My story “THE GLIMMER” has been long listed in the Zeenat Haroon Rashid 2023 Writing competition for Women.
Zeenat Haroon Rashid (21 Jan 1928 – 8 April 2017) was the daughter of Sir Abdullah Haroon. She was a young stalwart of the Muslim League and founding member of the Women’s National Guard at the time of Independence, and throughout her life promoted a vision of Pakistani women as equal partners in the struggle for building a modern Pakistan. The Zeenat Haroon Rashid Writing Prize for Women has been set up to promote and provide support for women who wish to pursue writing as a career.
Thank you to this year’s judges, Amina Ahmad, Shandana Minhas, Mohammad Hanif, Sarwat Yasmeen Azeem and Shan Vahidy. Grateful and chuffed 🙏🏼🌸
That was what I saw at 1 in the morning. My screen glimmered with the same vitality as it had when it had announced the birth of a nephew an hour ago, my cousin’s son. I stared at the message uncomprehending, detached, suspended in the ether of all existence for a moment. But just for a moment. And then the physical reality caught up with me, bound as it is in gravity and empty space that was once shared, and time that becomes agonizing in the thrum of organs that keen when tragic things happen. I felt an overwhelming grief. But it was a quiet grief, devoid of the frenzied heart-bursting pain that I had experienced only once before when my mother had passed away. Loss after that had become inevitable, unremarkable and oddly peaceful. Like I was now awake at a deeper infinite level and privy to a soul moving on to other things, embarking on new adventures in other realms, a sojourn for which i was still biding my terrestrial time.
G— was my partner’s best friend. By association and by the fact that he was larger than life wherever he went, he had become my good friend too. Every weekend we, A— and I, would bump into him somewhere as he floated around the city socializing and networking, and encouraging and supporting entrepreneurs, students and the odd soul who had fallen on difficult times. “Hello darling!” he would say to me, his ready smile lighting up his face.
G— was also a drinker and a smoker. His days had taken on a curious upside down quality where he would retire for the night at 6pm, stupefied and benumbed in the gaunt fingered clutch of alcohol and nicotine. He would be dead to the world while it heaved and glimmered in its nighttime cadence. He would then wake up at 3am, before any haplessly insomniac bird had, or any other creature that had suffered the rigors of a disrupted circadian rhythm. The sunrise and all its ephemeral promises of a better day, a gentler horizon, and the companionship of loved ones were therefore never seen or heard by him. He was already in the throes of a day a quarter spent by the time the sun and its new-dayness swept across the rest of the just-rising world. In his solitary state in fact, G— was quiet, wistful and melancholy. Unbeknownst to so many who considered him the epitome of a life fully lived, he was an unhappy man with a heart that beat to a forlorn drum. How did I know this guarded, covert state of his being? I wouldn’t have but for my partner who is intuitive and insightful in his own right. Even between them, there were things that were spoken and things that were not, and the un-uttered things had the loudest echoes, vibrating in the flesh of the heart and then settling somewhere in the left ventricle. In G—, these unsaid things beat pensive, irregular rhythms that flowed out into the world through some of the saddest eyes I have ever seen even while his face wore its sunny smile.
Over the next few days, G— circled the periphery of my thoughts constantly. I was home with my family: my father, my sisters, my niece and a bevy of aunts and cousins. And still, I found myself washed over by regular floods of sadness. G— had been a friend, a good friend, but the heartache I was experiencing seemed to go deeper. There was no time to reflect on the brimming emotion that I felt while I was surrounded by the energy and chatter of extended family.
Then I got back home to SL. Back into the routine of my life there. And I was able to finally sit with my thoughts. The fact that he had passed away just one day after I had spoken to him when A— had gone to pick him up from the hospital; the fact that he had sounded exactly like his usual self: cheerful and bright; the fact that he had only months ago begun to take an interest in the wellbeing of his body, his mind and his heart; the fact that at 48, he had died so young; and finally, the fact that A— had lost his best friend, and I, one of the purest souls that I have known, all huddled together in my head. I picked up each one gently and put it away where one safekeeps memories of loved ones. He would live on in our thoughts, mine and A—’s. Despite the grief not having fully settled, I had clinically unravelled the state of my sadness and addressed it as I thought fit. And that should have been the end of that.
