Ramadan Sky

The single most common question I have been asked in the last ten years is that one. Are you married? I can tell you how to say that in five languages. I have been asked this question by taxi drivers, tuk tuk drivers, shoeshine boys, businessmen, women selling me perfume, students, strangers on the street.

When you are young, of course, it is easier to get away with almost anything, because of the perfect body and flawless skin and the belief that the future might bring anything at all. Fate could strike like magic and there you could be in another life that you never even dreamed about. When you get older, it’s harder. The disappointment starts to show through the cracks, and cheap clothes do not forgive an ageing body. It is only youth that can outshine poverty.

When someone hits you, you should not turn the other cheek – you should hit them back – twice as hard.

Life was stretching out its many long fingers of afternoons and evenings going nowhere and becoming lost forever, without a chance to mean anything.

Everywhere she turns she is assigned a sexual identity and is then denied the right to express it.

It is a matter of taking your time and having a clear idea about the final product before you start.

the sound of unlikeable, lonely people clamouring for attention in a wilderness of dust, smoke and disappointment.

The Arabic prayer ringing out over the Asian city, seeming to claim dominion over everything.

Our motorbikes roar like stallions, kicking up dust over the oily moon.

The strange thing is, you can feel it even when you have never even set eyes on a place before.