The Slightly Forgotten Traders of Perfidy Town

 The Slightly Forgotten Traders Of Perfidy Town

There is an unhurried, silent grace to miniscule pebbly towns that rest along the banks of great rivers, especially when the sun begins to dip behind ancient neem trees and the dust in the air turns to liquid gold. Shahdadkot stretched its lazy limbs along unpaved tracks leading toward the mighty Sindhu. It was a town where time moved at the leisurely pace of an old bullock cart, and crows perched on overhead telegraph wires to discuss daily gossip with the solemnity of village elders.

As our vintage truck bounced over the rutted track, the open window admitted a rich wave of evening spices: mustard oil frying fresh pakoras, the sucrose waft of crushed sugarcane from a hand-cranked press, and the dry smell of baked sandstone that had soaked up a hundred summers. Papu Mama drove with a relaxed one-handed grip. He slowed the vehicle near a patch of carbon mist illuminated by the pale glare of a solar lamp.

He lifted a calloused index finger toward a dark, sleeping storefront. 

"Over there," he murmured into the shadowy square. "Your mother and I came here when we were no taller than that mud wall. We bought tin whistles and wooden dolls from that abandoned shop. It belonged to Koto and Moto, two gentle souls who believed the whole world was honest" 

Long before the square acquired its modern monuments, Koto and Moto arrived in Shahdadkot with ambitious eyes and a shared vision of local trade. Whether they were twin brothers or bonded friends born under the same constellation, nobody in the bazaar could truly say. They wore thin, spotless white kameezes and carried gleaming smiles that flashed brightly against their sun-browned faces.

Their store grew into an endless wonderland for local children. Inside, the air smelled delightfully of dried henna, jarred mango pickles heavy with mustard seed and oil, bolts of unbleached cotton cloth, and the fruity tang of sour candies kept in tall glass jars. The brass lids clinked like small bicycle bells whenever opened. If a neighborhood child walked in without a coin, one of the brothers would reach into a jar and press a sticky peppermint into his palm with a quiet wink.

What mystified neighboring merchants was the front entrance. Made of thick, dark planks warped slightly by heat, it was a door that had never learned the purpose of a padlock. When night fell and rival shopkeepers locked iron chests and slid heavy bolts into place, Koto and Moto simply pulled their wooden door to, leaving it unlatched. The night breeze off the river would push it open an inch or two, allowing moonlight to rest upon the counter amidst pickle jars and sweet tins.

"Why don't you bolt your door, Moto?" my grandfather would ask, leaning on his smooth bamboo walking stick during his late-night strolls.

"Ah, Khan Sahib," Moto would reply with an easy laugh while brewing cardamom tea on a charcoal stove. "A lock only offends the dignity of an honest man, and a real burglar will break it anyway. Why ruin a good wooden frame for nothing?" 

In those drowsy afternoons, my father was an irrepressible boy with a mop of unruly black hair and pockets bulging with pebbles, string, and stolen guavas. To him, the two generous shopkeepers were irresistible targets for practical jokes.

When the bazaar grew quiet and even the flies seemed too lazy to buzz, my father would tiptoe toward the low counter. While Koto measured out half a seer of lentils for an old woman, my father's hand would dart out like a kingfisher, snatching a bright pack of Planet Bingo cards straight from the display rack.

Stuffing the cards deep into his kameez, he would stick his tongue out and dash down the dusty lane, his rubber sandals slapping against the sandstone path.

"Stop, you little rascal! Wait till I tell your father!" Moto would yell, bounding over the counter with a mudgal and covering ground with surprising speed.

Panicking as the shopkeeper gained on him, my father would hurl the bingo cards into the air like a flock of colorful birds and dive through the archway of his home, hiding behind his mother's brass water storage pots. Moto would stop at the threshold, scoop up the scattered cards from the dust, shake his head with a suppressed grin, and walk slowly back to his store.

Yet Moto never noticed that one card remained missing from the deck. Card number seventeen, tucked securely inside my father's pocket, its edges marked by a circle drawn in blue ink.

No town remains untouched by time. As rural populations migrated into urban spaces, commercial rivalries sharpened. Other merchants looked at the open door of Koto and Moto not with admiration, but with cold calculation.

Political unrest and tribal friction spread across the region. Competitors leveraged social tensions to undercut the twins' trade, orchestrating severe financial losses. Yet through every strain, Koto and Moto refused to alter their ways or bolt their door against their neighbors.

Then came a dark, windless night when the wooden door swung open to an empty interior. Koto and Moto had vanished, departing without a formal farewell.

Rival traders immediately attempted to strip their memory from the market square, erecting official signboards and making loudspeaker announcements to rename the area. But the townspeople resisted. No matter what name politicians wrote on tax ledgers or monuments, the locals kept only one phrase on their lips: Koto Moto Chowk.

