A Bag of Thoughts

 Four teenagers sat in a far green patch, almost as dewy as the grass beneath, a sheet of newspaper under each. They liked it here, in the sun and wind and the slight miasma from the slum behind the fence; they were optimistic realists. The taller girl had brought along a book, but like the others, had abandoned the distraction, no they were here at last. Stories, playlists, adrenaline, these could wait. They were talking, the conversation went and came in waves. The silence was not a picturesque ocean wave crashing on the shore, but the humidity and unsettlement was equally palpable. They were volatile. New to each other, but somehow familiar in their hesitation and desperation to feel something that was not solitude.  They were not very similar.  None of them were from the same country, only one of them was from this country but still, she felt none of them felt they belonged (yet). It took time to adjust from simple convenient name tags on a screen to people with dimen...

meet Kay. you’ve probably heard of her and definitely made fun of her, if not question her existence. today I’m here to talk about the injustice against Kay, the struggles that she’s been through but which have seldom been talked about. she is the very embodiment of underestimation.   look at words like knowledge and knife . aside from the fact that they can be used to kill , they have Kay in common. but her presence isn’t even acknowledged and many have gone as far as to say that without her these words would be the same. at this point, it’s clear that Kay is oppressed to the point of silence (literally).   to get a better understanding of Kay’s struggle, let’s consider her greatest rival, Cee. we’ve all heard of her, have we not? if the alphabet family had a school dedicated to themselves, she would be your it girl. the power she holds is immense. not only does she come before Kay in the alphabets, it’s crystal that Cee is the better-liked and more used of the two. from coo...

everytime it rains i feel elated and whenever i look at the sky, i am fascinated not because of the beauty, but because of the petrichor, the calm thudding, the light piercing glare of the sun, the surprising brightness of clouds, i remember how the rain would melt the bare fields, the red from the soil bleeding out and into our bodies when we laughingly fell into the puddle of water, eyes closed in laughter and the air filled with loud nursery rhymes. we created a spectacle and everyone snickered when we passed by, the girl in unicorn-pyjamas and long black hair tied neatly into a plait, the rest of us clad in sports wear we had thrown on hurriedly, excited by the thunder's sudden invitation. no one knows as well as we do how troublesome it can be to wear flip-flops in the rain for their flip-flopping movements did heavily dirty the hems of our long colorful kurtis, monsoon and four months would pass by before we sat on the rocks looking up at the sky and i imagined the hill we we...

“Hola Linda”. This phrase translates to “Hello Beautiful”. These were the two words printed on a hand sanitizer I had. Another commonplace item which has become a symbol of a weapon to ward off the newly famous COVID-19. This sanitizer though, for a long time was laughed at by my wing-mates for its outlandish name and I would only ever use it for its disarming smell. Little did I know that this object signified a full-fledged war that humanity would wage against this obscure virus with cryptic origins and a far more elusive cure. I didn’t start taking this virus seriously until it was mentioned on the night of our farewell. The speaker was Shirali sir and in all classes other than maybe the 11 th and 12 th , he was seen as the embodiment of authority. He said that there are two kinds of viruses that he heartily hopes we are never affected by: the recent coronavirus and the other subtle virus of hatred, of images, of ideas and simply, of prejudice. The next thing ...