It’s possible to open our eyes, to see, to recognize our solitude—and at the same time to not be entirely alone.
But that is the way of things, for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.
And each time she returned she told the maid to come with her, and the maid said no, for she had a sense of the fragility of things, and she felt she was a small plant in a small patch of soil held be...
[the streets] enforce the ancient hierarchy that comes to us from the countryside: the superiority of the mounted man over the man on foot. But here [...] it is the man with four wheels who is forced...
You have reminded me of how alien I found the concept of acquaintances splitting the bill when I first arrived in your country. I had been raised to favour mutual generosity over mathematical precisio...
Yes, Manila had its slums; one saw them on the drive from the airport: vast districts of men in dirty white undershirts lounging idly in front of auto-repair shops — like a poorer version of the 1950s...
Writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.
There are two social classes in Pakistan, Professor Superb said to his unsuspecting audience, gripping the podium with both hands as he spoke. The first group, large and sweaty, contains those referre...
She thought she mattered little to him, but in this she was mistaken, as the musician was quite smitten, and not nearly so unattached to her as she supposed, but pride, and also fear, and also style,...
It's more of a novella than a novel. It leaves space for your thoughts to echo.
It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books . . .
It seems an obvious thing to say, but you should not imagine that we Pakistanis are all potential terrorists, just as we should not imagine that you Americans are all undercover assassins.
Islamophobia, in all its guises, seeks to minimize the importance of the individual and maximize the importance of the group.
In times of violence, there is always that first acquaintance or intimate of ours, who, when they are touched, makes what had seemed like a bad dream suddenly, evisceratingly real.
In America, the murky, unknown places of the world are blank screens:
If you don’t pray, he said, lowering his voice, why do you wear it?They were sitting at a table for two by a window, overlooking snarled traffic on the street below. Their phones rested screens-down b...
If differences can be hidden, perhaps they aren't differences at all.
I met her eyes, and for the first time I perceived that there was something broken behind them, like a tiny crackin a diamond that becomes visible only when viewed through a magnifying lens; normally...
I know I'm standing still, but I feel like I've stumbled and I'm starting to fall.
I can understand it, she said. Imagine if you lived here. And millions of people from all over the world suddenly arrived. Millions arrived in our country, Saeed replied. When there were wars nearby....