Decades later, the square underwent a modern transformation. Banks, pizza shops, and ice cream parlors filled the lanes, and a tall obelisk pointed toward the sky. Yet the memory of the two brothers lingered in every cup of cardamom chai.

On a warm summer evening in our family haveli, while frogs croaked in the courtyard, my father lay resting under the dim lamp light.

Beside his pillow rested an old, dog-eared Planet Bingo card. Its corners were rounded by decades of handling, and in the center, the number seventeen was neatly circled in faded blue ink. The shadow of his boyhood smirk still touched his lips as he slept.

I held it up to the dying light, looked at my sleeping father, and quietly tucked it back beneath the woven linen. Some stories do not belong to the vanished past; they sit quietly in the dark, waiting for someone to remember their light.

  Grey and Salt

It was 2:15 AM, and I was deep into Binge-glimpsing Sugar And Toys on Pluto TV blackhole with the glazed, zombie-like peepers of a zonked twenty-something.

There is a specific kind of muteness that starry night brings like a stillness that solely is home to insomniac Aashiq, stray cats, and old ghosts. Outside my window, the wind rattled a loose iron pane with the synchronized clicking of Ami Mithi’s knitting needles.

Honestly, at early twenties, my back had the structural integrity of a damp Parle-G biscuit dropped into scalding chai. I sat crumpled on my worn-out sofa, nursing a dull ache behind my shoulder blades and wondering when exactly the sprightliness of youth had slipped out through the back door without saying au revoir.

There is something strangely cathartic about watching the innocent cartoon icons of your youth get recycled into ruthless adult satire. 

In the dark down the block, on masonry railway arch bridge, a lone Metro-North Railroad commuter train sounded its long, mournful whistle, while I had a random realization on how Brian Ash had mixed and matched nostalgic TV cartoons of my childhood into a grown-up comedy with a different outlook, in other words, loads of sugar for an adult who had followed those cartoons but had left it behind in the rat race of life, now for them this animated series serves one with Push Pop diabetes in a Zen state. It made me ponder that what if we Gen-Z took that exact same experiment and applied it to our life? Wouldn’t that be amazing? Of course it would. 

And just reminding me of how injecting a dose of chaotic Latin flavored outlook on Bubbles and her gang (Powerpuff Girls) could make one laugh and making my world instantly feel a bit more alive, it could in actuality make things sugary out there too, in another words. We are told that to survive the bleakness of living, we ought to sprinkle a little sugar over everything.

By that, I mean make life colorful, unique like Sugar and Toys, a new version, make it sweet, like a Soho boutique on a Sunday morning, a neighbor’s overgrown dandelion garden, or a coat of Miranda Sings’ aggressively pink lip-blush. Add a lo-fi beat in the background, drape a rainbow over your anxieties, and voilà you’re living in a high-contrast Instagram filter.

By now we admit that sprinkling a pinch of sugar in a vessel of life could sparkle a honey, cinnamon sort of living, just like IG filters. Except, while half the world is prancing through life looking like a pop-art parade, there exists another species of human altogether.

We are the black-and-white film extras. We live, we yawn, we pay for subway and a Subway, we check our Chase bank balance to see whether Temu didn’t deduct more than ten bucks, and we yawn again, actively diluting the "sweet sixteen" vibes of anyone within a five-mile radius. We are the kind of folks who prefer a quiet corner with a BookTok trendy murder mystery novel in a loud Starbucks full of couples and screechy high-school pupils. We find more comfort in October’s autumn vibes clenching a cup of pumpkin spice latte rather than roaming aimlessly in the blazing heat of a summer noon with melted cream soda, sweating in midst of crowd.

And now comes the plot hole, I am the reigning Prince Charming of this second category.

My internal train doesn't bullet through life; it churns like an asthmatic turtle on a steep incline. While my brain cells fantasize myself with high fade spiky haircut, wearing a lemon print white Hawaiian shirt, driving my yellow scooter on a sunny Miami beach with Prada hat crowned on my head, A blue house and a yellow scooter beckon a brown boy who shakes his head ruefully and limps away.

While in reality, my actual eyes focus on the grimy tile walls of the 68th Street–Hunter College subway station whipping past my blurry window every single morning. If life were a vibrant box of thirty-two Faber-Castell colored pencils, I wouldn't even be navy blue or deep forest green. I’d be pencil grey, scrawled in the margins, smudged, and easily erased.

Well, pencil grey with a brief exception for animated adult comedy and late-night junk food.

Suddenly, my phone buzzed on the coffee table, vibrating against an empty Stanley tumbler of matcha. It was a WhatsApp notification from Iqra.

Iqra: Yaar, are you awake? Tell me you’re awake. Ama just sent me another biodata of that Dubai dude who loves Sandeep Maheshwari more than his interest in shaadi and dowry.

I snorted, my thumb flying across the keyboard.

