By the time anyone noticed the man selling silence on Brick Lane, the street was already too loud for most people to hear themselves think. It was a Saturday, the kind where the market spilled over itself — vintage jackets rubbing shoulders with second-hand books, churros curls next to jilapis, teenagers filming everything and nothing … Read more
By the time Maya Rahman found the film rolls, her mother had been dead for six months and the flat had already started forgetting her. Smells went first. The coriander and fried onions that used to cling stubbornly to the curtains evaporated. Her mother’s rose attar, the one she dabbed on her wrists before going … Read more
By the time people started saying that time moved differently in his shop, Hassan Ali was already too old to correct them. The shop sat just off Bethnal Green Road, squeezed between a nail bar and a chicken shop that smelled of old oil and teenage hunger. Its window was crowded with clocks — wall … Read more
The morning light in Whitechapel always arrived reluctantly, squeezing itself through terraces and shopfronts like someone slipping into a room they weren’t entirely welcome in. On Durward Street, where old ghosts and old languages clung to the walls like paint that never quite dried, a small tailor shop sat wedged between a Polish bakery and … Read more
On the morning of her wedding, Ayesha woke to the sound of her mother arguing with a saucepan. The saucepan was innocent, just sitting on the hob, but her mother’s voice bounced off its metal sides as if it were responsible for everything. “The caterer says he needs final numbers by eleven o’clock,” Ammi was … Read more
The first time it happened, no one noticed. It was a Tuesday in late winter on a narrow street in Whitechapel, where the wind found every gap between buildings and pushed its cold fingers through. The sky had already folded itself into early darkness. Cars crawled past slowly, their headlights smearing light across wet tarmac. … Read more
By the time the sun began to slide behind the grey-brown buildings of Mile End Road, the shop signs started to blink themselves awake. Neon halal signs hummed softly. Steam wrapped itself around the glass of the kebab shop like a shy ghost. Buses exhaled people at the stop opposite the big Tesco, and those … Read more