the reason (microfiction)

26.09.2025

I had just spent the past hour messaging three of my friends. They had all thought of me at the same time. It was Friday evening. It was the start of the weekend and some free time. So they had all thought of me. It was nice to be thought of like that. And, in some way, it had alleviated my loneliness. I lived with my parents. I had spoken to my mother while she had cooked me a feast of paneer with pea curry, curried spinach and spiced yoghurt with a generous salad. But still I felt alone. I was always going to feel alone. There was no point not trying to feel alone. Because I was never going to meet anyone special in my life. I was going to have to sleep in a bed alone every night for the rest of my life. I didn’t kid myself.

But then, I also had Alfonso. I rang him up. Without saying hello to me, he jumped into a question. ‘Why do people look for a reason for why their life is not what they want it to be?’

‘Because there is some reason why there life is not what they want.’

Alfonso was eating something. I wondered what it was but did not ask him. ‘What is the reason your life is not what you want it to be?’ he asked me.

‘Because I am an ethnic minority.’

‘You always say that.’

‘It doesn’t mean it is not true,’ I said. ‘Do you think these racist bastards even know how racist they are? How much it governs their society? What kind of fucking scum they are? No, they don’t. Because their racism makes them think they are superior to people like me.’

‘They have close relationships with people from other countries. With immigrants.’

‘Yes. With the westernised ones. With the ones that bend to them and want to lick their boots. I come from the village. I have rejected westernisation. I am too good to lick anyone’s boots.’

‘Then your situation is your choice.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘To choose freedom over slavery is not a choice. It is a necessity.’

‘Yet you call them slaves to the state. Have they chosen that slavery?’

‘Yes, that is the tragedy. They have chosen slavery over freedom. They are slaves in their hearts and minds. Slaves that think they are the masters.’

‘They hate you because of your criticisms.’

‘Let them hate. I also despise them for judging me. For being Indian. I never forgive anyone that rejects me because of that. You are taught to nurture your relationships. Especially enmity.’

‘You will never get this war that you want.’

‘I have it already. In my thoughts and my writing. In my heart. In my books that I publish.’

‘They will never fight you. And they will stop you from fighting. If you don’t change, you will always be alone.’

‘If you let someone pull you to the ground and step all over you, you are not a man. If you let someone throw you out like garbage and rob you of your dignity, you are not a man. If you let someone put a fucking leash on you like you are a fucking dog, you are not a man. If you let someone talk over you, reject you, exclude you and you fawn over them, you are not a man. You are a piece of shit. And I am not a piece of shit. In fact, I am The Tiger. Fuck everybody.’

‘Well,’ Alfonso said. ‘Even though you are so disagreeable and angry, the wonderful thing is that you still have friends. And yet you claim that you are all alone.’

‘Where is my family?’ I said. ‘How can you think you have anyone when you don’t even have your own family?’

‘What is the lack?’ Alfonso asked. ‘Be honest. Is it the children or is it the woman?’

I didn’t answer him. Who knew the answer to that? The ache inside, who knew who or what could soothe it? Although I did know. The only way to soothe the ache was with the war. And therefore, I did not look for anyone in this world. I looked for the war. The war was something that I could work on. The war was something I could have and hold in the nights. Yes, I lay in bed thinking about the war. I woke up in the morning to wage the war. I was a warrior from the old world. Not this shitty world. War was my destiny. We had been slaves. We were slaves. But we would not be slaves tomorrow. The child of The Tiger would be a king. He would walk free. The child of The Tiger would be a Queen. She would walk with dignity. The love of the world would be his. The love of the world would be hers. The war that we fought was for tomorrow. For tomorrow. This pain that we lived in, it had a purpose. It was for tomorrow. This hunger that we had. It was for tomorrow. One day, the spark would be lit. I had to survive for that day. It might not come before the end of my life, but it would come. In the end, it is truth alone that is triumphant. Satyameva Jayaate.

suffering and reading (microfiction)

15.09.2025

‘Instead of suffering, shall we have another topic today?’ Alfonso asked me.

‘Well then, what would you like?’ I responded.

‘Isn’t it more the case of what you think your readers would like?’

‘Is it going to be a question for a question?’

‘Why not?’

‘You would rather have a whole conversation as a question?’

‘Don’t you think it’s possible?’

We both laughed. Fighting and laughing. We did those things the best.

‘So, the topic I will introduce,’ I continued, ‘is reading. When I finished that long trilogy that I was reading, I did not manage to slip into anything else. I made a desultory few pages into a children’s picture book about animal languages. That one is on my library app on my phone. Life is so busy it is hard to read anything.’

‘Didn’t you tell me,’ Alfonso smiled, ‘that there was a certain someone that read everything that you wrote on your blog for two whole years? Every night. Why were they reading and how did they accomplish the feat?’

I ignored the question. I had a theory. But dwelling on such topics was dangerous.

‘I am speaking of myself. I don’t have the requisite tranquillity to read nowadays.’

‘You are lying,’ said Alfonso. ‘How do you get such good marks on your part time university course around work hours? You do seventy or so hours a week on work, maybe even more. And yet you are still doing the reading and getting good grades on it.’

Alfonso was good at cross-examination.

‘I am talking about fiction. Which is supposedly the easiest of reads. But it goes back to the beginning of this conversation.’

‘In what way?’

‘You wanted a different topic from suffering. But suffering is all there is in my life. Reading is a great pleasure to me. It has been since I was a child. I was a precocious reader. Later in adult life, I did an English Literature degree and then a PhD in that subject. To give myself time to read. Yet now? Because I suffer so much, I find it extraordinarily difficult to lose myself in a book.’

‘You blame suffering. Why not blame distractions?’

