Dual Devastation & Eid 2025

Salaam & hello sis,

I hope you’ve been well - Eid Mubarak if you were celebrating! I hope you had a blessed time with your family, friends and loved ones. It was a hard one though, wasn’t it? This was the second Ramadan that Israel continued to bomb fasting, praying, worshipping Palestinians as they slept, starving because Israel has continuously prevented aid from getting into Gaza, the prison which has just become a shooting range.

Yes. This is where I am at. Heart-broken and angry just like so many of us. I cry, like many of you, almost every single night.

I’ve been away from this space for quite a while. I will call it the Dual Devastation that wrecked me for a while. Dual Devasation refers to the personal and public tragedies I have been struggling with over the last few years that I only now have the courage to address and write about.

The first of the devastations was having my best friend in the whole world, my beloved husband, fall very, very ill during COVID and almost die - twice. As if that wasn’t enough of a test for us at a time that he was hospital-bed bound and every visit was a battle with nurses and doctors trying to establish strict protocols due to the Pandemic, we found that the man who returned home from hospital after almost 3 months of dealing with death was not the man who had left home to go to the hospital. In essence, my husband never came home. Instead, a man who felt the marriage was no longer a fit for him came home and we tried for 3 years to make it work. We failed. No wait—I failed. Despite loving him more than life, I was unable to show up for him in ways that he needed and I feel deep regret and remorse even now. It’s been a journey, folks! Hang in there, I will write more about that.

I did say ‘dual’ so here’s the second half of all that pain: while dealing with sudden separation and divorce in 2023, still reeling from becoming single after 10 years of loving someone so much I forgot myself, Israel decided that it would punish all Palestinians for having the audacity to want freedom and for challenging their imprisonment, the disappearances of their men, the torture of their loved ones, the rape of those in jails, the murder of their children in the streets of Gaza, their unlawful treatment in West Bank and the UNRELENTING APARTHEID that Israel has subjected Palestinians to for 76 years. No one is thrilled about the attacks on Israel, but hey, who started it?? Let’s keep in mind that if you try to steal the land from underneath folks, they might want to let you know how they feel about it and THEY HAVE THE RIGHT TO DO SO UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW!

Now, 18 months into Israel’s brutality, we can all see where unrighteous rage, unchecked racism and white supremacy can lead. We can now all see how what goes around, well, eventually it comes around.

For some odd reason, a lot of folks felt that it was okay for Palestinians to undergo such a savage genocide - almost like a kind concession to Israel - can you see the horrific and macabre thinking behind letting Israelis slaughter Palestinians wholesale “so they can have a home”? You literally would be rationalizing GENOCIDE and ETHNIC CLEANSING. I think for a lot of silent people, reflecting on any of this feels deeply unsettling because it means confronting the deeply held biases against Arabs, Muslims and BIPOC folk in general.

Don’t get too comfortable in your bubbles, folks. This suffering is not just “written for Palestinians” - maybe a taste of something like religious epiphany is on its way for all of us: atheist, agnostic, devotee and dunce!

So here I am. Showing up here with all of this on my heart and mind. I’ll keep sharing. And I’m letting you know I can’t be all sweet and kind these days because little ones (not one, not two, THOUSANDS) are being slaughtered in their beds in Palestine by IOF cowards, are being killed in Congo’s mines by Rwandan thugs paid for by Israel and USA and being starved and bombed by the USA in Yemen.

There’s no time to waste, dear sis. These are the days. These are the days that define us and we can’t let evil frighten us from speaking. I may finally put up some videos addressing some of the pain I am feeling.

I wish you a heart capable of holding the hurt and still finding ways to offer love to the world - I’m working on it too - keeping something soft even as the world keeps hardening my edges— so keep me in your prayers, and I will keep you in mine.

Peace/Salaam

Your sister ATS

She Made Me Cry Today and It Was the Sweetest Sadness Ever…

I wonder what makes me cry when I see her innocent, brooding, thoughtful face, her kind eyes and gentle, shy smile. I cry for her softness that the world will undoubtedly seek to toughen with gleeful cruelty. I cry for the innocence and gentleness in me that stole away somewhere like a victim flees a war-torn country as I battled the forces that demanded I restructure who I was.

I cry that I can not protect the innocent of the world. That all the prayers I make, the rosaries I read, the heartfelt rushes of love I feel will do nothing to stave off the forces that will tear asunder the souls of innocents. That my sadness is in vain. Perhaps it is a sign of lack of trust in the Divine, who through trials brings us all to surrender and submission. I want the sweet to remain untarnished,untrammeled by this world.

Yet I know that nothing but soul-sifting in the sieve of this world can find out the inner gold of a human spirit - and I must submit to the wisdom of this even if I can’t bear the thought of the pain. The One who subjects us to this suffering is also who holds the wounded in His loving hand–is all Knowledge, all Power and all Mercy too. My love for creation is as limited as I am in all ways, but I yearn to be an echo of God’s Infinite Mercy in this world. To know, be wise in the light of a loving knowing, and yet strive to preserve the awe and wonder that shines in the eyes of the child in all of us.

I am too unsubtle to be illuminated by any such Divine wisdom. But the heart in me is a bucking, raring creature who wants innocence and illumination both, avaricious thing that it is!

