How Red Sneakers Changed My Life

I wrote this poem on behalf of my mamu (my mom's brother for you non-Urdu folks:)) in December 2010, for a friend of his who'd been diagnosed with brain cancer a while back. He'd been my mamu's roommate during his graduate years in Purdue University and from the stories I got to hear about him, he must have been a force to be reckoned with. Bursting with life, exceptionally bright; he'd bagged the best of both worlds. He was in love with football and all things sporty, and he was also a brilliant student. He got married, he started a family, but it seems to me that life's got a taste for melodrama. The next thing you know, the doctors found he had a brain tumour. And it only got worse from there. Cancer is such an ugly disease. I don't understand it, it's always the last thing you expect, you always think you're immune to it but just when you're least expecting it, it rears it's head and strikes. His cancer had spread too far and wide to ...

Humans are one clever species. Having spent about two million years on planet earth, I guess we've managed to pick up a thing or two on living. Like how to justify everything life throws our way. If things are going the way we want them to, then we tell ourselves we deserve it, no doubt about it. And if something bad happens, we find a thousand and one reasons to assure ourselves that it was ultimately for the best, or to use Dumbledore's words, that it must have been for 'the greater good'. But the question is, was it really? Are we ever really in a position to judge what could have been better or worse for us when we don't even know what never happened?  The other day, my cousin was talking to me about parallel universes, about how each of us has got a double living in some alternate dimension who does the exact opposite of what we do in the real world. So if I go left when I'm walking down a street, my double goes right in his world. Okay, so as cool as th...

I've spent the past ten summers of my life in Ha'il, Saudi Arabia, where my dad worked as a college professor. My mom, my sisters and I moved to Pakistan, because education is a big problem there for people like us who never got the hang of Arabic. Anyway, my dad moved back home last year, which means no more vacationing in Saudi Arabia. I miss it, and I don't miss it. I miss the silence of the desert, how the ringing of the phone and doorbell was a special occasion, the hot, dry wind whipping my face, everyone dressed in black and white wherever you went. That's what summer will always mean to me.  The summer air coils itself around our house Winds along the white trunk of the eucalyptus tree In our front yard Whispers through its ghostly leaves Makes them dance -just out of reach. The summer wind licks my face A candle flame, caressing me in the darkness. It smells of dried-up twigs and withered leaves Desert plants that have learn...