Life is going at a leisurely pace right now. Finally! I wake up in the morning and quickly finish up my household chores and settle down with a book. Since I moved to Dubai, only in the past month or so did I actually feel, ‘this could be called home’.

I had been feverishly busy since last November. A new country and myriad different nationalities hobnobbing together, everything had to start from a scratch. Getting a license (Alhamdulilah, got it in one go), getting to know the roads (I still get lost), and worse still learning to cook! Yikes. My biggest achievement was to be able to make Aloo Ghost and Pullao that looked normal and could be eaten without a salt-attack.

Six months after the move, I visited Pakistan and blissfully lapped up everything from the rain to the trees, food to the endless wedding invitations. Coming back and resetting my self into the mundane: cook, clean, eat, sleep then cook, clean, eat, sleep; I felt my life slipping away. Amazingly I had calmed down. I let it slip. There were no tears, no fiery outbursts, insecurities or such. I just said to myself, ‘so it is destined to be this way’. How easy things can be when you let the current take you, devour you without protest.

So the very next day, that I uttered the magical phrase, by some queer twist of fate did I find Abez sitting in my lounge, scribbling a few addresses, edging me on to write. The encounter lasted hardly fifteen minutes. Is my old self being resuscitated! I do not want to comment. I just spun into action as if bewitched. I read up blogs sometimes laughing sometimes feeling awful, nevertheless enjoying literal concoctions that others had put online.

I just want to thank Abez for giving a dying flicker in me, hope. Whether it lasts or not is not the question.