Me: Tell her you only want to marry Miss Lee who taught Mandarin in Cadet College Petaro so that Masi Zeba faints and leave you forever.

Iqra: WTF. You haven't changed a bit, Sam. Still as bitter as ever.

Her DM instantly sent my mind drifting out of the blue to a humid night back in Clifton, years ago, before my life revolved around Cancer Lab Tech, Monroe University, and a life scattered us across different time zones.

Clifton that night felt like you could drink the air, it was heavy, almost sticky, thanks to the sea mist. The breeze off the Arabian Sea carried a jumble of smells: salt and roasted corn, camels somewhere nearby, McDonald's, and the sour tang of empty cocktail bottles left behind by the burger kids hanging out at the promenade.

 Iqra and I were perched on my penthouse balcony like two brooding gargoyles watching the dark city skyline.

Then, outta nowhere, the echo of an Asees Kaur track drifted from some beat-up car rolling by. It sounded sad as hell, actually, kinda fits the mood. We just sat there, blowing fake smoke from those candy cigarettes, pretending we were rebel legends or something, but honestly? Total amateur hour. Our version of Breaking Bad was sneaking Bournvita past school gates while 9XM was yelling pop songs from the living room TV. Those were the days, petty little schemes, big drama over nothing.

Down on the street, an old stray dog with one torn ear nosed around a crumpled paper cup. The streetlamp above sputtered, throwing jittery shadows onto the broken asphalt. This was the hour of the wolf, as Fatima Bhutto once called it.

Iqra set down her cup of artisanal Cortado, took a glance at my slouching frame, and sighed.

“Sam, why don’t you become a donut?” she asked out of nowhere.

I blinked, taking the pink-tipped sugar cigarette out of my mouth. “Like a doughnut? Or a donut with the exception of the 'ugh'?”

"Dude, I meant like, literally," she groaned. Her fingers made these ridiculous air quotes, almost sending her coffee flying. "You know, just be nice. Like, actually nice. Maybe smile more? Say things in a kinder way? Don't flip out every time someone says something dumb which, honestly, you do way too much."

I tossed my head back against the old, rusty balcony and sighed so loud, I swear the whole planet felt it.

“If people want sweetness, they should go buy a gulab jamun, Iqra. I am a teaspoon of salt. I look like sugar, instead I’m zesty.”

“What on earth does that even mean?” she asked, one eyebrow arched in pure disbelief. “When are you ever going to turn your twenty-four-seven hogwash radio off.”

“It means I intend to live an unsweetened otherwise bitter, fierce life in an entirely innocent way,” I declared proudly, sitting up straight. “Bunnies belong in a circle these days, Iqra, not out in the bloody jungle trying to act like tigers.”

She rolled her eyes and took another sip of her Cortado. “Stop it. Enough of your hogwash, I told you, bonehead. If you still remain this sour, you are never going to survive folks like the mullah Allahbuxsh at the madrasah who taught us Koran and hit us with his blessed scepter in other words, wooden ruler, and uses the curse word 'dala' as if he was not a Saraiki who came from Multan but prolly hailing from Dalala Land. You know how he gets your sassy rebel ass when you give him your classic death stare.”

That struck a nerve. Instant flashbacks flooded my brain.

My mind wandered even further back, to a long-forgotten summer spent at my grandmother, Zeynab's old wooden bungalow in the hills. It was a sprawling, creaky place with a tin roof that roared like thunder whenever the monsoon rains hit. The backyard garden was overrun with a giant banyan tree, armor lizards, and aggressive weeds that my Baghdadi Jew grandmother never bothered to pull out.

 "They have as much right to the dirt as the roses," she would say, sipping her pitch-black, unsweetened tea from a heavy porcelain cup.

It was Ayi Zeynab who first taught me that crouching with wool, knitting Pashmina cashmere shawl and hand-picking velvety leaves from centuries-old wild tea trees is privilege.

I had complained once as a seven-year-old that her tea was bitter and tasted like boiled oak leaves. She had looked at me over the rim of her spectacles with quiet amused grey eyes.

"Sam Baba," she had said in her low, raspy voice, "sugar is for masking the taste of bad tea, just as fake smiles are for masking bad company. When you learn to drink it plain, you learn what the leaf actually has to say. It isn't always pleasant, but it is always true."

I think about her often when the world demands that I coat everything in syrup.

During those days, with Iqra, I used to ping-pong to the madrasah down the hill near a famous Falooda vendor. I could still vividly picture our Koran learning class. Our teacher, Mullah Allahbuxsh, a stern man with a henna painted beard that reached his chest, used to wield a long wooden ruler like a samurai sword. He had zero tolerance for distraction, and even less for us.

One afternoon, right in the middle of a lecture on humility, my stomach had let out an embarrassing, thunderous rumble. Iqra, sitting next to me, had secretly passed me a small bag of spicy Slanty chips under the low wooden desk.