And then it popped up. Like a ghost in my phone. A little message bar at the top of my screen: “Say hi to G—, it’s been a while”. I stared at the message and at G—’s smiling face. I have to admit, I felt petrified for a moment, but only for a moment, and then I let my gut speak. My wise one sits there. It was a message from beyond if you will; a little missive to say, I may be gone but I hope you haven’t forgotten me. And here’s a cheeky little hello from me. Over the next few days, again and again the message (a queer quirk of social media algorithms and I believe, a sentient universe) would skip out to the top of my screen, reminding me of unsaid final farewells. I knew then that I had to visit G—’s resting place to pay my respects, to say one last goodbye.
I also realized then that while I had neatly compartmentalized my sadness, I hadn’t sat with it until it had settled into its forever place. In my faith and culture, on birthdays and death anniversaries, one visits the graveyard to say a prayer and to scatter fragrant rose petals on the final resting place of loved ones that are gone. Even though in line with Buddhist tenets, G— should have been cremated, he wasn’t. There was a sticky little detail whereby the needful could not be done without the nuclear family being present; and as fate would have it, and in the ever mysterious meanderings of the universe, his next of kin, his daughters lived overseas. So now there was also a grave, a place where I could go and say a little prayer. There was no reason not to, and a luminescent cosmos of reasons why I should. I had to convince my partner. Paying graveyard visits was not a cultural norm for him. But we decided on a day for the visit. I got some flowers, white and yellow – the pristine for the purity of new beginnings and the sunny for the joy of new adventures.
A— wasn’t sure of the exact location of the grave so while we looked for it, I also invoked my spiritual sixth sense to somehow point us in the right direction. We found the burial spot ultimately. I gazed at the slightly despressed patch of fresh earth in front of me and then looked inside at the feelings that were washing over me now: Joy for the man G— had been, teariness for the loss of him and an odd elation for the cosmic trip that he had started out on. I laid the flowers and said a little prayer, Restful dreams, dear G—, I whispered at the end. There was a resplendent Indian laburnum tree just a few feet away swaying gently in the breeze, scattering dappled sunshine on G—‘s grave. Even as both of us stood there, holding his memories close to our hearts, I could almost see him leaning against the tree, eyes twinkling, his trademark smile on his face saying, “Thanks for the flowers darling. Take care of each other you two, and see you somewhere, sometime”.
Despite its inherent catastrophic nature, the end had come quickly, almost mechanically. Its very swiftness had robbed it of the tragedy and chaos that usually accompany annihilation events. Some say it had started with the largely unnotable skirmish on the Russo-Ukrainian border. President Putin had fallen gravely ill at about the same time. His infirmity somehow catalysed the inscrutable little exchange of fire into an all out war as Russian troops marched belligerently into Kyiv. At about the same time, there was a devastating tsunami that whipped up in the Indian Ocean, a formidable ghost of its 2004 predecessor. The deluge ravaged twenty countries across Asia and East Africa in its deadly wake. In the space of a week, half the world had gone into emergency mode. The other half watched in a stupor of war fatigue even as new horrors unravelled. Two days after the tsunami, the Ukrainian troops fell to the wayside. No blood was shed, no words were spoken, no flags were raised or lowered. The invaders and the invaded sat together watching the world fall to pieces around them.
That is when she had come; the Mind-bender as she came to be called: Arfaana, a 35 year old woman who had until recently also been a mother of two. She had walked into Lafayette Square in Washington DC and screamed. She had screamed until she couldn’t scream anymore. And then she had wailed, her rhythmical moans echoing like the tolling of a doomsday bell. People had stopped in their tracks frozen. At first. And then something extraordinary had happened. There are many versions of the event but they all agree that somehow in that moment of tremendous anguish and pain, humanity had connected. At some combined cosmic and primitive level, the energy across the square had come together and found a harmony of purpose.
