On the night the Thames spoke Bengali, no one believed the first man who heard it. He was a minicab driver from Stepney Green, halfway through a twelve-hour shift, the kind of night where the city felt like wet cloth draped over tired bones. His name was Jalal, but the controller at the base called … 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
In the early mornings, before Brick Lane remembered who it was supposed to be, Abdul Malek walked the street as if it were a long, slow river and he was the last fisherman who still knew its secret currents. The shutters on the sari shops were half-asleep. The curry-house signs blinked like tired eyelids. Only … 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