Mother in the Jamun Tree

Kabir · February 7, 2026 · No comments

This short story by Dr. Samia Altaf was originally published in The Peshawar Review. 

Samia Altaf is a physician specialising in Integrative Medicine. She is the author of So Much Aid, So Little Development: Stories from Pakistan (2011, 2015, 2025) and of tamasha-e ahley karam: aalami bank ki naakaam imdaad aur Pakistan ka nizaam-e sehat (2025).

Just as we finished breakfast — halwa-poori, cholay and cheese omelette washed down with mango lassi — on a bright Sunday morning, mother announced that from tomorrow, Monday morning — she did new things on Monday mornings — she would not live in the house anymore. She would live in the old jamun tree in the beautiful Bagh-e-Jinnah. There, from its top branches, she could observe the Mall Road, look through the windows of our second-floor lounge and see us as we lounged around, our faces in our phones. And she could hear us too, especially big brother as he did his daily riyaz. She loved the darbari bandish he was working on these days — anokha ladla-aaaa — and didn’t want to miss out on.

Why?

She was tired of it all. This life. The government lying, the people dying, on land and in sea; people actually killing each other for praying this way or that; the useless, selfish leaders constantly yelling, only jostling for “kursi.” The begging, the begging, the constant begging for oil, for food, for electricity, water; and no one listening, caring, or paying attention. And the children! She’s heartbroken to see girls and boys, unable to read or write, especially the little girls, so tiny, so skinny with their heads covered, scarcely able to breathe. All this suffering, so unnecessary. Sure, life is difficult; as a doctor she had seen people die, authorities lie, and no one pay attention — remember the Covid days? But now it is too much. She was teary as she ate the piping hot puris that the cook placed on her plate. She was so tired, she said, of the need to be so alert all the goddamn time; to pay attention and yet be dragged into a deeper hole. She feels she is on a treadmill that goes faster and faster, its speed controlled by some sadistic demon. She needed “out.” Interrupting the trajectory of her fork, she recited:

What is this life, if full of care.
We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.

She had decided that instead of standing beneath the boughs, she would live amongst them. Continue reading Mother in the Jamun Tree

Review: The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie

Kabir · February 4, 2026 · No comments

From my Substack:

Salman Rushdie is one of the world’s most prominent English language writers and certainly among the most famous writers of Indian origin. His second novel, Midnight’s Children won the 1981 Booker Prize as well as the “Best of the Bookers”. Other well-known novels include Shame–one of the great novels about Pakistan– and The Satanic Verses.

The Eleventh Hour is a collection of five stories, two of which were previously published in The New Yorker. For the purposes of this review, I will focus on “The Musician of Kahani” and “Late”. Continue reading Review: The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie

When Even Jainism Becomes a Hack

X.T.M · February 4, 2026 · No comments

And so, some students I know claim to be devout members of the Jain faith, which rejects any food that may cause harm to all living creatures — including small insects and root vegetables. The students I know who claim to be Jain (but aren’t) spend their meal money at Whole Foods instead and enjoy freshly made salads and other yummy dishes, while the rest of us are stuck with college meals, like burgers made partly from “mushroom mix”.

I was reading about Stanford’s accommodation culture when one detail stopped me cold. Some students, the article noted, claim to be devout Jains in order to escape the mandatory meal plan. Jainism, one of India’s oldest religions, forbids harm to living beings. That includes insects. In many traditions it excludes root vegetables, because uprooting a plant kills it. It is an ethic of extreme restraint, discipline, and care. The students claiming it, by the author’s own admission, are not Jain. They are optimisers. This is not a small lie. It is a revealing one. Continue reading When Even Jainism Becomes a Hack

Pakistan, 1971, and the Misuse of the Holocaust Analogy

X.T.M · February 4, 2026 · 35 comments

“Pakistan army remains the only one after WW2 to have carried out a large scale genocide. The comparison to the Nazis is a fact-based one. Mentioning this simple historical fact isn’t “anti-Pakistan”. RNJ

The events of 1971 in East Pakistan involved large-scale violence, mass civilian deaths, displacement, and grave violations of humanitarian norms. These facts are not contested. What remains contested is classification. Continue reading Pakistan, 1971, and the Misuse of the Holocaust Analogy

Open Thread Modi and Drumpf announce US-IND Trade deal

RecoveringNewsJunkie · February 2, 2026 · 42 comments

https://x.com/narendramodi/status/2018377090840830101

With typical bluster, the Donald declares victory and claims that India will ‘stop buying Russian oil (eventually’, and buy ‘$500 billion’ in US goods (no timeline given). Modi’s announcement doesn’t even mention those vague commitments notably.

18% is lower than Vietnam, lower than China, and also lower than Pakistan’s tariff rates, in spite of the ….abject genuflection given to the Drumpf Administration by Pakistani elites over the last few months.

Israel: Ongoing Genocide now Concentration Camps

sbarrkum · February 2, 2026 · No comments

Israels Genocide in Gaza is the Greatest Crime of this Century.

