Home Fire

For girls, becoming women was inevitability; for boys, becoming men was ambition

Grief was what you owed the dead for the necessary crime of living on without them.

Grief manifested itself in ways that felt like anything but grief; grief obliterated all feelings but grief; grief made a twin wear the same shirt for days on end to preserve the morning on which the dead were still living; grief made a twin peel stars off the ceiling and lie in bed with glowing points adhered to fingertips; grief was bad-tempered, grief was kind; grief saw nothing but itself, grief saw every speck of pain in the world; grief spread its wings large like an eagle, grief huddled small like a porcupine; grief needed company, grief craved solitude; grief wanted to remember, wanted to forget; grief raged, grief whimpered; grief made time compress and contract; grief tasted like hunger, felt like numbness, sounded like silence; grief tasted like bile, felt like blades, sounded like all the noise of the world. Grief was a shape-shifter, and invisible too; grief could be captured as reflection in a twin’s eye. Grief heard its death sentence the morning you both woke up and one was singing and the other caught the song.

Everything else you can live around, but not death. Death you have to live through.

A man needed fire in his veins to burn through the world, not ice to freeze everything in place.

What would you stop at to help the people you love most? Well, you obviously don’t love anyone very much if your love is contingent on them always staying the same.

Grief was the deal God struck with the angel of death, who wanted an unpassable river to separate the living from the dead; grief the bridge that would allow the dead to flit among the living, their footsteps overheard, their laughter around the corner, their posture recognizable in the bodies of strangers you would follow down the street, willing them to never turn around.

She felt, as she did most mornings, the deep pleasure of daily life distilled to the essentials: books, walks, spaces in which to think and work.

I’m driving at the fact that habits of secrecy are damaging things,” Hira said in her most professorial voice. “And they underestimate other people’s willingness to accept the complicated truths of your life.

For girls, becoming women was inevitability. For boys, becoming men was ambition.

bay-takalufi.’” He sat up straight and raised his hand like a schoolboy. “I do know that one. It’s informality as an expression of intimacy.” She experienced a brief moment of wonder that a father who hadn’t taught his son basic Urdu had still thought to teach him this word. “I wouldn’t say intimacy. It’s about feeling comfortable with someone. Comfortable enough to forget good table manners. If done right, it’s a sort of honor you confer on the other person when you feel able to be that comfortable with them, particularly if you haven’t known them long.

grief saw nothing but itself, grief saw every speck of pain in the world; grief spread its wings large like an eagle, grief huddled small like a porcupine; grief needed company, grief craved solitude; grief wanted to remember, wanted to forget; grief raged, grief whimpered; grief made time compress and contract; grief tasted like hunger, felt like numbness, sounded like silence

Contempt, disdain, scorn: these emotions were stops along a closed loop that originated and terminated in a sense of superiority.

All the wrong choices he made, they were necessary to get him to the right place, the place he is now.

Why sociology?’ he said. He shouldn’t have opened the wine – it would only make Terry angrier. There was never anything to be gained from pettiness. ‘I wanted to understand why the world is so unfair.’ ‘Shouldn’t your God give you those answers?’ he said, surprised by the slight teasing of his own tone. ‘Our God did, in a roundabout way.’ ‘How’s that?’ he said. She was pretty when her face was at rest, wiped clean of the encroachment of anxiety. ‘For starters, He created Marx.

She was the portrait to his father’s Dorian Gray – all the anxiety you’d expect him to feel was manifest in her.

... if your head is in the shade of love then surely your feet are in paradise.

who knew everything about her rights and nothing about the fragility of her place in the world.

She gave him precisely the look of disgust he deserved for such a statement, and strode away without another word.

But just then Aneeka shrugged in response and he experienced one of those terrifying moments in which a person you thought you knew reveals a new aspect of their character that has taken hold while you weren’t looking.

Well, you obviously don't love anyone very much if your love is contingent on them always staying the same.

You think marriage is in the large things, Mrs. Rahimi had once said. It's in the small things. Can you survive the arguments about housework, can you learn to live with each other's different TV viewing habits.

By the time the first light appeared in the sky she felt herself transformed by the desire to be known, completely.

I meant, it must be difficult to be Muslim in the world these days.” “I’d find it more difficult to not be Muslim,

Laughing, he said, “Cancer or Islam—which is the greater affliction?

We saw something was happening, my sister and I. We thought it was some kind of secret affair, his first time in love. In a way, it was. What else explains a person being turned inside out in the space of just a few weeks?

He knew it was a paramount failure of friendship to disappear into a relationship, but to be in his friends' company now felt like stepping back into the aimlessness that had characterized his life before Aneeka came along and became both focus and direction.

Aneeka must learn to think of him as lost forever. It was possible to do this with someone you loved, Isma had learned that early on. But you could learn it only if there was a complete vacuum where the other person had been.

One camera recorded only the flattened grass through a cracked lens. The other, moving closer to the girl, showed her dupatta fly toward it, a close-up of the tiny embroidered flowers on the white cloth, and then a battering darkness. For a few moments there was only a howling noise, the wind raging, and then a hand plucked away the white cloth and the howl was the girl, a dust mask on her face, her dark hair a cascade of mud, her fingers interlaced over the face of her brother. A howl deeper than a girl, a howl that came out of the earth and through her and into the office of the home secretary, who took a step back. As if that were the only thing the entire spectacle had been designed to achieve, the wind dropped as suddenly as buildings collapse in 3-D models, and the girl stopped her noise, unlaced her fingers. The cameras panned, then zoomed. In the whole apocalyptic mess of the park the only thing that remained unburied was the face of the dead boy. “Impressive,” said the home secretary.