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