What Remains After a Fire Quotes

“Lahore is a delicious city. A mottled mess of vanishing history and new regimes. Lahore becomes ominous when you are in Morgantown. Lahore becomes a quiet mirage, an odd spectacle hung in time that only moves how you want it to move. It only moves when you want it to move. It does not speak to you or wail for you, yet you write only about Lahore. You preserve it in your poetry. You suppress it in a verse. You capture it in the refrain of a poem: its beating heart, its howls and cries, its chuckle. Yes, Lahore chuckles. The colonial drawing room in your mother’s house. The pale light that slithered through the bedroom curtains. The moth your father captured in his palm when you were a child. And then he kissed the brown wings to show you that the moth was a friend. The goodness of the gardener who gave you jasmine flowers every evening. The ceramic bowl with painted tulips where you placed the flowers. The horrid monsoon rains that killed the houseboy. How long can a stanza sustain the scuffling of a city?”
― Kanza Javed, What Remains After a Fire: Stories