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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.

the beginning of an end

“They will kill you for this love,” she cried in the anguish of a woman about to miscarry. “You will die! And for this woman…this whore,” her words spat a cold venom.

I shut my eyes and muted her torture. With the room heavy and the air so stale and oppressive, to breathe was to asphyxiate. “Peace mama, I will not ask for your blessing, only for your tolerance and understanding”. Unhearing, she melted in her desperate pool of grief.

As I walked towards the door, I passed the colourful framed aayah that hung on the wall. They were the signs of what my mother believed I had forsaken. “In the name of Allah, the most compassionate, the most merciful”. I still believed He would be.

before That Phonecall

Like a heathen who doubted her prophet, I asked for a sign.