When you can be this, why are you ever anything else? – Broken Verses
My ex calls the ochre winter ‘autumn’ as we queue to hear dock boys play jazz fugues in velvet dark.— Broken Verses
There is no mystery– that’s the beauty of it. We are entirely explicable to each other, and yet we stay. What a miracle that is.
We never actually have serious conversations about anything for more than 20 seconds. So there’s a beautiful superficiality to our relationship which sometimes gets covered up by all the genuine affection flowing back and forth.
They adore you beacause they think you offer up your friendship and ask for nothing in return. But that’s not true-‘ He took a deep breath. ‘You do ask for something. You ask that we never expect you to need us.
If we had more reliable systems of law and governance perhaps our friendship would be shallower.
If the greatest loss of his life is the loss of a dream he’s always known to be a dream, then he’s among the fortunate ones.
You have this ability to find beauty in weird places.
I didn’t tell him that I grew up in an ugly city that taught me how to look between dust and rubbish and potholes to find a splinter of glass that looked like unmelting ice, beautiful in its defiance of the sun.
There was little Hiroko Tanaka hadn’t learnt about the shameful resilience of the human heart.
So she became a woman who held her head high, not in arrogance, or contempt, but because she knew that it was a form of cowardice to make a choice and then pretend you didn’t really make it
Come on! Think of Miandad hitting that six off Sharma. If he could do that, you can do this.
Where are they, the American fiction writers whose works are interested in the question “What do these people have to do with us?” and “What are we doing out there in the world?
Bijli fails in the dead of night / Won’t help to call “I need a light” / You’re in Karachi now / Oh, oh you’re in Karachi now. / Night is falling and you just cant see / Is this illusion or KESC / You’re in Karachi now
Can angels lie spine to spine?If not, how they must envy us humans
This is the worst of our ways of remembering–this tendency to prod the crust of anecdote in the hope of releasing a gush of piping-hot symbolism.
There’s a ghost of a dream that you don’t even try to shake free off because you’re too in love with the way she haunts you.
Yes, I know everything can disappear in a flash of light. That doesn’t make anything less valuable.
We should have stories in common, I found myself thinking. We should have stories, and jokes no one understands, and memories that we know will stay alive because neither of us will let the other forget.
Coming back to Karachi is like stepping into the sea again after months on land. How easily you float, how peaceful is the sense of being borne along, and how familiar the sound of the water lapping against your limbs.
Difficult but worth it– that’s how my mother had once describe life with Omi.
Character is just an invention, but it’s an invention that serves as both reason and justification for our behaviour. – Broken Verses
The world won’t get more or less terrible if we’re indoors somewhere with a mug of hot chocolate.
For a second I was almost jealous of the clouds. Why was he looking to them for an escape when I was right here beside him?