This Way Out

by Tufayel Ahmed

A year after the greatest tragedy of my life came the greatest blessing. Funny how life works like that. It can completely knock you on your ass, like you’ve gone twelve rounds with Tyson, and then lift you up and dust you off, as if to say, We cool now? No, life, we definitely are not cool.

few things give me joy like discovering a good book

He radiates body heat no matter the season; in winter, he is my personal radiator, keeping me warm through the night. In summer, though, he becomes a furnace, threatening to turn me to cinder by morning light. And yet I can’t sleep without him. If I am to burn, so be it.

He is mine. He chose me. I have him.

I don’t know your family but if they’re anything like you, Amar, I feel like they couldn’t possibly be so blindly hateful just because you love a man. I don’t believe a family that has you in it, the man I love, could be like that.’

I am angry, too, at God. If being gay is a sin, how could a kind and merciful god make me this way? Make my life so difficult? It is cruel and unjust to be punished for what I can’t control. I never chose to be attracted to men, to fall in love with a man, and there have been so many times I’ve considered how much easier my life would be if I were like Abed or Asad or any of the other Bengali boys. But I can’t live a lie. I have to live my truth.

Joshua takes out his house keys and begins etching our initials into the bark at the foot of the tree: JA + AI. Joshua Armstrong + Amar Iqbal. ‘So you know you will always have a home with me,’ he says.

I imagine a thousand more days and nights like this with him. Mundane everyday activities that other people take for granted. To me, they feel like the spoils of a lifelong war.

A book is a beautiful object. Each page should be treated with love and care.’

love is a gift. The Quran says that Allah “created for you from yourselves mates that you may find tranquillity in them; and He placed between you affection and mercy”.’

Love is companionship, feeling content and safe in the arms of another person. It is the mundane moments when you know the other person is there but you don’t need to speak – their presence is enough, the meals shared, the walks taken, not just sex. What is so wrong about that?

Opening up a book unlocks the imagination, it transports you to a different world, it inspires, it teaches you about people and cultures you might not otherwise know about.

True cruelty isn’t dropping bombs on a faceless enemy, but what we are capable of doing to the ones we claim to love.

They have made me realise that family can mean many things; it doesn’t just have to be the family you’re born into. It is possible to find family, too.

you can do whatever you want, be whoever you want – there are no limits or barriers.