https://monsoons-blog.github.io/tags/prose/ Recent content in Prose on Rumuuz Hugo -- gohugo.io en-US Sat, 16 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://monsoons-blog.github.io/notes/when_the_mirror_melts/ Sat, 16 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://monsoons-blog.github.io/notes/when_the_mirror_melts/ Roze is an activist, poet and programmer living in Queens. During their college years studying computer science, they took heritage Urdu courses, never expecting to stumble into the world of Urdu poetry. The following essay explores four verses — from Sauda and Ghalib — and how they speak to love, annihilation, divinity, and the fragile mirrors through which we attempt to know the world. I saw my Lord with the eye of the heart. https://monsoons-blog.github.io/prose/remembering/ Sat, 22 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://monsoons-blog.github.io/prose/remembering/ Mama: I am afraid of reading the world without my mother. She is my portal of entry into a realm in which Urdu and Punjabi dance without missing a single step. There has been no word too hard, no sentence too dense, no book, play, movie, or show that mama has not been able pull down from its perch and sing back to me in a tune my ears can make music of. https://monsoons-blog.github.io/prose/clay/ Sun, 03 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://monsoons-blog.github.io/prose/clay/ Kara’s music had struck me in a way unlike anything I’d heard. Her voice seemed to me both apologetic and confident at once. It also carried with it a familiar accent; the way she pronounced her d’s and t’s reminded me of the old film sets in the Northeast, in which a character might speak with a kind of Robert De Niro accent. I couldn’t help but feel this was artificial, because in her conversational voice, the accent was nowhere to be found. https://monsoons-blog.github.io/prose/aa/ Fri, 03 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://monsoons-blog.github.io/prose/aa/ For three minutes, twenty-one players at Arcade America watched Sameer convulse on the floor. Witnesses recall Sameer Shaheed, a 12-year-old refugee boy, calling out before the time of his death. Sameer had been playing Stormhill, a popular virtual reality game set in a fictionalized version of his home country. “I remember being scared at the time. His words sounded like the bad guys from Stormhill,” said Lyola Thomas, a frequent customer at Arcade America.