by Sabyn Javeri Jillani Eve was thrown out of heaven because she was a temptress, Sita had a trial by fire because she crossed a line, Lot’s wife (who doesn’t even get a mention by her own name) was turned into a pillar of salt because she was disobedient, but Mary was a saint for…

by Sabyn Javeri Jillani In April 2020, Arundhati Roy wrote in the Financial Times, “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine the world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” Her words reminded me of the state of Barzakh,…

by Sabyn Javeri Jillani Sometimes it’s the anatomical heart, a muscle the size of a fist, pumping furiously to keep us alive, at other times it is the beating of the metaphorical heart that leads us astray. Fact or fiction, real or symbolic, the heart is central to the story of our lives. The heart is…

by Sabyn Javeri Jillani ‘To be a woman is to be an actress’, writes Susan Sontag in her 1972 essay The Double Standards of Ageing. She is referring to the beauty norms that expect women to freeze ageing while levying no such expectations on men. As the popular saying goes, men become wiser with age…

by Sabyn Javeri Jillani In the early 2000s, when I was expecting my first child, I became acutely aware of ‘skin’. Not only had my skin stretched beyond imagination without splitting, but it had taken on a dark glow that made my brownness stand out amidst the light-skinned London neighbourhood I lived in. Pregnancy cravings…

by Sabyn Javeri Jillani Now that we are witnessing a world that has withdrawn indoors, many people are reading plague literature, discussing Camus and Defoe, and reflecting on the nature of fear and contagion. But there is another kind of literature that lies neglected: stories that reflect the disconnect and dejection of seclusion -the literature…