There was an almost communal climax of wretchedness and despair as one and all, the people had screamed and bellowed and wailed until there was not one unbruised throat left in the square. Arfaana had walked into the Capitol building then, her eyes wet and blazing at the same time; propelled onwards by a force of over five thousand strong. There she had spoken to silent, awestruck law makers and executors of the Republic. They had listened when she had called for the laying down of all arms; of creating a colourblind society; of sharing the world’s resources with all; of de-weaponizing the world. They had heard her speak of a new community, built on the vestiges of humanity that still remained in their current world. They say, Arfaana, the first Wise One, had summarily robbed them of their will that day. She had bent their minds to her way. Everything had changed after that. In a bizarre balancing act following The Fall that was marked with such colossal swells of torment and pain, the societal shift had happened quickly, almost mechanically.
T + 40 years
December 24th
Arfaana sat in the Discourse Room in Serenity Dome 1, in Washington. These safe havens had mushroomed after The Fall and now mainly housed within their impregnable, tranquil cores, the women of the planet. She had just had news that the two thousandth dome had been erected, this one in Lahore Pakistan. She had called her contemporary in South Asia to congratulate her on the milestone. The fissure in the Subcontinental patriarchal structures had been one of the hardest to make. Change had come about slowly and painfully. Over time, hotels and guest houses had been converted to makeshift shelters for women across the subcontinental land mass. Ultimately, heritage buildings had been commandeered and lovingly converted into the very first Serenity Domes. There the female collective had regrouped and reformed their communities, one troublesome, caustic law at a time. It had taken the better part of the last three decades to purge the South Asian society of its ingrained psyche of male privilege. From the roti seller* at the tandoor* to the testosterone driven CEO in his boardroom, they had all had to relearn the new ethos. There had been countless incarcerations as age old gender roles battled in the new environment. Many of the men had been “shifted” to shanty towns just outside city limits. These meandering, heaving masses of corrugated iron roofs, scrap material and sheets of plastic had burgeoned and blustered for years with the savage might of the patriarchy.
In the twenty fifth year of The Fall, the slum population had evened out and by the thirty fifth year, it was finally in decline. Mindsets had been changed; the new norms had been learnt one bitter lesson at a time. There were still the odd ragtag bands of ex-society men who had refused to assimilate and who still blew off steam by plastering city squares with old world propaganda. The Wise Ones took a largely tolerant view of these muscle flexing shenanigans, letting the idiots tell their now obsolete “tales full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”(1). The adage adapted from old world literature had become their mainstream maternal approach. Indeed, the Wise Ones made every effort towards non-violence. They knew that their primary focus needed to be the new generation of men and women across the globe. They would be brought up with new codes of morality, community and awareness. They would be the ultimately balanced beings – both genders schooled in and at ease with their masculine and their feminine sides.
By the thirtieth year, another epic milestone was achieved – planet-wide nuclear disarmament. Global military spending had been reduced to less than 0.3% of world GDP. The planet was recovering in big and small ways as fossil fuels were steadily replaced with alternative forms of energy. In the fourth decade of the event, as resources were redistributed, lifestyles across the globe had become more or less consistent – typified by the western middle class before The Fall.
It had been a momentous journey of the mind, the heart and the will, thought Arfaana as she emerged from her musing. The women had finally triumphed! This last thought crossed her mind with almost academic stridency, repeated as it had been at so many pivotal moments in the last forty years. She paused, just for a moment. The slightest of pauses for a twinkling of a moment. And yet, in that tiny instance something had taken fledgling root. An awareness of imbalance; a new kind of imbalance. Earth was transforming into the proverbial Venus. Hidden in that romantic confluence were dark shadows, whispering their own doomsday songs. Songs of a new, belligerent, unsound matriarchy.
Arfaana blinked, willing away the disturbing thoughts that were now crowding at the very edges of her mind. She knew these unsummoned visitors would bide their time, until they had gathered in their vastness aided by that formidable Truth teller, her Intuition. Arfaana rallied. They, the women had changed the world, one rotting, crumbling societal edifice at a time. They were saving the very humanity of human beings. They were building back compassion, harmony, cooperation and culture into their societies. They were building back better(2) … another hackneyed phrase from old world politics came stomping in, marching alongside her bolstering, purposeful train of thought. The hypocrisy, bigotry and irony that accompanied the catchphrase also came sashaying in, looking into her soul with their smug little faces. Venus Rising indeed! they seemed to say.
