My Friend, the Unconscious

 Love Where did this word come from? who uttered it for the first time? For whom? For what thing? What feeling? What for? I do not know or maybe I am still in process of knowing it. It is an occult, a mystery. I hear many people pronouncing this word. I say pronounce because it doesn’t refer to any one thing/feeling; concrete/abstract. It is a signifier(s) and its signified slides incessantly and it differs at every mind so much so it remains a word without any one referent. Water, fire, sea, mercury, sand, desert, bird, dirt, nestle, alone, and so on and so forth. Whenever I try to make sense of it, my friend the Unconscious start vomiting these all similes, metaphors, metonymies et cetra that are being injected into him every now and then. I don't know why he cannot stay calm as a peaceful lake. Nowadays, he is engaged in shaping the concept of Love for me in dreams. Sometimes, he becomes Byron, singing "She walks in beauty~". Sometimes, he brings THE beauty (forgive me...

Dear Karachi! I'm lying in a train right now. Just trying to sleep but its difficult and mysterious to have it, so I decided to share this experience with you because I found you the best to share it with.  We are seven in the cabin of six berths. I, my one elder brother, two youger ones, my father and two Islamic preachers who were strangers in the begining of this journey. By the way, our train is heading toward you. The strangers acquainted with us by telltaling the lives of holy saints. In short, they are nice and generous. The feeling I want to share with you is the way I'm trying to sleep. I'm lying in-between the six berths, three on my right side and three on my left but unfortunately (or may be fortunately) I'm on the floor, on the preacher's sleeping bag that he has bestowed. But alas! I couldn't manage a pillow. I've rolled an empty bottle in one end of the sleeping bag. The movement of train is shaking me on this slippery bag like someone shakes ...

       Lock down was outwardly leashing while unleashing at heart. I am personally interested in the later aspect of it because, as most of its witnesses or let us say victims, there is no point of fascination in its external dimension. Where it bounded the hands of industrious beings and cunning capitalists, it confined the perspectives of creatives eyes to mere windows. Being into a room, for not hours and hours but months and months, reminds me the predicament of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa or perhaps Kafka himself. And then Kafka reminds me of the unconscious… stop yawr ! I guess I should stop talking to my friend, the unconscious, now for Its time to plunge into creative inner courtyards of the writers whom this hegemonic span has galvanized to fill the vessel of Pandemic Short Fiction.      Reading the pandemic short fiction took my-“self” directly towards the actual rooms from where, I consider, all stories come. Yes! I tried to stay aloof from recolle...