But is such an ask above my spiritual standing? Is such a thing even possible? Ya Rabb!

Holding my heart these days and sending love to anyone who needs it,

Peace,

Asifa

So Much More Yet…

The growth is in my own awareness – that there is so much still to reach, to feel, so much more yet to do.  At times, the contours of what I am feel like the worn-out grooves in a piece of furniture accustomed to holding me. At other times, I feel I have to become a stranger to myself to truly know who I am.  In my willful estrangement from myself, I can reach out and experience intimacy with my own thoughts anew – all here is alive and crackling with electricity.

When you shake hands with the stranger you are, when you move hesitantly to give that embrace, you know, the one that says: ‘welcome home, welcome home, again’ –  it is likely that the floodgates of feeling will be flung open, that numbness will hurriedly pack-up and bid you adieu, and joy…joy will say:

‘Thank you for letting me in. I was waiting at the doorstep for so long, I almost thought you’d forgotten me!’

You will reassure yourself, one arm over the shoulder of your hesitating visitor: ‘I didn’t hear you knock, dear old friend, but I’m here now and I’m ready and there’s so much more yet for us...’

A couch shared by you and joy, some tea or coffee, flowing and flowing like the heart-to-heart between you both.

Oh, all that there is yet to discover! So…who is at your door, waiting? Who needs the embrace?

Peace and Love always,

Tabassum

A Complicated Affair of Words

For as long as I can remember, I have hesitated to formally acknowledge my writing. I’m not saying I wasn’t writing, because I often was, but rather that the relationship between me and my writing was, well, an aloof one.

We have been like two strangers sharing a space but never interacting with one another except in brief, passing acknowledgements when encountering each other…never pausing to examine the crux of why we are even together at all!

There’s this Urdu word which I really love for the way it sounds and resonates :‘ajnabi. It means ‘stranger/alien’. This word comes to my mind when I think of how my writing and I have co-existed, side by side and yet the distance and gulf between us as wide as we could manage while still being in each other’s orbits.

And that’s just it. It didn’t matter where I was with my writing, or where it was with me, we were always circling each other in a mysterious dance of a shared fate that was decreed before I was even born.

This complicated state of affairs has been the status quo for so long, I almost let myself cave to a life where my writing was the roommate I wanted no one to acknowledge was anything more than a barely rent-paying annoyance.

But things are changing, thank God. I’d been so good at planting word seeds in hidden corners that I stopped believing I could make a garden of words that others might want to take a stroll in, one that my heart could be proud of—until now.

While new possibilities for my writing have emerged (and this has been mostly delightful), there are days that involve the painful unlearning of patterns long-established and detrimental to my writing health. And still, nothing is more painful than the regret of having ignored my writing for so many years—it makes this new pain of growth a good kind. The kind that has a releasing effect, inspires seedlings to thrive in sunnier spots and the kind that makes it possible to hope for a full blooming garden one day.

Until that day, patient reader, you’ll find me here, planting language in little clay pots.

I welcome you, whole-heartedly to this, the sunny windowsill of my writing hopes, where the array of clay pots, full of tiny expressive sprouts and word-seedlings, are being nurtured with the sun and water of my attention and love…

That’s what I needed, and my writing too!

How about you?

Love & Peace always,

Tabassum

Take Two

Hi there—Salam and welcome!

I’m embarrassed. As the name suggests, this is ‘take two’ of setting up a website, my website, and sharing it with the world. Yup—it took that long for this site to go up officially.

You’ll see posts here from 2021, early 2021 when I was full of a new and burgeoning energy, a nascent and fledgling belief in myself, shaky on toddler legs unused to walking--yet there I was trying to run a marathon on those shaky legs! I lost steam quickly, the doubts set in and I gave up pretty quickly. ‘Who am I kidding?’ I thought to myself, ‘you can’t do this, it’s beyond you! And who are you anyway?’

I recognize now that many of my doubts had been hanging around for a long, long time and knew just how to wrestle confidence out of me. But circumstances in the past two years didn’t help my creative life either. During the Pandemic, my husband became gravely ill and I nearly lost him. His recovery has been a long two year battle and my days and nights became about him. How could I focus on my writing when the one I loved most was struggling with a life-altering experience?

No one talks about how the illness of a loved one can impact everything in your life. How your dreams can become dust, disappear into the ether the moment you realize that someone you love, maybe more than anything in the whole world, is direly in need of you.

So while I continued to work on bits and pieces of writing, this site stayed dormant. I paid for it and watched it sit month after month. I simply couldn’t bring myself to work on it or the podcast.

The beauty of time is that it passes. And that with it’s passing, healing also comes. It is now September 2022 and I’m feeling readier, steadier and more confident about myself as a writer. I know that this little piece of me that I’ve been hanging on to will only grow if I plant it in the soil of the wider world.

So, Bismillah, in the sacred name of the Divine, here goes!

It’s not much right now dear reader…but for this gal, just getting this going is a big deal and I know, this is just baby steps. That’s how we all start, right?

I’m looking forward to growing so much here. And I hope you’ll keep stopping by to chat and share –

I’ll be looking forward to it!

Peace and love always,

Tabassum