This is an attempt to articulate the political/personal struggle that I had endured as a Muslim student during the period of students’ agitation following the sacrificial death of RohithVemula. The whole episode being stitched with my political experience as a…
“Rahiye ab aisi jagah chal kar jahan koi na ho ham-sukhan koi na ho aur ham-zaban koi na ho” —Mirza Ghalib (Go and stay in a quarter where no one lives None to hear your speech, none to speak in…
I have been engaged in a constant writing project that intends to highlight Palestinian narratives since 1948 up to the present. The dispossession narrative touches every Palestinian family including my own. During the 1948 Nakba and the war period, two…
MY MURDERER AND I The murderer loses no morality Never risk a thought Pitched on the terrain of war Thoughts are ammunition We can discuss if the murder happened But never doubt the morality of my murderer He gently caressed…
1 The poem was accused asanti national and rejected like a US visa applicant from Muslim country It wanted to prove as nationalist It started with Vandematharam the continuing lines were only nouns of the independence struggles in which the…
Mosquito bites scab over and the itch fades. Oud notes fade through the patio door into the night and smoke escapes from your lips to mine. I inhale. I look over the railing into the night at the lights below.…
This is the story of the time when I still used to wear the Hijab. I was 14. It was 2008. The year of the global recession, not that I knew what that it meant back then. I was flying…
This is something about which I have always wanted to write. Something that contributes so much to my identity and me as a person, yet, from the cover, it’s just a scarf. Just a piece of cloth. I don’t remember…
On a sunny Los Angeles afternoon in June of 2017 I was driving to the airport to pick up mycousin who was coming to visit me from Canada for the very first time. As I approached the international terminal I…
My first journey to Delhi ended with a drizzling rain at Nizamuddin railway station on the first of July 2016. I was in the city to attend CSDS (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies) two month long course on…
