "Fine, I think." Then she told me about how, in an earlier class...

There are moments when I feel insignificant and this feeling of unimportance often results in a phase of ingratitude that, upon retrospect, is shameful. Insignificant. Unimportant. Ungrateful. Shame. Powerfully weighted feelings of experience. In the moment(s), these...

Heartbreak is simply the aftershock of a very big love. There is nothing sadder in life than a heart that was not broken at all. Jann Arden Precisely forty-four days later, a tidal wave of nothingness hit her again. The nothingness was composed of some shrapnel made...

  It is a Friday evening and a cold wind is blowing outside. Though its only the middle of September, the remnants of the first snow of the season are still present along shaded sidewalks. Yellowed leaves frozen to a crisp are fluttering and the sky is a strange...

She placed her faith in people, in places and in things, which is why her ultimate condition was that of misery. Misery of being. There was a high that lasted eight days and before she saw it coming, it came down crashing on her—the 'it' being the façade of joy,...

On the daily, the mesh of feelings one goes through is a complex web of everything: one moment, its cold charcoal—dark and just there. The next moment, it's a fire, out of control and burning everything down. Before you know it, it's embers, glowing softly and giving...

Evenings are the epitome of emotional transition. When the sun is finally setting on a long summer day, and when hues of orange, pink and gold are playing hide and seek, it usually so happens that a flood of memories and melancholia befalls the mind: the free mind....

When I was eight years old, I loved tagging along with my brother and cousin and walking, sometimes skipping, to the little cornerstore by the local neighborhood mosque. It was a five minute walk but thinking back now, the hot summer afternoons would melt away the...

the year 1999. what is it about sepia hues and motherland’s mountains that wring the insides of my heart and call my name? what is it about this portrait of my childhood that forms a summation of the ‘90s…a summation so profound, it leaves me weeping for the innocence...

"When spring-time flushes the desert grass, Our caravan winds through the Khyber Pass. Lean are the camels but fat the frails, Lighter the purses but heavy the bales! As the snowbound trade of the North comes down, To the market square of Peshawar town." - Rudyard...

and he toils, ever so, ever yet. this is man. these men. they exist or they exist not—one knows not. and the place still exists, ever so, ever yet. just shinier, polluted, and a little less clean. but it exists. and the earth bears witness to the weight of those...

Chipped blue paint. Old red bricks. Remnants of the past. This old man. This man clad in white smiles under the tangle of wires through which sparks buzz as the copper tries to catch up to the new world. A new world, nestled within which are traces of the ancient....

During my depressive, post-1984-reading phase, I was helplessly sour at everything. I yelled at my little brother and pictured O’Brien’s nasty grin every time I chased pointless debates with my older brother. It all felt so natural and good, it kind of creeped me out....

“You’re encased in a disastrous matrix of fear and loathing. You’re just a function. You’re just a function of the universe. You think you’re free. You have no more freedom than a cell on your body. The universe isn’t a democracy. It’s a monarchy. You’re just a...

“Here's what's not beautiful about it: from here, you can't see the rust or the cracked paint or whatever, but you can tell what the place really is. You can see how fake it all is. It's not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It's a paper town. I mean, look...

We grew into children running around and creating chaos. Surprisingly, the chaos we created was cute to many. Then the obnoxious years of teen bid upon us their presence. We battled through the acne and restrictions, grades and parental consents, the 'I can't wait...