"Eat fast," she had whispered, not moving her lips. "Before he turns around."

I had popped three chips into my mouth in one swift motion. But in my rush, I forgot the cardinal rule: I hadn't recited Bismillah before eating.

Mullah Allahbuxsh had stopped dead in his tracks. The sharp CLACK of his ruler hitting the wooden podium echoed through the depressing madrasah. A startled sparrow shot off the window sill, wings flapping like mad, totally shattering the silence.

"Sameer!" he had boomed, his eyes narrowing. "Did you just consume worldly snacks without blessing them first?"

Back then, instead of taking the high road and being a well-behaved angel like Iqra, who immediately folded her hands and looked like a pious saint, I used to grind my teeth until my jaw clicked. My face turned the color of crushed red grapes in silent, furious rebellion.

"I was hungry, Mullah," I muttered under my breath.

"What did you say?" he demanded, stepping closer, the wooden ruler swinging by his side.

"I said... my stomach doesn't check the clock before it gets hungry," I said, a bit louder.

The entire class had gasped. Iqra had pinched my thigh so hard I nearly jumped. I received two sharp thacks of the ruler on my palm that day, but I didn't shed a single tear. I just stared back at him with pure, unadulterated scorn, my palms burning like hot coals.

Later that day, when the rest of his brain-washed pupils aka puppets left for their homes, I asked Iqra to wait for me in the mogra garden outside.

While I sneaked into Mullah's secret room in the backdoor leading corridor to a confined mud space possessing water matka, a creaky charpoy, and unimaginable poster of Kareena Kapoor smiling lustfully.

I knocked on his door and came in and without any hello and salam, I straight on got into the point, I rose my voice, saying, ''Today I want to talk to you about things that perhaps no student has ever discussed with a mullah.''

''Oh, but you certainly have plenty to say, don't you? Go on, speak.'' He practically barked.

''I want Iqra to undergo a sex-change operation to stop her from committing suicide in future.''

''What will you do? Do you realize what a terrible sin you will commit? You will interfere with God's work!'' he said.

''But He is the One who gives life, choices, biological sex and gender roles, you are the one who taught us this.''

''Of course He is! But that's not what you mean.''

''It means He has given us the ability to act on rationality and the knowledge he has bestowed on his being. Did angels sit down to write down what set of chromosomes Iqra Naich from Karachi should have? Two X chromosomes or one X and one Y chromosomes.''

The very first word of Koran is Iqra that means to read. TO READ. And in this case, our mullah was failing on both the Iqra. The sacred word and the being, his student, Iqra.

''Astaghfirullah! You wretch! Say Astaghfirullah!'' he shouted loud enough to give me deafness. But I wasn't going to stop in the middle of the convo track.

''Oh, my God! Why can't you understand such a simple thing? Medicine, rationality and science is very much regarded in religious communities these days.''

''And why can't you understand that God Himself has taken responsibility for providing our sustenance? Na'uzubillah! You wretch! Na'uzubillah!''

I cleared my throat to speak the word of wisdom into his pea-sized brain. ''Go on, say Na'uzubillah, because I'm actually doing a good deed by helping you understand His point of view correctly.''

''You're going to explain God's point of view to me? Isn't it enough that a respected religious clerk like me has his sermon done on those nasty liberal, Western ideologies, you youngsters come up with these days?'' He shouted back at me.

And I wasn't going to give up that easily either.

''Have mercy, Mullah. Have mercy! How could Mullah say something like that? You should give a sermon on how to be the greatest in honour, status, and progress. What could you possibly mean by disregarding science, logic, medicine, and freedom? That we should do cousin-marriages even while we're having epidemics of polio and thalassemia due to it? Mullah Allahbuxsh, look at Iqra. Look at what you've done to her. She drapes a long shawl on top of torn skinny jean and Sex Pistol tee under grey hoodie and tomboy cap and it's almost hundred degrees in and out!''

Back on the balcony in Clifton, Iqra laughed softly at the memory, breaking through the heavy night air. "And you honestly think you can sass your way out of life’s madrasahs forever?"

“I channel my inner Kevin Hart daily,” I replied, throwing my shoulders back. “‘May I speak my sassiness?’ voice included. Life gives you lemons, you don't make lemonade. You squirt the juice right into life's eyes and make shikanji instead.”

"You're impossible, Sam," Iqra chuckled, shaking her head. "Completely impossible."

Sitting in my New York apartment years later, watching the end credits of Sugar and Toys roll past on the screen, outside, the first faint wash of freshness was beginning to touch the Manhattan skyscrapers. Unlike sunrise over the pine-covered ridges of Murry or the misty shores of Clifton.

A solitary pigeon landed on my internet wire, shook its feathers against the morning chill, and gave a low, throaty coo. There is a quiet majesty in being simple, plain, and unadorned. Look at the pigeon sitting on the telephone wires, they do not envy the bright plumage of the parrot. They go about their business, cawing loudly, pilfering breadcrumbs, and surviving every bitter winter with their dignity intact.

