Imaan Farooq Sheikh > Recent Status Updates

My God, the twists in this book! I'm on the edge of my seat, eager to find out what happens next.

A life of no time can’t be recounted. Your very condition militates against narrative.

Agreed. If we couldn't experience time, our frame of reference for narration wouldn't exist either. For how could we ascertain what happened before or what after?

By what means are we ever to become re-attached to the world?

A very valid question that every person in mourning must have reflected on.

Previously I hadn’t believed that speech is simply the translation of something already formulated in thought. Now I was faced with the evidence that sometimes it is, but that the translation can fail.

I don't think there can be a better way to put this into words.

“What is next to ecstasy?"
"Pain."
"What is next to pain?"
"Nothingness."
"What is next to nothingness?"
"Hell.”

― Umera Ahmed, Peer e Kamil

Poi si tornò all’ eterna fontana.

Translation: Then she turned back to the eternal fountain.

They say, ‘The coward dies many times’; so does the beloved.

Such a short line yet so impactful. This book is one of my favorites now.

And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen.

I love all these connections between grief, time, and fear throughout this book.

It is a part of the past.
And the past is the past
and that is what time means,
and time itself is
one more name for death,
and Heaven itself is a state where
‘the former things have passed away.’

It is a part of the past.
And the past is the past
and that is what time means,
and time itself is
one more name for death,
and Heaven itself is a state where
‘the former things have passed away.’

Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch? She died. She is dead. Is the word so difficult to learn?

Stab me right where it hurts, and watch me bleed tears.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

Such good lines to start the book. I feel this on a personal level.

If there is ever to be any movement again, that moving will not be ‘on’. It will be ‘with’.

This line hits right in the feels.

I read on rapidly about the discovery of the corpse in a still-running bath, its good musculature (at that, he’d have brightened up), its chest cavity opened up by means of the conventional incision, the skull sawed so that the brain could be lifted out, the enlarged heart dissected on removal, the fluids in lungs and bladder inspected and measured.

I am speechless by the skill of this author.

I was my two eyes set burning in my skull. Behind them there was only vacancy.

How poignant and dreadful at the same time. Feeling nothing but emptiness behind your eyes as if the whole world could show you nothing that would fill the void left by losing someone.

What a finely vigorous thing a life is; all its delicate complexity abruptly vanished. Almost comical. A slapstick fall.

The imagery and the emotion behind it flow so well. Just a few pages in and I am hooked.

Any written or spoken sentence would naturally lean forward towards its development and conclusion, unlike my own paralysed time.

I love the way this connects writing and narration to time and the state of being arrested in it.

Every lemon will bring forth a child, and the lemons will never die out.



I don't want any of these lovely characters to die. I've been sobbing like a wreck with this book.

Just the third chapter and I was in tears.

The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you.

This line just struck deep, plunging into my heart like a sharp razor blade. Because this isn't just the case for people who are mentally unwell. Whenever you get hopeless, be it in any way or form, the very people you call your own shun you and keep you as far as possible from the perceived normal society.