This Way Out

by Tufayel Ahmed

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.

He was a chef, he said. And I was starving.

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.

might be a son that brings shame on the family, but in an alternate reality, I’d be a model daughter.

No wonder people don’t get therapy, if we aren’t equipped to deal with mental health the same way we do a burst appendix. I blame the Tories.

My experiences in the homogenised world of advertising, the emphasis on whiteness in campaigns – sometimes explicit and other times implicit (‘I just don’t think it’s the right tone,’ clients would say when presented with a brown or black face, which could often be decoded to mean the model was the wrong colour) – have soured me on print magazines.

White people, in my experience, tend to be a little hostile and uncomfortable when confronted about their blind spots when it comes to race or culture. It’s almost like the accusation of racial or cultural bias is more offensive than the behaviour itself.

Maybe I don’t want to always be a learning experience for you. Maybe we just haven’t realised how different we are, how different our worlds are.’

It’s things like this – unconscious bias – that always makes me stop and think: How welcome are we really? How integrated can we really be? Even if people appear nice and not-racist, these generalisations about us are always going to be there in the backs of their minds – what they think they know about us. It’s always going to colour the way they see us. It’s not fair.’

People are more concerned by what two men or two women do in bed than about love. 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?

And there’s nothing like taking your time and browsing the shelves to find that next book. Picking up books and reading the blurbs on the back. Smelling the newly printed ink. Feeling the quality of the paper. Without a shop like this, that physical thrill of book shopping is taken away. We want people to keep discovering books – and maybe, like me, they’ll discover a bit of themselves, too.’

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

In these cemeteries, the dead are all equal, just as they were intended to be in life.