Between Sahiwal and Pakpattan, near the buried memory of Harappa and the shrine of Baba Farid, I return to my father’s land not to cultivate, but to sell. What begins as inheritance becomes heat, paperwork, family dispute, and grief — a journey through Punjab’s soil, where history, betrayal, and love are all quietly absorbed by the earth.

In the old city of Rhodes, the library of Hafız Ahmet Ağa stands like a whispered refusal to be forgotten. It carries the atmosphere of an older Muslim world — one built not for spectacle, but for learning, devotion, and the quiet, radical work of continuity.

In Oslo, I found myself speaking about Pakistan as if trying to warm what the institution had long ago allowed to go cold — a small archive, a sleeping collection, a world half-forgotten yet still alive in cloth, memory, and the body.

This essay is a first-person account of Zakaria, a Chitral-born man facing deportation to Afghanistan. Through small domestic intimacies—shared chai, borrowed clothes, fevered nights—it explores how borders erase what everyday tenderness builds, asking what it means when the state rejects someone a heart has already quietly chosen as family.

I wear my pakol tighter against the late-March Arctic wind, and against the gaze. In Edinburgh, a hat becomes an accusation—Mujahedeen, foreign, suspect. Yet it’s only wool, land, lineage. If it disturbs the eye, let it.

No patriarch made this life. I was raised by Shahida Perveen—breadwinner, disciplinarian, constellation of small refusals. In a Chitrali studio full of wool and river-noise, I trace her unseen architecture of care and rage, asking what it means to be a son of such witness.

Among dust, chai steam and crowded streets, they glimpse a fierce tenderness, realising this is not a place defined by its wounds, but by the everyday courage with which it keeps moving forward.

Amid backlash to a Karachi concert by Qashqarian, this essay defends mixed public joy, critiques gender segregation as control, and invokes Begum Rokeya’s Ladyland to argue for education, tolerance, and courage. It calls communities to build stages, not walls—letting Khowar, women, and men breathe together without fear, as ordinary citizenship.

Set in Chitral, this essay follows a son and his visiting mother: thinning hair, jasmine oil, Quranic recitation, and kitchen rituals turned tender acts of care. Between longing and faith, they inhabit an unspoken country—binding memory and desire, absence and presence—quietly practicing love through order, patience, and daily gestures.

White Gold is a pastoral constellation—handwoven cloaks from Chitral to Scotland, botanically dyed and lit with goldwork. Not costume but cosmography: garments as portable altars, carrying pasture’s scent and the shimmer of night. Step onto this bridge of wool and light.

Unknown eyes barcode me at the border: permissible? passable? I used to rearrange my face, staging light to backpay the years of being looked through. Loneliness learned my ribs like weather. Now the gaze reverses. No permissions. Let the scanners fail—I enter with a loud, untranslatable heart.

In the hinge between English and Urdu, hawa lays a hand on the neck. I came north in 2009 to study embroidery; Attabad rewrote the pattern. Fifteen years on, I read rivers like textiles—beauty as system, craft as ecology. Change the pattern before the river does.

From Chitral’s Hindu Kush valley, this essay asks who ‘آزادی’ is for. As Pakistan marks 78 years of independence, a friendship with Zakaria—born here, raised by Afghan refugee parents, denied nationality—reveals how suspicion and paperwork can erase a life. Between bread ovens, river light, and a portable family laid on a dastarkhwan, the piece traces the everyday labours of belonging and the quiet courage of being stateless. It is a call to widen the circle: to turn flags into rights, neighbours into kin, and borders into bridges.

Across the shifting sands and ancient paths of Xinjiang, nestled among soaring mountains and vast deserts, lie cities that once resonated as vibrant crossroads of the Silk Road—Kashgar, Hotan, and Yarkand.

A searing reflection on the assault against Tehran, Tehran Burning mourns the attack on Iran while evoking the soul of a city steeped in poetry, resistance, and ancestral memory

Cihangir is a place of contradictions—a quiet symphony of scent, sound, and memory. Here, the call to prayer blends with jazz, and history lingers in the salt air. A sanctuary of solitude and discovery, it teaches love, loss, and return, weaving the sacred and the ordinary into something eternal.

Home lives in taste, scent, and touch—the sweetness of mango murabba, the crunch of mishri, the dust of Sahiwal’s fields. In diaspora, vataan lingers, threading itself through prayers, memories, and meals. We carry it always, a golden shimmer of belonging, never fully here, never fully there.

A dead dog lies curled in the dust of Chitral, unnoticed, unmourned. People pass by, heads bowed in prayer, hands open in supplication—yet they do not stop. It asks: what does it mean to witness suffering and look away?

This piece is my reflection on Aboo, his solitude, resilience, and unspoken grief and the intergenerational echoes of displacement, longing, and resistance. Through poetic introspection, I explore our shared struggles, my search for azadi, and the journey to reclaim freedom from within, shedding inherited burdens while honouring his memory with love and growth.

In the shadow of a mulberry tree, a circle of men gather not just to share tea and tasks, but to weave bonds of care and vulnerability. In this Chitrali mehfil, I rediscovered a tenderness in men, a quiet poetry in their companionship that defies modern notions of masculinity and healing.