It is the effect of scarcity; one’s rules of propriety make one thirst for the improper.
In many places, the past fifteen years have been a time of economic turmoil and widening disparities. Anger and resentment are high. And yet economic policies that might address these concerns seem ne...
If the choice is between being held up at gunpoint or holding the gun, only a madman would choose to hand over his wallet rather than fill it with someone else’s cash.
If one had asked Manucci during his days as a street urchin, as he sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah, Manucci would probably have said that ACs were hot. The first time...
From a distance she might be mistaken for a very young woman, while the maid seemed to have aged doubly, perhaps for them both, as if her occupation had been to age, to exchange the magic of months fo...
A woman walks by the gate, leading a little boy with a balloon of hunger in his belly and hair bleached by malnutrition.
Courage is demanded not to attack when afraid,
While they wished to look out for each other, and to keep tabs on each other, staying in touch took a toll on them, serving as an unsettling reminder of a life not lived, and also they grew less worri...
There is something magical about London. It can coax a water lily to tie its roots to land.
The world will not fail if Pakistan fails, but the world will be healthier if Pakistan is healthy.
The city waits for thunder's echo, for a wall of heat that burns Lahore with the energy of a thousand summers, a million partitions, a billion atomic souls split in half.
Power comes from becoming change.
Perhaps he had been selfish, his notion of helping the youth and the country through teaching and research merely an expression of vanity, and the far more decent path would have been to pursue wealth...
One's relationship to windows now changed in the city. A window was the border through which death was possibly most likely to come. Windows could not stop even the most flagging round of ammunition:...
I was honored and pleased that she was confiding in me in this fashion. I met her eyes, and for the first time I perceived that there was something broken behind them, like a tiny crack in a diamond t...
I love it when you talk about where you come from, she said, slipping her arm through mine, you become so alive.
I did not grow up in poverty. But I did grow up with a poor boy's sense of longing, in my case not for what my family had never had, but for what we had had and lost.
And so their memories took on potential, which is of course how our greatest nostalgias are born.
A single strand appeared to unite these conflicts, and that was the advancement of a small coterie's concept of American interests in the guise of the fight against terrorism... I recognized that if t...
The way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transie...