I’ve decided to anchor my life to three simple rules of The Unsweetened Manifesto:

1. Be a soda without bubbles.

Be whatever you want, but stop trying to squeeze yourself into the neat, sparkling definition society crafts for you. Carbonation is overrated. It makes you feel bloated and gives you an uncomfortable burn in the back of your throat. You can still be a soda. Refreshing, grounded, and real and without the performative, nose-stinging bubbles.

2. Be a bubble tea without bubbles.

Tea doesn't need to be scalding hot to be comforting, nor does it need chewy tapioca pearls bouncing around in it just to prove it’s trendy. You get to choose your own temperature, your own steeping time, and your own flavor profile, whether that’s earthy Taro or aggressively sour citrus. Or Ayi Zeynab's bitter tea. Stop adding extra pearls just to impress folks who aren't even drinking from your ceramic mug.

3. Be a Splenda.

Dr. Sean Lucan once noted that sugar has become one of our trendy modern enemies. Fructose crystals carry the risk of heart attacks and diabetes; excessive sweetness in real life usually hides a latent toxicity. So, act like Splenda instead. You aren't hazardous, but you’re still capable of delivering a sharp, unexpected kick of flavor when required.

I walked over to the kitchen, filled a small steel kettle with water, and placed it on the stove.

I poured the boiling water over a pinch of plain loose tea leaves in my favorite chipped mug with no almond milk, no tablespoon of sugar, no clove, cardamom and absolutely no and never a ginger. As the dark amber liquor steeped, releasing its sharp, earthy aroma into the chilly kitchen air, I took a small sip. It was bitter, strong, and grounded.

Sugar is the currency of empire. We tend to forget that, tucked away in our tiny, air-conditioned apartments in Manhattan, sipping imported tea while an algorithm tells us what to watch next. Sugar was never harmless. It grew out of the scorched earth of Caribbean plantations and East Indian monopolies wrung from the hands of people who'd been stolen, just to sweeten the lives of monarchs too cowardly to face their own greed. When people ask someone from the Global South to be sweet, they aren’t just asking for good manners. It’s another way to erase who we are. It’s a demand to sand off our sharp edges, smooth out our wounds, and nod politely as systems of power erase our stories, turning our pain into invisible dust.

When Iqra texts me from across the seven oceans about biodatas and men who she would never marry herself off and not certainly wearing a gajra on her short-hair, wearing red bride gown with garland of rupee notes and chugging desi daaru in roaring rickshaw in Tariq Road's China Town at 3 am hunting down Miss Lee with her iphone flashlight under thunderous rainfall, zilch nada.

 I refuse the saccharine.

 I place my mug it on the windowsill by this little chunk of lapis lazuli I hauled over from Pakistan once, because... who knows. Habit, so it sits there, catching some pathetic city light, chirping, Oh, honey. Look at you. Look at you in your little combat armor made of salt and graphite.

Because God or Fate, or whatever glorious, messy, unnamable Presence keeps the planets spinning in their orbits while we throw fits on our couches, just adores a person who is trying that hard to be tough.

And God bless both of us! God bless the glitter-throwers and God bless the hedgehogs, because we are all just a bunch of frightened, beautiful children trying to figure out how to walk around in these fragile, aching meat-suits without losing our minds.

When I was seventeen, going through the brutal, soul-shattering ruin of my own life back when I used to spend my nights sobbing on the bathroom floor, praying to God, I thought that strength meant being indestructible. I thought it meant being cold. I wanted to be like iron. I wanted to look at the world with a cool, detached stare and say, "You can't hurt me, because I already expect the worst of you."

It took me years and a trip around the entire planet, and a lot of very messy, embarrassing, ugly-crying in alleys of Paris and Abdullah Shah Gazi's shrine to realize that cold detachment isn't strength at all.

Today I am the bitter black tea, and tomorrow I might be the ridiculous, frosted, colorful-sprinkled donut, and next week I might just be the quiet dirt underneath the bakery floor and all of it is sacred, and all of it is ME.

The world is terrifying. It is full of mullahs with wooden rulers, and heartless dictators running democracy, and soul-crushing subway commutes, and news reports that will break your heart into a thousand bloody shards if you look at them too long. Marvel's Thanos is always out there, metaphorically snapping his fingers. The jungle is real, and the predators are hungry.

But you know what else is real?

The way hot water smells when it hits dried leaves.

The Lentil Fort

At 7:42 AM, the digital display on the kitchen microwave flashed a relentless, blinking 12:00 for the twenty-first consecutive day. Ever since a transformer blew in Clifton three weeks ago, our kitchen had existed in a state of suspended chronological grace.

Down the street, the yellow school bus horn blared with a low, menacing rumble that vibrated through the humid salt breeze coming off the Arabian Sea.

