Nostalgic Homo sapien

  The winter air in November had a kind of stillness to it — as if waiting for a decision to be made. In our family, the living room was full of soft murmurs, trays of sweets, and a tension that often came with marriage proposals. My cousin Aleena, the eldest of four sisters, sat quietly in her peach salwar kameez, eyes lowered, fingers playing with the corner of her dupatta. “He’s a good boy,” said Uncle Rahim, her father, for what must have been the tenth time that week. “I’ve seen him grow up right in front of me. Same gali, same mohalla. Feels like one of our own.” His voice held that tone — that sense of pride laced with urgency, the way fathers speak when they think they’ve finally found the 'perfect' match for their daughters. The boy — Arsalan — ran a mobile repair shop just a few shops down from Uncle’s general store. He was soft-spoken, polite, and his family lived decently. But something about him never sat right with me. Every time I saw his Instagram DP, I’d get th...

 They say time reveals the truth. I say memory preserves it. Some stories live in silence for so long, they begin to ache inside the bones of those who carry them. They don’t scream for attention. They whisper. They tug gently, again and again, until one day, you finally sit down and listen. This book is the result of such whispers. It was sometime after Mother’s Day this year that the whisper became a pull. A sense of urgency washed over me, a need to speak, to document, to tell a story that had long been passed down in fragments, through looks exchanged between my parents, pauses in their words, and the heaviness in their silences. It was no longer enough to know the story in my heart. I had to write it. My parents will celebrate twenty-five years of marriage this July. I wanted to gift them something personal. Something lasting. Something beyond material. And then I remembered what my mother once told me during the COVID lockdown years ago, when the world had slowed down enough ...