Posts

When the Muse Doesn’t Know

-
Image
I ask you what animal you would be. “Elephant,” you say, without hesitation. Grounded. Intuitive. Loyal to your herd. Guided by both memory and emotion. Your answer has weight. Mine flutters. The question first comes up in a leadership workshop where the exercise asks, If you were an animal that reflects your leadership style, what would it be and why? I ask the facilitator if birds count as animals. Everyone laughs. I am not joking. Birds lead differently. Through instinct and air. When you turn the question back to me, I say hoopoe. You look it up and tell me, amused, that the bird can release a foul-smelling secretion to ward off predators. I say it reminds me of my own gastrointestinal tendencies. Maybe that is a kind of biological leadership trait too. You laugh, the kind of laugh that travels through a screen but lands human. Later, I send you When Time Changed Shape , the story that begins with Rooh ki Saheli. You ask who that is. A soulmate? “Not quite,” I say. “M...
Post a Comment
Read more

Adam

-
Image
There is a jetty on Lake Geneva that thinks it is a philosopher. Every few minutes a voice drifts over the water and asks questions no one really wants to answer. That night the recording says, “who’s delusions have you drowned?” Although the grammar is strange, the timing is perfect. I stand back from the railing and watch Adam pretend he has not heard it. He sits alone at the edge of the lake, hood up, shoulders slightly curved, phone in hand. He always tries to look like he has himself figured out. He has not. The man-child carries confusion like spare change in his pocket, rattling everywhere he goes. He calls himself a dumbfuck without blinking, a habit he has perfected far too early. Most men take years to earn that level of self-deprecation. He lifts his vape and inhales with the seriousness of someone negotiating a treaty. The blue light on the device blinks against his cheek. He holds the vapor longer than necessary. When he exhales, the cloud rises in a thin, unste...
1 comment
Read more

When Time Changed Shape

-
Image
It began with someone else’s unease. My rooh ki saheli (soul friend)  had messaged earlier that morning. She was leaving for her six-hour-away destination in interior Sindh and wrote about her travel anxiety. The restlessness before departure, the ache of transition itself. I thought about it as I packed. Why am I not anxious anymore? I, who once turned every journey into mild existential drama. That question stayed with me as we left Fujairah.  I sat in the passenger seat while my three travel companions chatted in the back. AirPods in, I drifted into my own world. HAEVN’s The Sea filled it: songs that float between melancholy and surrender. “Back in the water, I feel like myself again,” the lyrics said. A chaddi buddy , childhood friend I’d recently rediscovered, had introduced me to the playlist. It felt like a small dedication, a familiar tide returning after years apart.  The road wound along the coast, sea glinting on one side, barren hills of Sharjah on the othe...
1 comment
Read more

Life of Chuck - My Story, My Way

-
Image
I watched The Life of Chuck on a flight out of JFK. The plane had just lifted, and the movie found me. No distractions, no wandering thoughts. It landed inside me faster than Flow had on another journey . I came of age reading Stephen King. From the haunting darkness of Salem’s Lot , The Shining , Cujo , and It to the unexpected humanity of his short stories adapted into The Shawshank Redemption and Stand by Me , King shaped my sense of how worlds can collapse, and how small, luminous acts still matter. The Life of Chuck felt like the natural continuation of that arc: not horror, but mortality seen through wonder. The story runs backward. Death first. Then middle age. Then childhood.  The world itself collapses into darkness, only to reveal the celebration of one man’s life, Chuck’s. Thirty-nine years written as if they were the span of a cosmos.  When he dies, the lights go out. That is the point: each of us carries a universe inside, and when it ends, so does the world ...
1 comment
Read more

Chicago to NYC: Notes from the Rails

-
Image
“How do you possibly endure these journeys?” Family, friends and others keep circling back to the same question. Ten-hour overnight coaches across Turkey. Greyhounds on the U.S. West Coast and across Texas. And now, twenty-five hours of steel and scenery from Chicago’s Union Station to New York’s Penn Station. “I would take the train every time.” My short answer. Airports have long lost their allure. Domestic U.S. air travel is misery disguised as security: endless ID checks, fingerprint scans, facial recognition, shoes and belts stripped off, dignity reduced to whatever the conveyor belt spits out. You don’t fly, you flee. Amtrak felt different. No one asked for documents or biometrics. I could step off at Cleveland, grab a snack, stretch, and hop back on without fear of being flagged as an outsider. For once, travel felt like belonging. That sense of contrast sharpened when I thought back to Greyhound. I had done my share of long rides there too - up the West Coast and acro...
3 comments
Read more

One Hundred Hours

-
Image
The morning after Karachi drowned, I did something I do not usually do. At 0700, I walked into Zahid’s room. He lay unresponsive, frothing at the mouth. Twenty-five years old, once trained patiently by my mother and later woven into the daily fabric of my household. Reliable yet often clueless, a boy who grew into a young man - always present, always willing. Now limp in my arms, his breath shallow. He had likely just seized. What if I had not gone? The question shadows everything that followed. The floodwaters of a climate-changed Karachi had receded just enough. The rain had stopped. The roads were empty, strangely permissive. Had they still been blocked; this story could have been another one entirely. Security guards from the neighboring house helped me carry him to the car. My sister-in-law hurriedly drove us to AKU Clifton ER , where competence was ready to act. My former residents, now instructors and SMOs, stepped forward with calm assurance. Nurses and staff I had once ...
5 comments
Read more

Fragments from a Pilgrimage: Rumi, Shams, and the Rest of Us

-
Image
I didn’t think much of it back then - Konya. A few days carved out from a longer trip. A loosely held plan. But now, years later, I can still recall how it felt. Getting to Konya wasn’t easy, or at least not emotionally. I took a ten-hour overnight coach from Gaziantep. It wasn’t just a geographic shift. It was me, testing myself. Years ago, on my first trip to Istanbul in the late 2000s, I was mugged; trapped, manhandled, left shaken . That experience embedded a quiet anxiety whenever I thought about returning to Turkey. But this trip was different. I needed to reclaim something. I wanted to prove to myself that I could be in this country, move through it alone, and feel safe. And I did. Nothing happened. Not in Konya, not elsewhere. That, in itself, was a kind of healing. Now mind you, Konya wasn’t dramatic. There was no thunderclap, no burning bush. Just presence. And silence. Not empty silence, but the kind that listens back. I stayed two nights. Walked between Rumi’s tomb an...
1 comment
Read more