I was 19 when I was forced into marrying a 26 years old fierce looking man, Zaigham Hassan Ali. I then was too young to probe the depths of personalities and handle kinship affairs, but old enough to understand that marriage would only mean a bar to my freedom. It turned out to be a useless fear, soon after the ceremony was over, I realized that he was the most charming person I would ever meet, who’d love me enough to make living a surreal fairytale for me, where he was the King and I – the queen. Continue reading →

Note: story for http://weandwords.blogspot.com/2008/07/best-in-lounge-story-writing_29.html

Few stories are less fairy-talish, they don’t deserve ‘once upon a time’ as a prelude, or for that matter a ‘happily ever after’. Continue reading →

My take on the child-abuse contest:

saat saal ki pyari lerki
Qismatoun ki maari lerki
phol chehra chand ankhain
titlioun si dulari lerki
hath mai kantay chubho rahi hay Continue reading →

Pro-Logue.

I felt my body languishing beneath the burning water. I saw the cuticles curling and the skin around my nails was white, wrinkled and dead.
I would then savor the ecstatic bliss of tearing it off with my pointed teeth and enjoying them. It was weird, wild and wilder.
It was like eating away your own flesh, perhaps my other futile attempt to scorn my self-detest.
It had a strange gentle sensation – a corner of your lip and the fingernails.

Although no one can commit suicide biting ones own flesh but I think I, very slowly, with others perfectly oblivious of it, am becoming a monster deep within!

————————————————–

The dormant necrophiliac monster is looming inside of me, silently and cautiously. Whence it came from? I don’t know, but it did, and that’s it. Its like a complete chick breaking the fully hatched egg… it presses the thinner end, “click” it crack open, and slowly but inevitably the whole egg-shell is broken into pieces and the chick comes out.

My skin is all peels. The hidden monster laughs a hideous laugh when i drag myself in front of the mirror. I can hear the eruption of wild laughs in my chuckles. I witness the venomous tentacles the monster is throwing in the air… floating back and forth.

It exist in me, like the bitter scum that is an integral part of cucumber, present but not apparent, like a dark gray blob of ink on black bed-sheet – existing, but perfectly hidden from their eyes. The monster in me breaths, eats, sleeps and nourishes itself inside of me.. That so sophisticatedly rebels from the igneous orders I give it.

Epilogue:
*Growls*

.a.
july 07, 2007

 

She stood at the threshold, aloof, with blushed cheeks (more of rouge than of anything else), kohl eyes (dreamless eyes that can hold the seas in them, of tears, of emotions, of regret, of anything but dreams.) and lips melting into mirthless robotic smile of the recipient (with thick hair neatly plaited) of that financing bank, but she was not the recipient and she didn’t have thick plaited hair. yet, She wore pink shapely lipstick over her unshaped lips, (that are forced to smile at her unwelcome guests) and stood there more disintegrated and more dissimilated than she appeared to be.

No one would ever see the wetness of the freshly cried off tears. But the wrinkles of her crumpled cheeks lamented a foreign weird tale of grief and melancholy (blurry enough for the world to be oblivious of, and vivid enough for the ignorant!) Clad in baby pink shirt, embellished with pearls (she did this her self!) the dress too beautiful with a long dupatta (tidily wrapped around the head, less of modesty and more because of the falling hair and lizard-tail plait made up of ashen-brown, as if burnt, hair) and a chooridaar. Too beautiful a dress that could have looked lovelier hanged onto the hanger, than on her dreadful body. It dangled oddly over her, as if complaining on its gruesome fate! Her wearing it; had made it look less adorable -perhaps hardly adorable at all.

She stood there vacuously, under the stern scrutiny, being gauged by two pairs of noxious eyes – the length of her index finger, (short! Disapproved) shape of her toe-nail (curled! Disapproved), worth of her gold-bracelet (cheap! Disapproved), teeth on her lower jaw (pearl-white! But… disapproved). Her every gesture, her every leaning (and not leaning – why?) had been inspected! Few meters away, in front of a decorously set table, which bore the empty saucers, showing signs of freshly baked cake and patties (home made!), her special samosas, and other fruits, were sitting the garrulous flaunting mother, (the size of his car, the shape of his labeled coat, the weight of his pocket on the 1st night of the month) and her patronized child, hair slicked back as if with spite, an oversized coat with loosely hung pants, as if borrowed.

A pair of haunting hawk eyes and a pair of hungry eyes, (as if never fed with good food!). This scene had been rehearsed so many times that now she could even predict the movements. The hideous women, with crumbs of biscuit and cake on the corner of their lips and greed in their eyes, the women who would gloat over their dominant position, who would boast off their child’s status, his immaculate taste and choice, women, who smell of rotten apple when speak and who would never find the secretive path that led to her beautiful heart (a crystal clear heart has to bear a attractive face – some one had said it utterly wrong).

Hideous pompous women that could never probe the depths of her seas and could never reach the skies of her thoughts, who would only see the apparent ugliness of her, the cripples wrapping sheet in which her dreamy enchant lay virgin! And not her way-too-perfection that lies beneath her plain bodily flaws! No one can ever see her mesmerizing beauty within. Blinds – fiends – Morons !! The little green frog, remained the little green frog, the coward kitten waited behind the curtains, reluctant to come in the limelight. The mother and the child stood up, nodding! The handsome child would marry a white-skinned, rosy-cheeked and long-thick-haired princess! No one saw that the queen of illusionary world, a princess of the lost land of Atlantis, had a very delicate heart bearing a tag, “Handle With Care” No one noticed that another (yet another!) sly crease had crept on her cheeks, a permanent mark of being rejected again!