I.

When my cousin–who I have not seen in almost ten years, with whom I only exchange a handful of texts on birthdays and anniversaries–asks me when I will visit next I say, Not for a long time. Not ever again, if I can help it.
She tells me this is the city of my birth, that we are blood. We are your home, she says.
I tell her I cannot call that city my home. The city of my birth, the city where the homes I grew up in have been demolished and replaced by ugly gray towers and the trees that shaded the roads have been felled. I do not want to go back to a place I no longer recognise, although truth be told I could not recognise the city even when I lived in it, imprisoned as I was behind wrought-iron gates and by a mother's insurmountable fear of the outside world.
I cannot double back to this place. To streets I cannot name, to sit at dinner tables with family I no longer recognise. It would be too painful.

by Shehtaz Huq 

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'Ease': Sehri Tales selections, Day 13

II.

***True Story***
With a mother like mine, my self-confidence should've been bulletproof. But the pervasive misogyny in our society often got to me. So, even as I watched Ammu forge ahead, I despaired of ever emulating her.
She was fearless. How else could she have charged through a crowd on Kemal Ataturk Ave to confront two guards at a car-sales showroom who were menacing a female beggar, before the rest of us even realised *why* she'd told my father to stop the car?
As the men in the crowd gawked, my elegant mother yanked the sticks out of the guards' hands, shouting, "You let go of her immediately! How dare you touch her?"
"She threw a rock at us, Madam!"
The woman interjected, "They were shouting obscenities at me!"
"I don't care *what* she did - you have no business touching her!" Ammu insisted.
Shocked at having their weapons confiscated, the guards watched, speechless,  as my mother then turned to berate the gawkers for not standing up to these bullies. The crowd melted away in a minute.
Having freed the woman, who departed - hurling a few choice insults at the outraged guards - my mother calmly returned to the car, where the rest of us stood dumbfounded.
"Did you know what you'd let yourself in for when you married her?" I teased my mild-mannered father.
"I knew she was twice the woman of any other I'd met," he smiled. "If she's double the trouble, I'm willing to pay the price!"

by Farah Ghuznavi 

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'Total': Sehri Tales selections, Day 12

III.

Unexpected
To say the least
The slow regard of silent things
The putrid stench of malice
The tepid stare
And here
In one corner of the world
Everything I resent
I have grown used to flying close to the sun
Wings melting
Feathers ruffled
Cyclones and hurricanes  
No longer does she hunker down
That vicious clown
That witch of homeliness
Proven
"Time and Again"
Insidious lies pray fell  
Temple of arrogance
Breathing incense, holding fast
Letting the slow hours come at last
I have grown accustomed
To this awful dance
My morning
My noon
The tick-tock-boom
Here it comes
All that trouble
I know for certain
I always expect
Double  

by Mastura Tasnim