Featured Essays
The Face of Miscarriage
The New York Times
The first time I’d miscarried I was a 24-year-old newlywed and, because of a scheduling mix-up, I’d had to wait two days for a D & C. While I mourned the loss, I found it macabre and scary to be carrying death. Afterward, I was sad but mostly relieved. Since then I’d had several very early onset miscarriages between two live births, but nothing so traumatic.
Now I was pregnant again. ..continue
Plating Memory
The New York Times
I grew up an immigrant child, spending my formative years in three countries, England, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. In a time before keeping in touch was an internet call away, I’d have to say goodbye forever to bedrooms, to classrooms, to friends. I learned to rely for continuity on two constant companions: books and food. ..continue
When My Authentic is Your Exotic
LITERARY HUB
You need to rethink food in your novel, an American editor once told me. Would my Pakistani-American family really be eating so much pizza? Food being one of the easiest ways to familiarize or de-familiarize a culture, the message I got was that while white Americans eat as much pizza as they want, Pakistani-Americans eat something else, preferably something more interesting and spicy, like pizza with Tabasco or green chillies (which might be exotic, but would be authentic to me, because that is how I eat my pizza). In any case, I found myself caught between the authentic and the exotic, wondering what do when my authentic was someone’s exotic. ..continue
We Are the Ink: Keynote Speech at U.S. Citizens Inaugration Ceremony
The Bitter Southerner
Thank you, Judge Amy Totenberg, for your introduction and welcome citizens and guests. As a novelist, my trade is to illuminate the universals across time and cultures — to connect worlds, to weave communal stories from our individual lives — and it is my immense honor to be standing here before you all in this capacity. Stories are the blood running through the veins of life. Stories connect. Stories bridge divides. Stories remind us of all that we have in common. We are the stories we tell and our bonds are the stories we share. ..continue
Heirloom Homes
apartment therapy
When I was around fifteen years old, I found myself at a drapery shop standing at a glass counter as my mother sifted through swatches for curtain material. This was the 1980s and we resided in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia where my mother, an anesthesiologist by vocation, lavishly indulged her hobby for collecting loose fabrics for future home decorating projects. ..continue
Good Girls Don’t Propose
BuzzFeed
I am in my last semester of college and this particular evening, a snow-sodden January in Maryland, my roommate Cora and I are drinking hot chocolate with extra mini-marshmallows. Our TV is tuned to a rerun of George Cukor’s 1939 film The Women. Cora and I both love this film in which, for all that men are chattered about ad nauseam and fretted over and pined for, not a single man is given a single moment of screen time. “Sort of like life,” I say. “Even when they’re not in the room, they’re in the room.” Cora has been regaling me with tales of the AOL dating account her parents have given her for Christmas. The Facebook phenomenon is more than a decade away; cell phones and email are not yet ubiquitous. So I ask, “What is AOL dating?” “A blind date site on the World Wide Web,” Cora says. “Like putting an ad in a newspaper.” I scrunch up my nose. “What?” says Cora. “Back home such ads are associated with desperation.” ..continue