Seven-year-old Veer skidded into the kitchen, his cheeks smudged with dried PVA glue and tears. 

"It’s due right now!" he shrieked, holding up a crushed shoe box that smelled saintly of old British Bata boots. 

"Miss Samina said if I don't hand in my 3D geography model of the Lahore Fort today, I get a zero, and I can't go on the class trip!"

Fozi Baji did not scream. In our extended family, fear had its own rules. 

When things outside our front gate went bad fast, the ladies of the house got calmer. 

Their heartbeat would slow down, even when the rest of the world seemed to fall apart.

Without looking up from her teacup, she stepped toward the grilles of the open window, grabbed a half-squeezed tube of UHU glue from the cutlery drawer, and pointed at the pantry.

"Let me get crushed orange lentils that last week, Fazeela got from Imtiaz Market," she commanded. "And the box of wooden toothpicks. Hurry."

We dropped to the wooden floor. The wall clock above the refrigerator whose batteries were dying, seemed to sprout tiny knees, cross its legs, and sit back to watch us sweat through our Friday cotton kameezes. 

I slathered glue across the frayed cardboard flaps while Fozi Baji dumped fistfuls of raw lentil seeds over the wet patches, attempting to construct a Mughal fortress before the bus driver laid on his horn a second time.

My older brother, Mir, ambled into the room wearing an unbuttoned linen shirt, adjusting his hair in the reflection of the stainless-steel toaster. He held a pose he clearly believed resembled Shah Rukh Khan in Dilwale, though the morning glare reduced him to a striking resemblance of Bauua Singh from Zero.

"Is there any KFC left from last night?" he grumbled, poking at a bowl of cold quinoa. "Who eats birdseed at eight in the morning?"

I rolled up a paperback copy of 13 Reasons Why and walloped him across the shoulder. "It’s midnight somewhere," I snapped, tossing him a packet of crisps. "Eat this and stop playing the tragic hero."

Fazeela, our sharp-tongued maid who spent more time in our kitchen than in her own, shuffled through the screen door clutching a plate of lukewarm French toast. She inspected our sticky, lentil-encrusted creation, shook her head, and muttered in her thick accent: "That is so not cheap."

It was the exact phrase she had uttered two years ago when I blew my monthly allowance on a comedy novel after watching an online review. Fazeela was right then, and she was right now that nothing worth having in this life comes cheap least of all sanity.

"Run!" Fozi Baji yelled, shoving Veer toward the door as the bus down the road honked its final ultimatum. Veer vanished down the gravel path, his lopsided cardboard monument dripping glue and orange seeds like a crumbling relic of the Mughal Empire.

By 10:00 AM, the house had settled into an eerie silence, broken only by our Bengal cat meowing rhythmically at the slow rotation of the ceiling fan.

I sat at my desk with a 101-degree fever wrapped in a faded wool shawl, staring at my MacBook screen. The cursor blinked back at me like a tiny, judgmental eye, counting down the thirty-five minutes remaining before my weekly web blog submission deadline.

My mind drifted back to hostel days, to a drafty dormitory room during monsoon season when every story I submitted to class was returned dripping in red ink. 

In those days, rejection didn't just sting; it expanded time. An hour spent staring at a rejection paper felt like an epoch in a damp cellar.

Yet those slow, agonizing hours had taught me a truth no early praise ever could that success makes you comfortable, but rejection forces you to think, and thinking is where real stories begin.

I recalled an old fable my friend had shared during those long hostel nights about a story of an ancient king who demanded a gift that would comfort him in times of gloom and humble him in times of victory. 

A wise traveler handed him a plain silver coin engraved with five words: This day will also pass.

I leaned back, closing my eyes against the throb in my temples. We spend our entire lives haggling with time. We treat it like a Mullah Allahbuxsh standing over us with a wooden ruler, ready to strike our knuckles for every unmeasured minute. We track our steps, our sleep cycles, and our productivity metrics, transforming our lives from a flowing river into a digital spreadsheet.

We are embarrassed by hours that produce nothing measurable about forgetting the twenty minutes spent watching rain pool on an air-conditioner ledge, or an hour spent listening to an aunt debate the market price of tomatoes. Perfection is cold, clinical, and dead. But a lopsided Lahore Fort fashioned out of wet cardboard, sticky fingers, orange lentils, and morning panic, that has a soul.

At 4:00 PM, the front door of the penthouse clicked open. Veer walked into the living room, his school backpack dragging on the Dettol washed floor.

I stepped out onto the balcony. The sky over the Clifton Beach had turned the bruised, glowing gold of an old brass lantern. The cat lay stretched in a fading strip of sunlight, completely indifferent to deadlines or metrics.

"Veer," I called down. "What happened to the project?"

