No.

I want to explain. I’ve never meant to be callous. I want to spare your feelings.Somehow I knew this was coming. It’s the way you spoke to me. I tried dissuading you. I ignored your messages. I hoped you’d realise that I was not with you that way inclined. If I could redirect your question to someone who would readily accept…  You say to forgive you if you are out of line. I respect you for asking. I do. My vanity is not flattered in refusing you. But I could never possibly… No. I can’t. I won’t. I just can’t. It’s just a word. Monosyllabic. A shake of the head. Thank you for asking. I wish I could be more delicate. I take no pride in refusing you. My head is bowed, my eyes sombre, my heart breaking for you.

LIFE be not proud.

DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
John Donne

All roads lead to Johannesburg. Rome had its day and the other half have their helipads. It's Johannesburg that's captured the direction of the physically mobile; the gridlocked will bear testimony. Roads from Johannesburg are altogether another matter, why they exist is the bane of all philosophy. The road to Vereeniging, for instance, stretches interminably long. Frustratingly so. It's not the type of road given to inspire a need to press forward exhilaratingly. Instead, it juts out from underneath the car, mile after mile, inspiring a fierce rhetoric against purpose and direction, "Why am I here?", is the adult gloss of, "Are we there yet?"

Just a few metres ahead of the board boldly pointing the way to Roshnee, a place of darkness if ever there was, a patch of land has been ravaged by a veld fire. The pine trees and bushes fencing that land have been exorcised, exposing a cemetery, lonely in all its overcrowding. The stark, blunt reality of a cemetery, on a road to Nowhere Slowly is roughly jolting. At first glance, from a moving car, it seems some boor chose to dump a truck's fill of litter on the graves. The desecration is about to incite an indictment on society until another look proves the colour not to be Coca Cola red; but rather deep carnation red. The flowers on the graves, their colour, seem altogether out of place between the grimness of death and the black remnants of the fire.

It's life that should not be proud. There's little sense in fencing away death.

For sudden Joys, like Griefs, confound at first — Robert Wild

There are people in our lives, they are not the everyday fundamentals, they are a lot like film extras with occasional starring roles, but the knowledge that they are there, a phone call or road trip away enriches our lives. And just as often, these people are snatched away from us. We do not question His will, His master plan, we must learn to roll will it, be one with it, but there is that watershed moment in which we realise the vacuum created by the loss of just one person.

My younger sister is generally the better liked of the two of us among family friends. She's more chatty, more boisterous and generally better at ease. But I was Uncle Anver's favourite, so much so, he wanted his son and I to get married. We were momentarily foolish enough to like his idea and think we liked each other, thank the Lord he met Mary soon thereafter. One night , while Uncle Anver sat chatting to Mum and Dad, I offered him a chocolate and belatedly realising his diabetes told him he couldn't have it after all, he teasingly unwrapped it and told me one chocolate wouldn't make much of a difference. Four days later he was shot dead on his way home.

Uncle Hoosen was a business associate of my dad's, during our trips to Mpumalanga we looked him up, became family friends and long after the business relationship became redundant, the familial relationship stayed. During a trip out east two years ago, I remember standing on the upper deck of a restaurant on the banks of the Sabi river in the Kruger National Park. Together with my brother, we watched the hippos in the river below, a consensus of silence between us. He passed away this morning. I haven't found the space to cry, it's a little surreal, some part of me still expects him to be there when next we're out in the Kruger.

To Allah we indeed return.

Living up to words

"Here might not be a permanent, but is there a possibility?
Or does it remain a far-fetched utopia?"

I haven't felt this way since I was a wee lass getting onto a roller coaster for the very first time. I was eight, or nine, and my (still) fantastically, brilliantly, awesome friend, Fatima sat beside me. I think it was a first for both of us, the rest were better schooled in the disambiguation of the world-out-there. We were only just catching on. It was a primary school field trip to Gold Reef City, but I can recall the way I felt as if it were yesterday, a mixture of terror and excitement clenched like a flyweight's fist in the pit of my stomach.

A minute later, I got off that roller coaster, Fatima and I smiled at each other and rejoined the queue, "Please Sir, a little more of the same.' But that second time, exciting though it may be, never lives up to the first. Roller coasters lose their potential to exhilarate after a while, so much so that you can be sitting on a mega-roller coaster and yawning during the biggest dip. Walking away from the theme park you eventually realise how wonderful it is to be a child, experiencing the world for the very first time.

But then years later, it happens again. I hold the controls to this roller coaster. Fatima's not beside me yet, but the adjacent seat is filled with a number of great people, so many of them, friends, and I'm grateful for here and now.

There's still a child of the world within.

Writing on Papyrus

'Most editors are failed writers. But, then again, so are most writers.' T S Eliot

I've spent the past few nights, burning the midnight oil, etching my undistinguished, ordinary scrawls onto papyrus, hallowed by history and steeped in significance. I remember reading some sort of writer's manual a while ago, not so much a self-help bible as much as a writer's advice to wannabes, where that author cautioned that in order to call yourself a writer, you actually have to have written something, that's all it takes, write something. To the uninhibited it's obvious, but to those who constantly seek reinvention in self and art it's not always that simple. And as I copied down grossly misspelled names into my own script, trying my damndest to keep the lipstick on the less refined form, I was writing in the very basic sense of the word.

And it is to papyrus that we can trace our first dabbling in orthography, so that from hieroglyphics we developed sufficiently enough for one to go back to papyrus and use the Latin script to write names from Greek, Arabic and isiZulu. And in there somewhere, I've seen a sign, like a light on a mountain for the forlorn traveller in darkest night, that just as writing as an act of language, developed from hieroglyphics on papyrus in Ancient Egypt, to being coupled with reading to being a statistic of the efficacy of governance, I may develop enough to be comfortable with my own writing.

I've been unwavering in my refusal of the term writer as a professional title, I haven't written enough to justify the title as per that holy grail, and immediately after my undergrad I was uneasy with writing for money, I remember writing in my journal (ironically enough) that it was a kind of prostitution I was undertaking. And now I have a magazine to run, to the few people in the world who didn't heretofore hear it from me, consider it a trumpet-blaring, scroll unfolding kind of announcement. I have this magazine, this title of editor and the work of a writer. And it's a whole lot like writing on papyrus