It is the effect of scarcity; one’s rules of propriety make one thirst for the improper.

Growing up in Pakistan in the 1980s, I lived in the shadow of a tyrannical state.

Maybe we are all prospective migrants. The lines of national borders on maps are artificial constructs, as unnatural to us as they are to birds flying overhead. Our first impulse is to ignore them.

The gun of the father is always the undoing of the son.

Being a writer is not the point. Writing is.

For if there were a list of cosmic things that unite us, reader and writer, visible as it scrolled up into the distance, like the introduction to some epic science-fiction film, then shining brightly on that list would be the fact that we exist in a financial universe that is subject to massive gravitational pulls from states. States tug at us. States bend us. And, tirelessly, states seek to determine our orbits.

I don't know if I'm truly at home in any language.