I have an op-ed in NYT on the subject of elections and minority rights in Pakistan: On Saturday, Pakistanis will head to the polls to choose a new government; for the first time in 66 years, a democratically elected administration has completed its term. Given Pakistan’s tumultuous past, this is an impressive achievement, but it [...]
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“What is your nationality?” “Canadian.” “You are Canadian?” “My passport says so.” “But where are you really from?” “You mean, where do I live?” “You don’t live in Canada?” “No.” “Oh, so where do you live?” “Dhahran.” “Tehran? You’re from Iran?” “No, DHA-HA-RAN.” “Where is that?” “In Saudi Arabia.” “Oh, you are Saudi Arabian?” “No, [...]
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a. Is a circumcision, for example, an exterior mark? Is it an archive? Let me begin at the beginning. My left eyebrow has a scar. It is jagged, and usually the droop of the eyebrow hides it from view. I see it sometimes when I look in the mirror. When I see it, I am [...]
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Millions of souls nineteenseventyone homeless on Jessore road under grey sun A million are dead, the million who can Walk toward Calcutta from East Pakistan Taxi September along Jessore Road Oxcart skeletons drag charcoal load past watery fields thru rain flood ruts Dung cakes on treetrunks, plastic-roof huts – Allen Ginsburg, On Jessore Road, December [...]
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[Guest post by Hannah Green. Green is a writer and student learning Urdu (and Hindi) in Lucknow, India. She got her Bachelor's from Northwestern University in June 2012. Her writings have appeared on ThinkProgress, 3 Quarks Daily, and Racialicious. Here is a link to some of her other work, and to a very unfinished website.] Whose 21st century? I didn’t know whether [...]
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Recently, my jacket lost a button. It is a new jacket. But, one of those fancy enough to have a small packet of extra button secreted inside a small inner pocket. I kept wearing the jacket with the missing button. Each time I wore it out, the same thought would occur to me (each time [...]
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This essay originally appeared in Critical Muslim Vol. 4 (Hurst & Co. London: 2012. eds. Ziauddin Sardar, Robin Yassin-Kassab). There are no billboards on the streets. For the last four years, a week or so before the new season of Coke Studio is launched, most of the important billboards in major Pakistani cities are taken [...]
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The plight of Gaza civilians has shaken many a torpor-ed digital selves recently. This was notable because the ordinary condition of Gaza, the daily quotidian plight is in itself a crisis of unbelievable moral and humanistic severity. Yet the now-sanctioned ritual sharing of photos, of inflamed or inflammatory opinion pieces, of outrage on social networks [...]
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The cricketers gather under the stone columns of Olympiastadium. The majority are brown. I knew no one, and sat at a respectable distance and watched the easy camaraderie among the others. I caught whiffs of punchlines and scents of anecdotes. After a while, S.K bounded over and introduced himself. I followed him to the field. [...]
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the first in a new series, gentle readers. i apologize for the protracted silences here. i am now settled in new york city. new job, new city, etc. i didn’t write about berlin much, but here we go. On a nondescript straße – lined with oaks – his restaurant abuts a motorcycle and waterski rental. [...]
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by Sarah Waheed From that moment, like the maniyan fly, an unknown fear began to envelop my mind. An irrational doubt began to grip me, a feeling that this journey was not leading me to the Gulf life that I had been dreaming about and craving for. The Gulf I had learned about from so [...]
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There is no real sense of how Maula Jatt changed Pakistan. Real as in what to quantify and how to do it. At some point, it was everywhere and then it remained. The man playing the role of Maula Jatt was named Sultan Rahi né Mohammad Sultan who was born in 1938 in Uttar Pradesh [...]
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Here is how I introduced Jahangir earlier: I walk down towards the rooms – there is an old man, in white wife-beater, a dhoti, and two fistfuls of shockingly white beard. He is sitting in front of a canvas on which is a bucolic village scene with a tube-well and a date palm. He looks [...]
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The christian colony, the milk colony, the officers colony, the even more ridiculously named murghi-khana (hen coop) neighborhood, all packed together, surrounded by acres upon acres of open spaces teeming with puchal parei, churail, jinn, chalawa.1 *I should note that this will be the last in the series. I needed to begin a writing project [...]
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The modern traveler, wrote Lévi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques, is forever chasing after “vestiges of a lost reality”. Such that writing about a city becomes a mode of constant nostalgia, a constant looking back, either textually or experientially. Sarnath Banerjee’s Harappa Files (which I read recently; thankfully, after I had already planned and written some of [...]
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You can’t see through cement – and neither can I. When I look at Lahore and the ways in which cement has cordoned off sight-lines, I see a city full of people blind-folded. The gated communities were the first variant – ghettos of the elite – where cement walls rose up to seclude and to [...]
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In Cairo, I thought I met Khizr. More likely, I found a new way of walking. Following hints, barely visible pathways, I try only to keep my sense of direction overpowered by my desire to get lost. Cairo, around Tahrir Square, looks a lot like the late colonial city abutting Old Lahore – the architecture [...]
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At some point in Old Lahore’s life, cement won. Floors stacked like cardboard boxes, and filled only with cardboard boxes, sprung up everywhere. The sky which is hard enough to find, now simply hides behind slabs of grey loosely slapped into holes or onto bricks. When you see an older building, terror-stricken and shaky, you [...]
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I sincerely apologize for the absence, gentle Readers. Let it be known that I have been tweeting in my absence here, and I wrote a very short note on Ismat Chughtai: These essays showcase the best of Chughtai’s range and mastery as a writer – they are erudite, self-aware and always probing. This is not, [...]
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[editor's note: This is the first part of M. Neelika Jayawardane's two-part essay on South African Desis. A longer version of this essay appeared in Transition 107. Our sincere thanks to her for allowing CM to host it.] As a child growing up within Southern Africa’s socio-political landscape, I found no easy, seamless fitting in. South Asians [...]
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