(An unedited excerpt from “The daughter of no one famous”)
Under the grey fleece of sunset, the muezzin called out for Maghrib.
She hated this time of day. It was lead on her brain, oppressive and dim.
Tag: drafts
Character: Sakinah-bhai
The rent money was gone.
Sakinah-bhai pulled back the decaying lace curtain to look outside. The street was still empty, Razi was nowhere to be seen.
That the rent money was gone wasn’t her only trouble, it was how it came to be ‘gone’. How would she explain it to Razi without that twit passing judgement and running off to tell her mother and sisters?
Stupid woman. Stupid woman. Her hands brushed against the tasbeeh on the sidetable. She picked it up and proceeded to thumb each prayer bead towards her. Stupid woman. Stupid woman. It’s what happens when you mix in the wrong circles. You try to impress, fit in. And you fail.
And you lose all the bloody rent money. Continue reading Character: Sakinah-bhai
Wednesday’s lottery draw
His dreams sell cheap at the corner shop.
bullet control
suck your thumb in ambient red. the universe ends at a point just before a crimson curtain fall.
time will soon betray and all this will be no closer than the time you missed the falling star by eyelashes. but for now, seconds sliding into their peers, is the lull, the ebb and flow of a living, giving heat. this is all you know. for now.
till one who once knew what you knew, since forgotten, takes metal to time-slapped palm, and a single shard of hurt to heart.
and while you suck your thumb in ambient red, the world forgets to take its lithium.
and an ob/gyn with a six-chambered heart and whose bedsidemanner is reassuring steel, performs your unscheduled ceasarian.
His name is
a soft sari of embroidered silk I want to wrap around myself.
before That Phonecall
Like a heathen who doubted her prophet, I asked for a sign.
buddy talk
I’ve been your friend since you puked up on me in grade school, I can tell you this. You buddy, make roadkill look attractive.
-Sheesh, I know i’m not the best looking guy around…
Well, thank God you don’t harbour any of those delusions.
-But she only wants to marry me because of the money.
A woman’s gotta love you for something. Be grateful.
Bradley gets her name wrong at breakfast.
Maybe it was the way her thumb slid evenly over the business edge of the butterknife, or the manner in which her mouth smirked up manically at the left towards the mole on her cheek. Either way, Bradley knew, that in five short seconds, his cajones would join his appendix in a doggy bag.
Papa always used to say…
One man’s dream is another man’s derision.