Update as of Feb 3rd 2026
As expected as much of Gaza has been destroyed and Gaza Palestinians have Ethnically Cleansed, Israel is now turned its attention on the West Bank
—
Israeli authorities have intensified their campaign of forced displacement across the occupied West Bank, issuing expulsion orders to an entire Bedouin community east of Ramallah and escalating demolition policies in occupied East Jerusalem.

The measures come amid a surge in settler violence targeting educational institutions in the Jordan Valley and residential homes in Qalqilya, further shrinking the living space for Palestinians under military occupation.

Original Article
Israel has cleared land in southern Gaza for the construction of a tightly surveilled concentration camp for Palestinians in preparation for their displacement from the strip, Reuters reported on 28 January, citing a retired Israeli general who advises the military.
Retired reservist Brigadier-General Amir Avivi told the news agency in an interview that the camp would be built in an area of Rafah that has been destroyed by Israeli bombing and the ruins cleared by bulldozers. “Avivi said the camp would be used to house Palestinians who wish to leave Gaza and cross into Egypt, as well as those who wish to stay,” Reuters wrote. Avivi’s comments come as Israel prepares for a “limited reopening” of Gaza’s Rafah border crossing with Egypt as part of US President Trump’s 20-point plan for the strip.

Reuters reported earlier this month that “Israel wants to ensure more Palestinians leave Gaza than are allowed in.” Immediately after the start of Israel’s bombing and invasion of Gaza in October 2023, Israel’s Ministry of Intelligence proposed expelling Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians under the guise of humanitarian concerns.
Since then, Israel has systematically destroyed Gaza, ensuring that the strip becomes uninhabitable and giving Palestinians little choice but to abandon their destroyed homes and exit to Egypt and beyond if allowed.

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir advocate annexing Gaza to establish settlements for Jewish Israelis on confiscated Palestinian land.

Brigadier-General Avivi said that currently, “There are no Gazans, almost at all, in Rafah,” which has remained under complete Israeli control following the ceasefire that took effect in October. Continue reading Israel: Ongoing Genocide now Concentration Camps

Pakistan’s Civilisational Orphanhood

X.T.M · February 2, 2026 · 77 comments

The argument over Balochistan exposed something deeper than maps or borders. It revealed a confusion about what Pakistan is supposed to belong to.

Formally, Pakistan is one of the most nationalistic states on earth. Its red lines are absolute. Its territorial language is uncompromising. Its founding trauma has hardened into doctrine. And yet, beneath this rigidity sits a quieter truth: Pakistan’s elite does not actually live inside a closed nation-state imagination. They live in English.

They think in Western legal categories, read Western literature, speak the language of international institutions, and send their children into global circuits of education and finance. At the same time, their social world remains unmistakably South Asian; family-centred, hierarchical, ritualised, and deeply embedded in subcontinental habit. They are neither fully Western nor comfortably Indic. This produces a tension that Pakistan has never resolved.

The Nation-State After 1945: A Container That No Longer Holds

Continue reading Pakistan’s Civilisational Orphanhood

Two Hours in Delhi, and the Myth of Sudden Alignment

X.T.M · January 31, 2026 · 2 comments

A popular thread this week argues that a two-hour stopover in Delhi, by MBZ, proves that India has replaced Pakistan as the Gulf’s preferred partner, and more than that, has become the gateway to the entire non-Western axis. The imagery is cinematic: land, sign, leave; a Pakistan deal collapses days later; Moscow follows. Read as theatre, it is persuasive. Read as geopolitics, it is misleading. Two hours did not change the map. They revealed it.

Serious agreements are never written on the tarmac. When a head of state spends two hours anywhere, it is precisely because alignment already exists. The documents are negotiated months in advance. The ceremony is optional. Speed signals confidence, not conversion. The absence of banquets is not contempt; it is efficiency.

India is valuable to the Gulf because it is large, stable, demographically young, and not ideologically intrusive. It offers scale without sermons. That makes it an excellent partner. It does not make it a hub through which all other alignments must pass.

Continue reading Two Hours in Delhi, and the Myth of Sudden Alignment

Iran and Pakistan Are Not the Same Kind of State

X.T.M · January 29, 2026 · 34 comments

Iran cannot be analysed using the same political categories as Pakistan or most modern states. The difference is not whether a regime is monarchical, clerical, or military. It is the age of the civilisation being governed. Pakistan is a young state. Its borders, institutions, and political language were assembled in the twentieth century. In such states, power fills a vacuum directly.

Power in Young States, Authority in Old Ones

A military dictatorship governs by force, hierarchy, and command. Its legitimacy is procedural and immediate: order, security, survival. This form works where political memory is thin and inherited meaning is limited. Pakistan’s army did not overthrow an old order. It stepped into an empty one. Iran is structured differently. It is a civilisational state that has existed in recognisable form for roughly three thousand years. Power there has never been exercised through force alone. Authority has always been tied to ideas that predate any single regime.

Monarchy as Civilisation, Not Administration Continue reading Iran and Pakistan Are Not the Same Kind of State

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