Arfaana picked up her com-set to call her Planning Manager. She wanted to make a change in the Earth and Science curriculum – the historical, mythical, science fictional allusions to Venus as anything but the second planet from the AM Star were to be omitted. There was still too much counter-matriarchal ammunition out there for the nay-sayers and the satire writers; their reformed world structure was still too new for such erratic emotionalism. The “Sun”, now called the AM Star had ceased to be called by its old name because of its masculine phonetics and the psycho-circularity of the word: Sun = Son = Sun. Venus too would be relegated to its astrophysical purity without the dubious romanticism given to it by old world patriarchy. One of the Wise Ones had said something about Earth too … even “earth” had begun to sound mannish.
They would have to revisit academic curricula around the world, review the very semantics of language itself, to purge it of its inherent masculinity.
Arfaana took a sip of her steaming mug of tea. She sat up and gazed into the distance, her determination strong and unwavering. Even if their new collective ethos was somewhat imperfect; even if their matriarchal restructuring sometimes seemed like barely cloaked knee jerk reactions to their gender-biased past, it was now the womens’ turn.
* First published in Eksentrika literary magazine in October 2023
* Roti-seller: Seller of Indian/ Pakistani flat bread.
* Tandoor: Also known as tannour it is predominantly a cylindrical clay or metal oven used in cooking and baking. The tandoor is something of a transitional form between a makeshift earth oven and the horizontal-plane masonry oven.
(1): Quote from Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
(2): The Build Back Better Plan was a legislative framework proposed by the 46th U.S. President Joe Biden ahead of his inauguration
The AM star was just peeping out over the horizon. Soon it would envelope all and sundry in its orange-blue glow. I woke up as the motorised blinds whooshed back into their dark recesses near the ceiling and a shimmering oval of light perched on the left side of my forehead like a glittery fascinator*. I kept my eyes closed, enjoying the blissful moments of just waking up, my senses treading the softness between complete wakefulness and dawn time dreams. I breathed in deeply, feeling the gentle warmth on the skin of my forehead. It caressed my scalp and then flowed down towards my extremities. I should have risen then; but I lingered in the afterglow, wiggling my toes to heighten the delicate sensations now leaving my body in undulating waves. Five minutes later when the AM rush had fully subsided, I opened my eyes. I smiled – widely. It was going to be a glorious day.
I live in a Bachelor Colony; we are the near-perfect males and also the genomic seed-sowers of Avartha – Earth as some of the old guard sometimes still refer to our planet. Earth, the old masculine term that has like a lot of other nomenclature on Avartha, been relegated to history books, heated City Hall sessions and story-telling. We of the Bach-Col* help to keep the population flourishing together with the Double X-elences* of the Procreation Dome. The Bach-Col is a whimsical enclosure full of beautiful things, both natural and unnatural. We are constantly surrounded by serenity and comfort. And D~alliance – the testosterone-quelling drug that all residents of the Bach-Col receive when they came of age. It was what made Avartha great, the Wise Ones said. The Wise Ones knew exactly when each boy came of age, varied as the onslaught of puberty was across geographies and junior Bach-Cols. Nature despite being tamed for the most part, still made unpredictable leaps in transforming a boy to a man. Still, the mean coming of age in West Avartha was 12 years and 7 months. I had come of age on my 13th birthday.
I am meeting Ramiz. He lives in the Service colony. Early on, as an infant, in fact, barely a few weeks old he had tested positive for early onset dementia. The OmniEssence – that triumph of biotechnology, had passed her resounding verdict as she did with every male born on Avartha. And so Ramiz had been castrated as all non Bachelor Colony infant boys were. Ever since, he had been nurtured as Maintenance staff, a worker ant for the upkeep of the Procreation dome and the Bachelor Colonies. Little girls that were imperfect in big or small ways, however, became doctors, professors, writers, engineers, spiritualists and stateswomen. They dominated the world of learning, finance, politics and religion. The women in fact, all of them, now superintended the planet in one way or another. They were the Wise Ones.
