I’m going to Mendocino, again. Finding Voice, Community, and the Story of Tara Each summer, I return to Mendocino. Not just to the town, but to the Mendocino Coast Writers… Read more Mendocino: A Writer’s Creative Pilgrimage →
We had set out for the First Cliff Walk by Tissot, a metal walkway that clings to the mountainside and suspends visitors over a dizzying drop with panoramic views of the Eiger. It’s the kind of attraction made for Instagram—arms outstretched, smiles frozen over the void.
I wasn’t smiling.
I bought Brian at the Brunswick Bookshop, a modest place in London. There it was—this slim blue book that promised to carry me through the city differently. Predictably, perhaps. Comfortingly so.
Brian’s life is full of chosen predictability: he walks the same lunch spot, the same streets, the same shadows. I liked that. I needed it, even.
A woman centuries ahead of her time. By the time I visited Mexico City, that seed had grown into a quiet urgency. I wanted to find her—not just in books, but in the places where she once lived and wrote. What would it mean to walk her path, to touch the silence she once filled with words?
Created by French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle, she has floated above Zurich’s station since 1997—golden-winged, radiant, joyful. A figure from the artist’s “Nana” series, designed to offer protection and warmth to travelers. She holds two silver pitchers connected by red-lit wires—lifelines, the artist suggests—echoing the balance and patience of the Temperance Tarot card. In that busy hall, her presence was mythic and maternal.
Yes, she confirms, we did read stories of the Princesses of Andalusia. And true to herself, she texts us, her nieces—now in our sixties—to say she still thinks of us as princesses. It’s a gesture that makes us smile.
Anniqua was ready to fall in love. At one moment she was sitting beside Bourdain at a restaurant in the hills of Granada enjoying snails in almond sauce, and the very next in the Asturias feasting on a white bean and sausage stew called fabada. She had no doubt that whatever she ate at this restaurant in the railway station, it would cause “a flood of flavor” to explode within her. Wasn’t that what the tv shows had promised her?
“’Heaven is the place where you think of nowhere else’…I can believe that.” I tell Selma, quoting Pico Iyer.
“I think I’ve been able to find heaven wherever we’ve been, Chakwal, Faisalabad, Lahore, London, California…” I add.
Behind a moat that, in the heyday of Khmer power was filled with territorial crocodiles, was Angkor. For an instant, it felt as though a thousand years had not passed, as if Khmer culture still dominated Asia from Burma to as far south as Indonesia. As if the archaeologist Louis Delaporte had not removed the finest statues in 1873 for “the cultural enrichment of France,” the United States hadn’t bombed, and the Khmer Rouge hadn’t used temples for target practice. Angkor stood.
All this praying will make us thirsty, but I haven’t told anyone yet. I took the cook’s advice. I have fasted like a bird.
All around us the 2018 Frankfurt Book Fair was cavorting like a circus: six airplane hangar–sized halls assembled around an open-air agora swarming with everyone from green-haired cosplay kids to scarf-tucking intellectuals from Die Zeit.
As I progressed to middle school and the pangs of adolescence set in, I gradually became known as the agony aunt of letters. Boys in my class who bunked classes to avoid a test or simply avoid being scolded for not completing an important homework started demanding my attention. They wanted me to write their leave letters for them.
Giza was incredible. Our driver Mustafa handed us off to some bedouins, who took us out to the pyramids on camels. Watching a camel run is one of the most awkward things I have ever seen an animal do, and riding one while it’s happening is expectedly unpleasant, but man was it worth it.
At that moment, the two pieces of white bread burnt with grill marks, sandwiching a thick layer of golden sweet sticky kaya and slices of butter, paired with the chocolatey bitterness of the coffee and creaminess of the eggs were one of the most delicious and indulgent meals I have ever had.
Growing up when a Tizita song played, I would watch as the chattering adults slowly quieted down and enter a sort of trance.
From where I sit, I can see cacti from Mexico and other parts of Latin America. There are succulents from all over the world. I think to myself, these plants didn’t come here of their own free will. And I wonder how many did not survive this transplantation? I’m looking at the living, not the dead.
I am particularly fascinated by a three-story high, one-meter wide, Casa Escondida (Hidden House) which stands between a Carmelite convent and the Igreja do Carmo for priests. There is nothing spectacular about the tiny house that stands between them, except for the fact that it was made to prevent fraternizing between the nuns and the priests. I want to know more.
At each turn a hidden art gallery, a local ceramic store, a poetry inscription on the wall, a panoramic view of the Mediterranean.
Imagine walking down The Mall, the main thoroughfare in Rawalpindi since the British colonial days, heading west. Near the end, before The Mall becomes Peshawar Road, on your right, at the corner of the last intersection, is the white building with the light blue signboard outside the gate announcing “PAF INFORMATION AND SELECTION CENTER” in gold lettering, the Shaheen (شاہین – falcon) insignia prominent at the top, with there being no need, really, to spell out PAF because everyone knows, even people who cannot read, that it stands for Pakistan Air Force.
“First, tell me about the Visigoths while we walk to Rome.” Anniqua looks up at me from the old Roman road next to the mosque in Toledo, Spain.