He looked up, his face unreadable. He reached into his bag and pulled out the shoe box. The lentil fort had partially collapsed on the ride home; half the toothpicks were bent, and a trail of orange dust covered his notebooks.

"Miss Samina didn't give me a mark," he said softly, walking towards me.

My heart sank. "She failed you?"

"No," Veer said, sitting on the top step beside my chair. "She looked at it for a long time. Then she asked me who helped me make it. I told her Mom glued the lentils and you held the cardboard."

He reached inside the box and pulled out a folded piece of paper tucked underneath the cardboard base. It was a faded yellow photograph, its edges curled with age.

I took it from his hands. In the picture, a young boy sat on a kitchen floor covered in spilled lentils, laughing while a man with dark hair and a thick mustache held up a glue-stained cardboard dome.

It was a photo of my uncle, Papu Mama and me from 2008, taken during the great three-day power outage in Karachi, the week before he passed away.

"Miss Samina said she remembered," Veer whispered, looking up at me with his big, quiet eyes. "She said Papu Mama made the exact same lentil Lahore Fort for your fifth-grade project when he came from Dubai and stayed with you all. She kept the photo in the school archive."

My throat tightened. The air around us seemed to freeze. All my grand theories about time, my intellectual musings on time dilation, productivity apps, and Douglas Adams quotes dissolved into the humid air.

Time wasn't a clock ticking down to zero. It wasn't an examiner with a ruler, nor was it a digital display blinking 12:00. Time was a thread that’s invisible, unbroken, passing from my dead uncle’s sticky fingers to my lively aunt’s quiet hands, down to this messy seven-year-old sitting beside me on a rickety chair. We hadn't just rushed to complete a last minute school assignment that morning; we had unknowingly reconstructed a memory that had been waiting fifteen years for us to find it again.

My phone buzzed against the concrete railing. A notification popped up on the school WhatsApp group. 

Reminder: Annual Fancy Dress Parade tomorrow at 8:00 AM sharp. Veer Khoso must arrive dressed as a scanned QR code.

I looked down at the photograph, then at Veer’s expectant face, and finally at the microwave inside the house, still flashing its eternal 12:00.

I took a slow breath, smiled through the mist in my eyes, and stood up.

"Come on," I said, putting my arm around my little cousin. "Let's go find some black chart paper and white paint. It's time to panic again…..beautifully."

Purple dog

The candy cigarettes had gone soft by the time I reached the lane. Five sticks with pink tips, sweating through their paper in the pocket of my school trousers, bought from the stall that also sold single biscuits. My mother believed I was at my uncle’s. My uncle believed I was a boy who could sit with a textbook until the light changed. Between those two beliefs stood a gate that stuck on a brick, and behind it Ammar was already talking.

He opened the door mid-sentence, the chipped tooth showing, as if I were late.

“.....the moon only looks bigger beside the buildings, it is an error in the eye, they will not teach it until class eight, and the cartoon is on in six minutes if the clock on the set is honest, which it is not, I checked it against the news....”

“Move,” I said.

The house smelled of mosquito coil and of dal scraped off a pot. His aunt slept in the front room with a cloth over her eyes and the fan pointed, wrongly, at her feet. His father was a man I had seen twice, both times from the back, tying a bag to a scooter. We were not allowed the television. It lived in the old store room on a crate, and when it was off the glass looked like ditchwater. Ammar turned it on with his heel, sat on the mat with his knees up, and did not stop talking.

I put a candy cigarette between my teeth. The shell cracked into chalk and a little soap. On the screen a farmhouse stood in a field the color of old teeth. Then the dog came in, small and shaking and purple, and the sound he made was not a bark. It was the sound of a body that has already lost and means to move anyway.

“People call him brave,” Ammar said. “He isn’t, while it is happening. They put the brave minute at the end so children will sleep. You can time the rest. It is mostly fear.”

“We are children,” I said.

“You are.” He made room for me as if this were a kindness he could spare. “You missed the scream on Sunday. I can do it.”

He did it. A thin rip went up out of him and hit the wall. In the front room his aunt turned over. We stopped existing. The fan kept its count. A truck on the bypass threw a bar of light across the ceiling and took it away. Ammar swallowed the rest of the scream and went on telling me the episode I was trying to watch.

The candy cigarette turned to paste. Behind my eyes something gray was warming. At the barber a magazine showed a sandwich split open, the meat loose, and under it the words Sloppy Joe. I did not know the food. The words fit the heat he made while he talked over it. He had moved on to purple. It was not a real wavelength, he said. The eye invented it. A bruise was only blood that had lost its job, and the dog was that color because fear is what the eye adds when the facts run out.

“Be quiet,” I said.

He managed it for as long as the dog was brave. Then the credits crawled across the glass and he began again, repairing the gap.

That year we were on the onion.

Mr. Pintu drew it so hard the chalk shrieked. “Not the room you sleep in. The room inside the room. Membrane. Cytoplasm. Nucleus. Ammar. Up. The structure. Without the biography.”

