Ghar//Home The city I was born in was named after a woman. Home is not four walls and a roof but something more concrete than that. It is listening to my Amma’s hoarse voice singing along to 70s Bollywood music as she washes the dishes. It is a person. It is belonging. The sun is more forgiving there. This is not a metaphor. It is permanent, a state of being. It is what longing feels like, the familiar ache almost like a phantom limb. The unfamiliar too. The best parts of me. The spoken and the unspoken. The subject of all my poems. It is saying goodbye but also saying hello. It is driving past Sea View at 2am and tasting sea salt on my lips and Karachi in my lungs. It is a song that tastes a lot like the first day of July. The sadness seeping through a long distance phone call. It is a December sky or a polluted sunset or maybe both. It is sunlight filtering in through the window and casting shards of rainbows all over my kitchen floor. It is in the Muezzin’s call to prayer. The matching creases my father and I wear on our foreheads while doing the Sunday crossword. I find home in the way my taxi driver’s eyes cloud over every time he talks about his beloved. It is far away. 11,000 miles away to be exact. Intangible. Home is everything And Nothing at all.
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December 2017
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