I am meeting Ramiz today. We had met six months ago on my birthday when he was assigned to lead my party preparations. Bach-Col boys had grand birthday celebrations and even grander seeding day festivities. I had had eighteen of the former and two of the latter. Someone had dared me to dance with the ruggedly handsome Service boy, and I had. We had kissed that night. It had been beautiful then and in retrospect, also academically interesting. Service boys never kissed like that; they were not supposed to want to kiss. It was a revelation for both of us and had over time, morphed into what I would call Love. Ramiz called it “camaraderie”. I had laughed and he had blushed. We both knew he was trying to make it all seem kosher, mundane even, in the pervasive, criss crossing lines of the moral and physical rules that defined our world. We had met up every week since then; our love and camaraderie growing like star jasmine, brisk, strong and all-encompassing.
I am meeting Ramiz at the Ahyoka* lake just outside the city today. That has been our rendezvous point for the past four months after nearly being caught together in my quarters. Bach-Cols and Servicers* are not supposed to fraternise and they are certainly not supposed to be lovers. I had been surprised at how easy it had been to circumvent Avarthan laws outside city limits, and was often ruminative about why there were not more like us: Cross sectional couples; couples outside the Procreation Dome and the exacting laws that governed it. I always ceased my pondering beyond this point – the godesses did not need to eavesdrop on another mortal thought and warp it into yet another ruse to trip up Avarthakind*. So after short, mostly inadvertent forays into puzzlement and awe on the subject, I would retract, unhandling my thoughts and stashing them away into the secret little spaces of my mind.
I was supposed to meet Ramiz today. In the little sheltered recess two hundred paces westwards from the lake. He had not shown up. I had waited for over an hour and had then headed to the Service Col. I had never been there before but I knew his quarter number. Room 42 was empty; like no one had lived there in a long time. I knocked on two of the adjoining quarters. Both Servicers seemed not to know Ramiz. How was it possible? How had he just vanished? How could he just cease to exist?
There was something else; something niggling at the edges of my mind. Everytime I tried to think of what could have happened to Ramiz, I lost my train of thought, the images scattering like hundreds of dandelion papas on a wayward breeze. I was puzzled and a little alarmed. But mostly puzzled. I was mildly anxious too because I didn’t feel the emotional whiplash of newly inflicted wounds or of broken dreams. In fact, I had felt more sadness when I had lost my favourite pair of boots to the hitch-hikingfungus*.
Back in my apartment, I put on the record player and lay down. The mind numbing melody of the “Infinite Improbability Drive”* thrummed through the room and my mind. I closed my eyes and fled into the familiar heart and mind space that music always took me to. I slowed down my breathing as I had been taught to do since I was four years old. I decelerated the rate of my inhalations to five a minute. My anxiety and my confusion subsided. Slowly, gradually I sank deeper into the restoring, enveloping clouds of my subconscious until I heard the comforting voice of the Wise speak:
“You are home. You are safe. You have learned. Thou shalt not covet anyone outside the Procreation Dome. Thou shalt remain pure of seed and spirit for Mother Avartha, the giver of life and the forger of destines. You are home. You are safe ….”
* Fascinator: A type of formal headwear, its function being purely ornamental.
* Bach-Col: Bachelor Colony
* Double X-elences: The women of Avartha who from time to time, give birth in line with keeping the Avarthan population in healthy, burgeoning mode. Female DNA is made up of two X chromosomes and hence the term.
* Ahyoka: A female Cherokee name meaning “She brought happiness” * Servicers: Males who had at birth, been diagnosed with some congenital flaw and were relegated to the positions of workmen and service staff across Avartha.
* Avarthakind: the people of Avartha.
* Hitch-hiking Fungus: Fungus that grows close to the ground transferring onto treading leather, canvas and rubber. Picked up by footwear, it moves from one place to another very much like a hitch-hiker and hence the term.
* Infinite Improbability Drive: part of the soundtrack from the 2005 movie “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, based on Douglas Adams’ book of the same title.
Mahvash Mohtadullah 