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Authors: Ghalib Islam
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at film festivals around the world and become hit Hollywood action flicks. Through my conversations with Niramish, I was developing my own understanding of the movie studio whose presence had increased exponentially since my fatherâs youth. Meanwhile, the glossolalist stranger remained affixed to my fatherâs shoulders.
My grandmother mother aunt were too busy running a business which by then was blossoming: they couldnât take down the clothes they put up on the racks fast enough to sell, to customers who now not only came from around the city but from throughout the country. Chaya had begun to design her own line of trousers-shirts; with a keen eye for style, she would grow to influence a generation of designers. Except know this: at the end of the day, when they looked in the cash register, there would be nothing but a few crumpled bills and small change. At first they cried thief, but who could have, it was only they three who ran things, and the air of mutual suspicion that was created only served to ensure that none of them were responsible. They updated books three times a day, and the figures never lied: despite having moved morestock than ever, they were hemorrhaging capital at a rate that would put them out of business very soon. But it was like that all over the unnameable country: no matter how hard people tried to make a living, they found themselves sucked bloodless, as if a mysterious source were filling its coffers with their hardearned.
THE ANNUNCIATION OF NIRAMISH
At that time, many things were beginning to reveal their secret characters. A team of American archaeologists and geographers, who had come with the first staff of The Mirror , had spent a decade and a half wandering the hinterland plains, penned between the Karkaars, an invisible southern border, and the Gulf of Eden by a swarming dustbowl, which did not give them a momentâs respite and followed them everywhere they turned, one morning stumbled upon a bubbling alcove of ash, where the air unexpectedly cleared. Anthony Sentinel, the leader of the group, later said he had seen a photograph of hell exactly like it in an encyclopedia series he used to look at as a child, and the measurements they took with their instruments, which had not suffered despite all the years of dusty wandering, confirmed it was an asphalt bay almost as ancient as the earth itself. Within it, they found strange flagellant insects and amino acid series that existed nowhere else on the planet, not to mention microorganisms that were subsisting on heavy metals and toxic chemicals.
I am inclined to believe, Sentinel reported to the BBC, that the unnameable country still contains traces of the globe at its youngest stage, and is therefore the oldest country on earth, though his comments did not result in an upgrade of our observer status in the United Nations. It is important to note the crewmen came back to America and found that no trace of their lives remained the same; several of them committed suicide.
At home, meanwhile, it turned out my aunt Chaya was not pregnant after all.
Donât want a baby, it looks like that; he donât want a baby, it looks like that, she said as a way of explaining when I asked her why she had her arms clasped around me, why she was saying take good care of yourself, Hedayat/ who was the man that also didnât want a baby, Chaya Khala/ why neither my mother nor my father would talk about Aunt Shadow/ why are you crying, Khala/ by name after her departure, but at that time there were other disappearances as well in my life.
Most important is the topic I wish I could avoid, the continued diaphanous transformation of Niramish, as if by laying down vast tracts of silence I would be able to change the reality of that time or the course of events that followed. The matter remains, however, that Niramish did die, and at the height of his powers as the Electrician.
Take it to One Arm, they would say, when the stylus of
My grandmother mother aunt were too busy running a business which by then was blossoming: they couldnât take down the clothes they put up on the racks fast enough to sell, to customers who now not only came from around the city but from throughout the country. Chaya had begun to design her own line of trousers-shirts; with a keen eye for style, she would grow to influence a generation of designers. Except know this: at the end of the day, when they looked in the cash register, there would be nothing but a few crumpled bills and small change. At first they cried thief, but who could have, it was only they three who ran things, and the air of mutual suspicion that was created only served to ensure that none of them were responsible. They updated books three times a day, and the figures never lied: despite having moved morestock than ever, they were hemorrhaging capital at a rate that would put them out of business very soon. But it was like that all over the unnameable country: no matter how hard people tried to make a living, they found themselves sucked bloodless, as if a mysterious source were filling its coffers with their hardearned.
THE ANNUNCIATION OF NIRAMISH
At that time, many things were beginning to reveal their secret characters. A team of American archaeologists and geographers, who had come with the first staff of The Mirror , had spent a decade and a half wandering the hinterland plains, penned between the Karkaars, an invisible southern border, and the Gulf of Eden by a swarming dustbowl, which did not give them a momentâs respite and followed them everywhere they turned, one morning stumbled upon a bubbling alcove of ash, where the air unexpectedly cleared. Anthony Sentinel, the leader of the group, later said he had seen a photograph of hell exactly like it in an encyclopedia series he used to look at as a child, and the measurements they took with their instruments, which had not suffered despite all the years of dusty wandering, confirmed it was an asphalt bay almost as ancient as the earth itself. Within it, they found strange flagellant insects and amino acid series that existed nowhere else on the planet, not to mention microorganisms that were subsisting on heavy metals and toxic chemicals.
I am inclined to believe, Sentinel reported to the BBC, that the unnameable country still contains traces of the globe at its youngest stage, and is therefore the oldest country on earth, though his comments did not result in an upgrade of our observer status in the United Nations. It is important to note the crewmen came back to America and found that no trace of their lives remained the same; several of them committed suicide.
At home, meanwhile, it turned out my aunt Chaya was not pregnant after all.
Donât want a baby, it looks like that; he donât want a baby, it looks like that, she said as a way of explaining when I asked her why she had her arms clasped around me, why she was saying take good care of yourself, Hedayat/ who was the man that also didnât want a baby, Chaya Khala/ why neither my mother nor my father would talk about Aunt Shadow/ why are you crying, Khala/ by name after her departure, but at that time there were other disappearances as well in my life.
Most important is the topic I wish I could avoid, the continued diaphanous transformation of Niramish, as if by laying down vast tracts of silence I would be able to change the reality of that time or the course of events that followed. The matter remains, however, that Niramish did die, and at the height of his powers as the Electrician.
Take it to One Arm, they would say, when the stylus of
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