On Being a Non-Bilingual Brown Person

“You can’t understand Punjabi?!” Rishma* said, mouth open in a grin stuck on pause that evolved into rolling laughter of disbelief. “No,” I smiled, clenching my fists that lulled by my sides to prevent them from instinctively floating up and punching her in the jaw. Advertisements

Exercise saved my mental health

I have suffered with mental health issues for as long as I can remember. Even in primary school, I just found life too overwhelming. What I didn’t consider though was that my diet and lifestyle didn’t help – I bunked every P.E class and I lived on fried chicken, ramen noodles, frozen food and concentrated […]

Can I celebrate Christmas as a Muslim?

I think it’s pretty safe to say at this stage that hatred of Muslims is brewing into something that can no longer be halted; there’s no other option now – it is going to get worse before it gets better.

He Came In The Dead Of The Night

It was the dead of the night, and Maria was dead to the world. Her legs sunk into the mattress, the weight lifted away, her mind finally tranquil when the first pebble hit her bedroom window. The cul-de-sac she lived on was quiet; a safe space away from the city, the throng of trees a […]

My First Love Broke Me

The first time I fell in love, I thought it would be forever. We had kids names planned and I had our futures mapped out in my mind. He was the first man to meet my parents – in all my twenties so far, I haven’t met another man worthy of the honour. But it […]

How Horror Helped My Anxiety

Whether it’s a glass of bubbly or a slab of cake, I’m yet to befriend a human who doesn’t have some sort of coping mechanism to get them through this thing called life. One of my vices is the Horror genre – it’s the perfect form of escapism.

Partition, 70 years on

So much reading material is available on the formation of Pakistan that it’s hard for someone as clueless as me to decipher what’s true anymore. But there is one tale that seems quite indisputable – that for almost 1000 years different religious groups co-existed here in harmony, as a family, embracing one another’s traditions.