1. I never wanted to belong to anyone, yet here I am, belonging to everyone.
2. Everyone stops me, otherwise—those fields, rivers, mountains, the sky itself—nothing would exist but what I have written.
3. The girl who drowned sleep-laden eyes in kohl—why should she rush to become another man's wife? She is made only to be a lover.
4. Where will you record these few fasts of mine separately, O God? All those days I went without—can you even finish tallying them?
5. When I am gone, bury the letters I have written along with me. I will not send them—there is not a single soul in this world for them.
6. I have a desperate hunger to succeed. Only then can I take my leave.
7. You are happy, I know. But why don't you know that I am not?
8. I cannot tell if I am alive or dead. Tell me—can a dead person weep?
9. When I die, you will not wait for me; you will take another's hand and go. For that fear, I have stopped wishing for death.
10. The one whose name is written in alpona across the courtyard—there is no one to call her tenderly by her pet name.
# The Burial of the Uninspired Time wears certain robes—sometimes the fabric of morning, sometimes the dust of midnight. On such a day, when time had donned neither, when it hung suspended between memory and forgetting, I found myself at a peculiar funeral. The dead man was not celebrated. No throngs pressed against the chapel gates. The flowers that adorned his casket were not roses or jasmine, but the pale, modest blooms that grow in neglected corners—the kind no one bothers to name. Even his name, now that I think of it, seemed to slip from my mind the moment I read it on the headstone. He had been a writer, they said. Or rather, he had *wanted* to be a writer. The distinction, I realized, was everything. In life, he had filled countless notebooks with words that never quite became sentences, with ideas that never quite became thoughts. His desk, I imagined, must have been a graveyard of intentions. The priest—a man whose voice carried the weight of a thousand such ceremonies—spoke about the democratic nature of death. "It comes for the inspired and the uninspired alike," he intoned, and there was a gentleness in his words that seemed almost like mercy. But I wondered: had this man ever truly lived, or had he merely rehearsed the motions of living, always waiting for inspiration to descend like a benediction that never came? Had he been, in his way, already buried—entombed in his own hesitation? The curious thing about the uninspired is that they do not fail in any spectacular sense. They simply *fade*. There is no grand tragedy in it, no Promethean struggle. There is only the quiet accumulation of unlived moments, the gentle erosion of possibility. As the earth fell upon his casket—a soft, inevitable whisper—I understood that this funeral was not for a man, but for the multitude of selves he might have been. We were burying not what he had done, but what he had not. And perhaps that is the truest death of all: not the cessation of the heartbeat, but the withering of the spark before it ever had the chance to burn.
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