Wherever We Are, Among Each Other: On Ramadan, Writing and Returns

Bandukwala, M. & Wani, S., (2026) “Wherever We Are, Among Each Other: On Ramadan, Writing and Returns”, The Hythe Review 1(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/thr.29429

“For poets and translators alike, to make a home out of estrangement, out of discomfiture, over and over again—this remains our only task.” —Rahat Kurd, “Elegaic Moods”

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since you moved, i moved too. movement is one tall word that contains within it so many others: meandering, migration, melancholy, momentum. i stack them like the boxes in our new home.

it is ramadan and i am alone in this country. i don’t fast without community because it doesn’t make sense. none of the months are easier than the next. when i come to the page, it shows me so much of my life is subterranean now, and i wonder if that’s the process of time. a burial. heather christle, in her latest book, calls writing about writing “a bad habit I have now picked up” and it makes me laugh. i am always trying to write and i never really know why.

i want to begin with a question about poetry and return but i don’t know how to phrase it. the feeling of what poetry was has changed, or maybe, just gotten wider. in a podcast i listened to on a long drive home, an astrologer describes the soul of a child as having dissipated. “it’s easier for children to die,” she says. “it’s easier for them to let go of this form and become part of spirit again.” she’s talking to a mourning mother, who can’t really feel his presence anymore.

of course we arrive at grief again, grief already, always grief. even with love, even when you arrive at the place you were meant to be, there is still grief. in triumph as steadily as in failure, it’s return.

what will poetry become now? for the rest of our lives? at chai the other day, we discussed new directions. community connections. what it means to uphold others. but truthfully, i’m scared. what if this endless and ineffable thing, this thing that has guided me for so long, disappears?

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two years ago i moved cities. it was, perhaps, the first move made with an intention of i’m doing this because i want to. like you, i’ve lived in many places. i’ve filled pages with poems about a deep longing for the people and homes i’ve had to leave.

but this move wasn’t crossing continents and oceans for a passport or entering a university’s too-large lecture halls or a pandemic-spurred escape. it was a move i wanted to go towards, and unlike previous upheavals this one brought an end to longing, of missing, of distance. and with this too came the end of poetry.

perhaps i should use the word “pause,” or, “the end of one kind of.” because there is still distance, one that weighs heavy the longer i am away. it’s been two years since i was home for eid. my gym has a box of dates for muslim students to open their rozas, and yesterday i took a date even though i haven’t fasted for the past ten years.

this year i’ve set my intention to return.

for close to five years i let my poetry be defined by these words: longing, distance, missing. now that those have closed, i’ve been thinking about what defines my writing. this one abstract feeling that disappears as easily as it appears can’t be the only thing.

i wonder, for you, what longing moving has closed, and what, in turn, it’s opened up?

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“One of the most terror-inducing aspects of writing is how much of it is an act of faith.”

—Saeed Teebi, You Will Not Kill Our Imagination

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what a turn opens up, a turn opens up. when i’m on the highway, i indicate. i’ve been driving a lot. moving with intention; moving with loss.

i did not realise the upheaval came at a cost. i think the words we should use are usually words we ought to resist: i think of the way the world heaves, language smeared or stained. who is murdered, who is killed, how is any movement named? how does that name hold its weight?

tell me about your intention; what is its colour? its shape? does it have its own secret name? definition is so fragile. abstraction can be so feeble. there, two names for two things, and the daisy chain continues.

the longing moving has closed is named question. the longing its opened is direction. we all have ideas for our lives, and at some point, we find ourselves playing them out. i had an idea to find love and i did. i had the desire to make home and now i have. now i look the other way, the path my life is not following. whether or not it is better for me, whether or not it is fresh, feasible, forlorn—whatever it is, i look toward it, and it looks back at me.

in every choice, there is a loss. in every love, a longing that physics calls a law of motion: for every force, an equal and opposite reaction.

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i would like my intention to be in opposition to the world’s upheaval. with softness, care, nuance. it is an intention difficult to hold when airspace is open one day and sealed the next. when family sends photos of intercepted airstrikes.

i’ve been thinking a lot about the idea i had for my life when i was ten, of where i would be. i had always imagined i would stay in Karachi, where i was born. if that idea played out, would i be living in a country swallowed by war over and over, Karachi itself just far enough out of reach of the bombs and missiles? it was my father who knew, even twenty years ago, that things would never get better.

it’s a small thing, then, to set an intention for what is within our control. to find the love. to make a home. to put words to a page.

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“Perhaps my writing, here, is the articulation of a series of ruptures—all the times I appeared to be waiting but was actually searching.” —Bahar Orang, Where Things Touch: Meditations on Beauty

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i understand. the world heaves and heaves and what do we do? we move, we gather, we mourn, we remember. we don’t relent, but who am i to say any of this? it’s endless.

small things become big. our ideas lift and shift, shiver and change, shift like bodies. i had an idea of life in Kashmir, close to where you might have been in Karachi, but it was a decade later. time is immutable in front of the border, but i imagine us both, ten years old, and running towards our ambitions like wind.

today, i set an intention to focus. i reflect on strength, on dignity, on accountability. i am about to embark on two weeks in the mountains, solely to put words to the page, and i crave the solitude. i wonder what will allow itself to me, or me to myself.

where does your writing thrive? how? why?

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the less structure, the more my writing seems to thrive. i’ve never been one to set an hour aside each day, or a wordcount to meet each week. this feels antithetical to every piece of writing advice i’ve heard.

in the company of friends, words flow onto the page. or among trees. after a swim in a cool lake. perhaps companionship is the answer, with human and non-human kin. winter is a time of hibernation, of slowness. it’s no surprise my writing is dormant for a period. snow falls in flurries at the end of march, but spring will be here soon.

a friend recently said she writes novels in her head for years. when she sits down to write it takes only a few months. perhaps that’s where my writing is, parsing itself out in the background of my life.

how do you hope to return?

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antithesis, thesis, antithetical, theta. temperature or a plane angle. everything has structure, even the most chaos; here, where I am in the mountains to write, each day unfolds anew.

months without writing I think are as beautiful (if not more) than months with. julia cameron has the image of the well, a new friend has an image of a lake. silt and salt. cause and clay. wherever we are, among each other, is absolutely the answer. winter’s sweetness, i think, is not just its quiet but its long slanted sky, its texture shifting like ice.

today is eid, which so often it is when we write to each other. if i hope and if i return, then the moon knows my answer. i’ll carry it, like a secret, with you.

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“There’s a sweetness that comes from accepting what I am, not a mountain, not a river, not a tree.” —Lorna Crozier, What the Soul Doesn’t Want