Notes from Saturdays

  I don't know the scientific terms but the title is trying to be clever; having two personalities for us is not a disorder, it's the very order, the only way we know & live, it's the only way anyone we know lives.  We grew up dancing with our cousins in parties and praying behind our teachers religiously. We smuggled VHS Bollywood movies, Disney cartoons and New Year's shows with neighbours and denied having heard of satellite dishes planted in our back yards. I remember my sisters would wrap the VHS in a black plastic grocery bag, I would hide it under my T-shirt, tucked into the waist band of my shorts & I would cycle as fast as I could to deliver it to the neighbour 5 houses up the street in exchange for a new one our guests hadn't seen. I also remember pulling annual all nighters in mosques with the same sisters holding the holy book over our heads & praying in repentance. I wasn't quite sure what I was regretting or confessing. Some years I tho...

  The last time Summer was a different season must have been the last years of University. I never took summer courses. I have no idea what I did all Summer. Probably taught more classes, watched more movies, slept worse -it got terribly humid- and felt more useless and lazy. When I was a kid, Summer did not begin on the 4th month of Earth's passage around Sun. It began with the last school exam. Some years, there would be a period of limbo between the last exam & the day a parent came back from school with your exam results in their pockets, and then... Summer began, 3 months of freedom! I had a cardboard box full of story books. The unboxing ceremony marked the first day of every Summer; I would pack away the school books and notebooks, dust my shelf and stack the story books in order of size. Some years the shelf would be the bottom compartment of the standing monstrosity in our shared bedroom -a hybrid between a coat hanger and a bureau- and other years the window sill or t...