Homeland Elegies: A Barack Obama Favourite Book 2020

If you can do anything else with yourself, anything more certain, you owe it to yourself and to everyone you love to do that. But if you can’t, if you need to be writing, well, then, one of the joys of the lonely journey ahead, beta, is the comfort of reading. A day spent reading is not a great day. But a life spent reading is a wonderful life.”

and back in Pakistan with my folks, visiting their various siblings and their families. One afternoon, when we were over at Ayesha and Huma’s house for tea, the girls persuaded me to play Ken to their respective Barbies in the living room. Huma was ten. Ayesha was seven. The play veered, perhaps inevitably, into the question of marriage. Would my K

“Bismillah al-rahman, al-rahim.”*

“Maybe that’s because I’m not a child anymore. I’m twenty-five.” “Latif was right. The longer we stay, the more we forget who we are.”

The Satanic Verses was my first experience of both magical realism and metafiction.

Picking through that disgusting orientalist history, disgusting tales the Christians told to make the Prophet out as some sex-crazed cult leader,

Looking back at that trip, I see now the broad outlines of the same dilemmas that would lead America into the era of Trump: seething anger; open hostility to strangers and those with views opposing one’s own; a contempt for news delivered by allegedly reputable sources; an embrace of reactionary moral posturing; civic and governmental corruption th

Out the window, the dramatic mountain vistas had given way to the familiar concatenation of sometimes ramshackle roadside constructions, stores and schools and homes, tea stands, food stands, pumping stations; the earlier evergreen of the Hazara steppes now replaced by sundry shades of drying earth, from ecru to umber, mud-brick walls and sand-brow

There was silence on the line. “You’re different,” she said. “Different from what?” “From the child I raised.”