You are currently viewing the stories for “April 2017.”
A 2010 article from Newsweek made international news with the headline, “Pakistan is the World’s Most Dangerous Country.” Growing up in Pakistan, I rarely experienced moments of panic. Pakistan could be dangerous—like when a bomb went off near my school—but I felt safe in my suburban neighborhood. When I decided to move to the United States for college, I traded [...]
Sitting in the sunset in the middle of Central Park, the unfamiliar boy and I huddled together in the growing chill of late October, using the excuse of needing bodily warmth to search for some other, more abstract warmth of feeling. We had spent the whole day exploring the Met Museum, and afterwards walked around the park trying to tell [...]
My father took me to the Coney Island Freak Show every summer growing up. My artist Dad seemed unfettered from his day job as a social worker, sketching subway riders on the hour train ride from the Lower East Side, where we lived surrounded by junkies and prostitutes wandering derelict streets. On the boardwalk, he had directed my eyes to [...]
It was well after midnight. My father and I sat on the stoop outside my new apartment on Thompson Street eating burgers in the late August heat, unable to get in. A cockroach scuttled beneath my feet and up the small half-wall to where my fries lay. “Ugh! Why?!” I jumped to the opposite side of the stoop. We had [...]
