I was ten when Nana came to stay with us. Dark-skinned and skinny. But for her breasts, she would have passed as thin. As thin as I was. She narrowly escaped. She had a lot of it. The kind that makes you think that God started from her head to create her, taking his precious...

It wasn’t the Youth Hostel. It may have been the same price, but no one was going to give you a daily task, other than minding your own business. The Iqbal was as far from the Fairview, as Mata Hari was to Mother Teresa. For three bucks a night, you didn’t get a window...

Time stood still. Neither one of us moved. The moon poured in through the window in milky white beams. We sat, motionless, held and frozen. “We have to tell someone,” my wife Hawa said after the first hour. “Yes, we must. “But who?” “Yes, who.” Ten o’clock. Ten-thirty. Eleven. We sat upright, awake, taking turns on the edge of the...

Today, not a pigeon in sight. You might think there’s been a hygiene improvement at the station. Yet, the filth is so vast that even a microscope would only reveal what’s already visible to the naked eye. Dirt without a name, from unknown origins, smeared across the stained seats, spreading across the floor like a...