Status Updates From The Book of Everlasting Things

“Firdaus had this habit of collecting and pressing leaves. It was never flowers, always leaves, and I never asked why that was. But for a long time after I arrived in France, I wished to have perished in the fire with my family, mixing in with the soil of Lahore, so that maybe one day I could have been reborn as a stem or a root or a leaf to be picked up and cared for by her.”

“ No, it seems rather pathetic even for me to be talking this way, all these years later, as an old man. To want to be remembered by someone. To want to matter. To want to know, to need to know, that no matter how long it’s been—days or months or years—someone could still be thinking of you. It makes me sad.”
“But this is love”

“One can leave a place completely, and yet the place can refuse to leave you. For so many years after Partition, everything real seemed to slip so easily out of my fingers; I had no grasp on the ground beneath my feet or the sky above my head…”

“But he had realized that history was never just about the events that had once transpired. It was also about who narrated the events and who heard them; who wielded time, fashioned the years, lived, or resisted them; and who ultimately was bequeathed the archive.”

“But if we remain alive beyond the war, how will we remember this land? What stories will we tell?”