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I am not allowed a knife, but the National Treasure’s son is. He has a red-handled Swiss Army one that incorporates a can opener, a bottle opener, two saw blades and a detachable pair of tweezers. He shows it to me in his back yard, levering the primary blade out of the handle with his thumbnail. ‘I killed a bird with it last week,’ he tells me.

I consider myself somebody who watches a lot of reality television. Married at First Sight was once my chosen poison, and it is exactly as it sounds: a juicy social ‘experiment’ where, according to objective compatibility standards, two individuals are coupled, only to meet for the first time at the altar.

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My first ‘proper’ published piece of writing was a satirical rant on being an unemployable graduate (arts/law), published in the now-defunct Heckler section of the Sydney Morning Herald. Heckler didn’t pay, but I arrived at the scene before digital overtook print and was thrilled to see my name on the back page of a weekday edition. It was a couple of years after September 11. But the Australian media had its Muslim spokespeople, and I had no desire to be a mouthpiece in this excruciating moment. So in my debut mainstream piece, I didn’t write about being Muslim in an increasingly […]

How can I tell you where it began? The episodes. The doctor always asks that. ‘Did you take drugs? Did somebody slip you something?’ No. It began with water … a long time ago. With a whisper calling me to gaze deep into it, and then a lifetime of following through. To harness and evade it. To yield without faltering. To fall and rise with its rhythm. To transform, evacuate and fill. To flush and gather. To hold and to keep still without raising the temperature, the pH level, the salinity. To source all nourishment from its constant movement and my […]

As Estha stirred the thick jam he thought Two Thoughts, and the Two Thoughts he thought were these: (a) Anything can happen to Anyone. And (b) It’s best to be prepared. —Arundhati Roy When we were children, before she entered the nursing home, my great-grandmother, a nonagenarian, used to tell stories of the untimely deaths of people from her distant past. Driving past a hill with a crater missing from its side like a bite taken from a giant apple, she remembered a friend who had fallen into the middle of it during a picnic in her youth. He had […]

Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $100 for print or $50 for digital. DIGITAL PRINT

Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $100 for print or $50 for digital. DIGITAL PRINT

Twenty-three grams. When he was born, my baby weighed 23 grams. Only when the funeral home told me that seemingly minor detail about my son—the only tangible thing I ever knew about him—did the weight of what I had lost begin to sink in. Before that, in hospital, he was ‘remnants of conception’ and ‘foetal tissue’. My baby was anything the medical staff could call him that would protect them from the humanity of the situation. And in turn, their word play hid the truth from me too. The truth that, as we peered at the strange shape on the ultrasound […]

1. 1988. It is five years after the Ash Wednesday bushfires, which devastated many parts of Victoria, including the coastline of the Eastern Otways. It is also Australia’s Bicentennial year. A man in his early twenties sits on the step of a small fibro bungalow in the Aireys Inlet riverflat, in the thick shade of two towering old macrocarpa pines. Catching the light at his feet is a loamy brocade of russet pine needles, stretching across the yard to the sunroom of his house, one of the few buildings in the town to survive the fires.  In this yard there […]

Click here to access a Spotify playlist of Sevdah music compiled by the author   What I remember most is how yellow his skin was. He looked bilious to me, sickly. The wrinkles on his forehead were sharper because of the yellowish hue, and the way he sat in his wheelchair, hiding his amputated leg with a jacket, he seemed like he needed to get back to bed, not go on a holiday to Bosnia and Herzegovina. Like a typical wog family, we were all at the airport. My parents, my uncles and aunts, my cousins and their children—there were […]