Ammar’s chair went back too fast and struck the desk behind him. Laughter ran the length of the room. He stood with purple ink on one finger.

“Membrane,” he said, and the word broke, and he hurried in after it. “The outer boundary. It chooses what enters. Cytoplasm, where the parts are held. Not floating. Held. Nucleus, with the material that decides what the cell is, and the mitochondria, which is the powerhouse of the cell, and the vacuole, larger in plants, we are not plants, and last year Mr. Nazeer said the nucleus is like a headmaster, which is wrong, a headmaster can leave the building, a nucleus cannot leave or the cell becomes a different thing.....”

“Sit.”

“.....and then your diagram is of a corpse.....”

“Ammar.”

He sat. His knee hit the underside of the desk. The rest of the sentence moved behind his mouth. Mr. Pintu called on a boy who answered in three words and received a nod the rest of us felt on our skin.

Under the neem at tiffin he found me, already talking.

“I knew it. The laughter was the chair. Chairs are against me. In the store room one leg is short and I put a purple paper under it, and it holds if you sit without speed. You saw a problem of timing.”

“You were scared.”

“The dog is scared,” he said. “You wait until that part is over and then you tell people he was brave. The scared part is the episode.”

He took a piece of my roti, our treaty, and ate it in bites small enough to talk through. I would not have called it love. The day got larger when he was in it, and I wanted both to cover my ears and to be certain of him after dark.

He clicked the pen. “If you telephone and I do not pick up, count to forty. I may be in the lane, or with my aunt, or at the part where the volume has to stay down. Forty is what the neighbor allowed before he shouted. It is enough to cross the house without running. Running wakes her. Do not hang up. If you hang up you will say nobody was home. The line is a place. You have to stand in it until I get there.”

“It’s a phone.”

“It’s a place,” he said. “If you leave, I am talking to furniture.”

I was watching a lizard on the bark. He could tell, and he told me the rule again.

One evening his aunt stayed awake, a spoon knocking in the kitchen, the radio turned up to prove it. Ammar shut the set off before the glow could betray us and opened the science book as if homework had been our plan. In the margin of the onion he had already worn the purple pen down to the paper’s nap. The dog was there. Too many legs. The right size for fear.

“We can still do it,” he whispered. “I remember. The screen is only color.”

He told the episode under his breath while I copied labels. Membrane. Cytoplasm. Nucleus. He knew where the joke was, and he knew the breath before the scream, and he waited and let me have it. The scream itself was no louder than air through a comb. I laughed into my sleeve. He looked at me as if I had given him something, and for a minute he forgot to go on. I could not leave the minute alone.

“Go on, then,” I said.

He went on.

The night that mattered, the power held and the cloth stayed on his aunt’s eyes. He had promised me the episode with the shadow, and he briefed me through the opening until I told him I would see it myself. I ate two of the cigarettes down to their pink ends. On the screen the dog’s shadow thickened, stood up off the ground, and went after the old woman. Ammar’s mouth closed. The room changed size.

In the lane, a real dog began to bark.

It was lower. It had a body. It came from the side where the wall was unfinished brick, a window someone had planned and then given up on. The cartoon dog shook in his colors. Ammar shook with him, then slid both hands under his thighs, ashamed of the accuracy.

The barking reached the gate.

“It’s a dog,” I said. My voice had shrunk, and I was angry at it. I wanted the set louder than the lane. I wanted one of his explanations, which could turn a noise back into a sentence. He didn’t offer one. He was looking at the passage as if the passage had become the episode.

He stood. His knees argued. He crossed the coil smoke and opened the front door the width of his face.

“It’s just a dog,” he said into the dark. “Go home.”

The word home broke the way membrane had broken. He stayed in the gap until the barking moved off toward the kilns, then shut the door with both hands so the latch would not clap.

He came back talking.

“Not last week’s dog. And a shadow isn’t an animal. A shadow is light being refused. If you’re afraid of it, you’re afraid of most places after nine, which is why they put the program on when the real dark has already......”

“Stop.”

He didn’t, or his mouth had been trained past stopping.

“You are cooking a Sloppy Joe inside my brain,” I said. “You talk like a radio in a locked shop. You talk like Mr. Pintu after the bell. The screen is right there.”

On the glass the purple dog finished the necessary part without us.

Ammar closed his mouth. I heard it. He nodded.

“Okay,” he said.

We watched the rest. I did not laugh at the joke that was meant to tidy the fear. I had the quiet I had asked for, and nothing to do with my hands.

At the gate he did not explain the moon.

“Tomorrow,” I said.

“The king one,” he said. “I won’t talk in the important part.”

“You can talk.” I said it the way you put a coin down after you have already taken the sweet.

He smiled with the chipped tooth and did not start another sentence. I was eleven. I called that peace.