‘Do you really believe that my attention span has atrophied with these users of their smartphones? I still read more in one day than most people manage in a month. Psychology articles, newspapers, magazines, poems, posts about history, art and culture. I don’t touch the fluff that they degrade their minds with. You are fortunate. You do not suffer. And therefore you read.’

‘Perhaps you should read to escape suffering. To lose yourself in another world.’

‘Before you take a step

Look where your feet are

Before you take a leap

Find what you are anchored to’

‘I make the wish for you to read.’

‘I make the wish to discover life instead. Instead of living as the dead and the dying.’

NAOMI: In Fashion Exhibition

13.07.2024

Dr. Suneel Mehmi

I did not pay attention to fashion when I was a child. I never read any newspapers or watched the news until I had my Cambridge interview coming up when I was seventeen and I was told I had to start doing that because no one had ever told me to read a newspaper before. I was not exposed to Western culture except in pop music, largely American TV shows and commercial films. So, the first moment I will always remember of Naomi Campbell is in a music video: Michael Jackson’s ‘In the Closet’ in 1992 when I was ten years old. Despite all the allegations and the overtly sexual nature of the song which sometimes threaten to spoil the delight of the music and singing, this is one of my favourite songs by Michael Jackson whose music I grew up with as a small boy. I was dazzled by Naomi, her perfect looks and her statuesque body in this song, her exhilarating dance moves. The curves of her impossibly long legs. She was the kind of woman I had never seen before in my life, me who lived outside of London in a white area with very little diversity. She was the kind of woman that made you notice that there were women in the world. She did not look like she was real. Looking at her was like looking at a different, glamorous, ideal world.

The next moment with Naomi is again something that I would never forget my whole life. The year was 1994. Now, I was twelve years old. We were watching Top of the Pops which I watched regularly because I have always loved singing for as long as I can remember. Suddenly, Naomi Campbell came onto the screen in an Indian sari. I had watched Hindi song and dance routines with women in saris my whole life in Hindi films (‘Bollywood’ – a term I don’t like to use because it is so derivative of Western cinema and Hollywood). But here, instead of the fair skinned Indian actresses that I had always seen, who were usually petite and curvaceous, here was a statuesque, dark skinned woman in Indian dress. It was an unexpected, dazzling, amazing sight. Back then, you didn’t really see women in saris singing songs on Top of the Pops. There wasn’t diversity on British television (has anything really changed there?) The performance was absolutely unique. And Naomi was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen in my entire life and looked even more beautiful in the sari, because that was from our culture.

You can see this performance here:

That moment is how I will always remember Naomi Campbell. She often wears saris. Because her ethos in fashion is to promote diversity and to celebrate the style that Western fashion has ignored – India and Africa.

As you can imagine, my visit to the Naomi Campbell exhibit at the Victoria and Albert museum was a trip down memory lane, with perhaps one of the most remarkably beautiful women that had made an impact upon me as I was entering puberty. I got a chance to see what I had not seen at the time – Naomi walking on the catwalk, Naomi the activist. Naomi on the magazine covers. I had only known her as a dancer and a singer. Now, I finally got to see what she was as a supermodel.

I was wary of these celebrity exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert museum before. That is because I was not really a fan of any of the celebrities that they were showing. Now, here I was, a fan of the exquisite beauty of Naomi Campbell. The exhibition made you feel close to her passage to fame and to her. It showed you the life that she was living, the clothes that she wore, the people who she was friends with. The exhibition enhanced the sense of connection you feel to remarkable people, the basking in the glory of their achievement that makes you rekindle the love you feel for your idols. More than this, the exhibition showed you the impact that your idols made on the world around them at the time, the fans that shared your passion for this amazing human being.

In the exhibition, they said that Naomi was seen as being able to wear any kind of fashion costume and make it look good, to pull it off. That wonderful athletic dancer’s body that she has, the imposing tallness, the statuesque quality, it works on everything. Whatever she wears looks dynamic and fluid, and, in fact, many of her clothes were figure-hugging. You could sense the powerful quality of being able to wear anything when you looked at the clothes on the mannequins. The clothes, beautiful as they were, looked lifeless without her in them. She exuded power and confidence, the energy of the noble beauty that she has in her appearance and within her. The style.

People often remark on my clothes. But some of them are very cheap clothes from market stalls and most of them have been bought at a sale because no one else wanted them, or could wear them. It is not the clothes themselves that make them look good. It is the body. I tell people this whether they believe me or not – the clothes look good because I am within them and I have absolute confidence in myself, despite being short, thin and not being particularly broad. Someone once told me that I look good in anything and a professional male model half my age once told me that he wanted to look like me and dress like me when he was my age. Naomi Campbell had even more of this quality of super confidence than me, perhaps more than anyone else. And with her, she has the kind of body that only a supermodel can have. Whether it is posture, gesture on the face, the apparent, easy athleticism of the body, or some kind of unconscious signification, perhaps to do with the connotations of ethnicity in a white universe, she has the body of power and visual display.

The exhibition was spectacular in every sense. And the appeal of it was that women want to imitate the power and confidence that Naomi has. There was a catwalk where you could walk like Naomi, become her in a sense. Watch yourself in a video as you become her. She is a role model for so many women and for women that are non-white, proof that you can rise to the absolute top despite prejudice, racism and a lack of real diversity in this society. However, I did note to myself how she was able to achieve this success: by being absolutely extraordinary. By being one of the most beautiful people alive. By having that air of absolute confidence, dynamism, power. These qualities are rare and not easy to replicate. And they show you how ethnic minorities have to achieve this level of success in this society: by being a million times more talented than white people, this being the ‘fairness’ and ‘meritocracy’ of this society.