There is something seductive about crossing the threshold into a new year. It’s the same feeling as opening a new journal, or writing on crisp letter paper, or sliding under clean bedsheets. A fresh start holds promise. It’s like a new relationship: full of romance and possibility. Humans like symbolism. And yet, I am different.… Read More On Flow and Just Being
I’ll tell you how I’m feeling today, if you tell me too. Not for us, the false niceties papering over our humanness. Not for us, the filters to smooth out our skin on social media, to give the grey pallor of our faces a sunlight hue. I’m tired and overwhelmed, and I know it will… Read More Are You Feeling Overwhelmed?
The baby didn’t sleep last night. His need for me is wearing. I stand in the hallway, exhausted, listening to him whimper in his cot after I place him there. I cup my hands in prayer. The shape they make is at first alien, a relic from childhood rituals when our family attended the mosque… Read More On Being Human
I’ve not been here for a while. The juggling of balls has been hard this summer, and there has not been enough pieces of me to share around. The baby is eight months now, and I’ve been ready for months to smooth out a white page, to fill it with words until every corner is… Read More A Love Letter to Openness and the Creatives in my Life
I’ve dreamt about this moment for so long, willed it to happen, worked hard for it, and now it is here, I’m spinning with excitement and fear. My first novel, All the Tomorrows, is due to be released in less than three months on 6 November 2017. Three months of happy dances, but also nail-biting,… Read More Three Days to the Cover Reveal for All the Tomorrows
Some days it seems as though my mobile phone has become an extension of my body: another limb or brain. Or a succubus. Why is it that we long to reach certain goal posts as children, ones which as adults are no longer enticing? Children as young as ten clamour for their own phones. What… Read More On Communication Overload
I know it’s not always the best idea to be political on blogs. Why alienate your readership? Even so, I’m going to break that rule. That’s because today, I found politics not to be divisive, but to be hopeful. Today, I went canvassing. Our older two children stayed with my husband. It was me and… Read More Canvassing and Understanding
We went to the beach at East Wittering, a few hours drive away. The sea air was bracing, the sand between my toes cool. Beach huts in primary colours and bold patterns stood against the grey sky. The baby fussed, and I was secretly pleased to leave our frisbee-playing big kids in their father’s care… Read More Yin and Yang, and the Folly of Absolute Certainty
Spring is here Here in London, spring is finally in the air. The daffodils are in full bloom. In some ways it feels like I am coming out of hibernation. The youngest member of our brood is now three months old, and during the dark and dreary winter months we’ve been cocooned inside with the… Read More Countdown to Big News
There are some things that just make me happy, like sitting in a park and watching aeroplanes flying through a blanket of clouds. Certain music tracks. What a joy it is to plug in some earphones and cancel out all the noise apart from what you are choosing to listen to. A glass of water… Read More My Happy List
When I was small, my parents used to worry I was too idealistic, a prime target for people to take advantage of. It made them protective, and less trusting of any reaches for independence. Even today, when the years have mellowed my idealism, I don’t see idealism as something that skews perspective, that is somehow… Read More On Hope and Small Spheres of Change
I try to keep politics off this blog. That’s the common advice, isn’t it? Not to alienate potential readers by being overtly political. It’s like bringing politics up at dinner parties or with family. There’s something unsavoury about it. Rarely does consensus come out of political conversations unless you are talking to like-minded people. But… Read More Them and Us
I’ve not posted here for a while. I had lost my way. Sometimes the only thing to do is to retreat into your shell, hide away, let the storms of fear and despair pass. Maybe I’m still lost, but it helps to turn up to a blank page, to coax the swirl of words inside… Read More On Fear and Love
My stomach swells from beneath the swirl of bathwater I sink until every inch of me is pressed to the white enamel internalising hearing the drum of my heartbeat eyelids closed, imagining multiplying cells and spirit the newly forming life inside the walls of my red womb I already love you more than myself, this… Read More Tiny You
Yesterday was Mother’s Day for many people. While in the UK it is celebrated in March, such is the reach of Facebook, that I twitched at the thought my mum might think I had forgotten to make a fuss of her. I’m ambivalent about commercial days like Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and Valentine’s Day. Even… Read More Rejecting Perfection: On the Ideal of Motherhood
I’m Muslim, did you know? You might have guessed, from how I look I suppose. I once was interviewed by a woman, who after I got the job, confided in me that she could almost always tell someone’s religion after speaking to them for five minutes. I wonder if she could tell also that I’d… Read More On Difference, Compassion and the Right to Speak
I’ve fallen in love with many places in my time. The shadows underneath the dining table, where I used to hide by my grandfather’s feet. The house where I grew up in Streatham, opposite the pebble-dashing business. Charles Bridge in Prague in the early hours of the morning before the tourists arrive. The Arts Centre… Read More A Meditation on Place and Roots
I was going to start this post – my first of the year – by wishing you a happy new year, but that seems trite, because, well, David Bowie died today. I hate the feeling as we age that the people we love are not immune to death. And because I cannot be trite, I… Read More Mortality Versus Potential
With the summer behind us and the kids back at school, I’m getting into the groove with the novel again. The second act of The Voyeur is going to be submitted to my online writer’s workshop over the next month. Initially, it felt unfamiliar to be diving into my novel again: the peril of taking… Read More My Roots in India
It is past midnight. My husband is snoring next to me. He has to wake in four hours to leave for a business trip. He sleeps despite the glow of my laptop and the sound of my fingers darting across the keyboard. I write, warming my cold feet on his calves. It’s one of those… Read More Write Although You Feel Small