Meet him.
Not Black, not Muslim, not Latino.
Not trans, not immigrant, not gay.
Not a card-carrying revolutionary,
not the frothing caricature you wanted.
Just a typical, homegrown lad,
straight as a plumb line,
a son, a brother, a suitor, a mate, refined by a conservative hearth—
and such hands are pulling the trigger.

So what now?
Do you stitch another fence from your fears?
Raise another shibboleth?
Wave another flag, red or blue,
as though stitched cloth could cauterise the wound?
You think radicalisation redeems?
You think polarisation purifies?
Antiquity laughs in the physiognomy of your illusions.
From Belfast to Bosnia,
from Rwanda to Westminster’s own whispering antechambers,
blood has always flowed
when men mistook categories for causes.

It is easy to mourn the dead,
to canonise them in marble prose,
to cry martyr, saint, beloved.
But brave you admit
that their words, their deeds, their ideology
cut others to ribbons while they yet breathed?
Valiant you hold paradox in your palm—
to love the slain and still
recognise the lesions they left behind?
Or must you always polish the past
until it gleams in a single colour?

Why does compassion crumble
the moment it meets conflict?
Why do we, clever apes,
demand a world painted in absolutes—
black or white, villain or angel—
when the truth is muddier,
a swamp of motives,
a cesspit of contradictions?

Unconditional love—
is it sermon or substance?
Does it mean to embrace
the murderer and the mourners alike,
to carry both insult and affection,
venom and antidote,
as though they were salt crystals upon the tongue?
And yet—
a pinch of salt, we say,
British understatement camouflaging despair:
It’s all good, baby, baby.
But is it?
Tell that to Gaza’s children.
Tell that to the mother of Stephen Lawrence.
Tell that to the father who buried his boy
after Columbine, after Sandy Hook,
after Uvalde, after London Bridge.
Is it all good?
Or is that phrase a nostrum,
smoothing over jagged veracity?

I ask you—
what if the problem is not extremism
but our refusal to sit in dissonance,
to experience its bitterness,
to accept that love must live with critique,
that empathy must coexist with resentment?
What if accord will never be built
from symmetry or certainty,
but from the messy work of holding opposites
without breaking?

So take your slogans, your scapegoats,
your shrill chants of “them” and “us,”
and taste them—
with a pinch of salt.
Swallow, if you dare.
It will burn on the lingua and glossa.
It will make you question
whether you have ever truly thought,
or only borrowed thought from louder voices.
It will make you squirm,
because exactitude is no banquet—
it is gristle, sinew, bone.
And it is yours to chew.

Once, the patterns were legible.
The habitual offender.
The ideologue nursing his factional frenzy.
The broken soul, warped by trauma or twisted chemistry.
We could explain them away—
file them neatly under pathology or politics.

But now?
Now the face is familiar.
The figure is camouflaged as a friend,
a neighbour who mows the lawn,
the colleague who shares your tea break,
the classmate who once copied your notes.

And when such a countenance turns,
when such a hand clenches around the firearm,
what excuse remains?
What comfort in the old categories?
What shield against the statistic
that the monstrous now wears
the pretence of the prototypical?

So I ask—
If the neighbour becomes the threat, who remains neighbour?
If the scholar becomes the killer, who remains wise?
If the ordinary becomes the executioner, what remains of the ordinary?
And if the veneer of normality can hide anything—
how long before it hides you?

Which brings us to the final, most unforgiving inquest.
People act as they do because people are pushed—
pushed against walls, pushed into corners,
pushed until the mind itself buckles under the strain.

Violence, we are told, erupts only when there is no other way out.
Yet irony mocks us:
it is often the free, the strong, the educated—
those with choices—that lift the weapon.
For you cannot expect the man, the woman, the child in Gaza,
starved of agency and shackled by rubble,
to redraw the law with their bare hands.

So why, then, are those who might have chosen amity
driven to the brink of madness?
Why do those with liberty squander it on bullets?
Should those who push not have learnt from history?
For history speaks, again and again:
whatever you sow—courtesy or cruelty,
mercy or malice— ricochets to you a hundredfold.
And if today resistance rises like smoke,
it is only because tirades of turbulence
were thundered from pulpits and podiums.

So the query stands, unresolved, unavoidable:
How do we bring kindness into a world
so fluent in fury?
How do we restrain the hand
before it clenches into a fist?
How do we calm the earth, unsettled and quaking,
when our very values tremble like sand?
What is ethics, what is morality,
if not the courage to refuse the cycle of return?
And if we cannot answer—
what hope remains of peace at all?

It was a dusky sort of afternoon, the kind that dangles between tea and twilight, with the sun loafing about like a lazy aristocrat—too proud to set, too idle to shine. The drawing room, with its high-backed chairs and bookshelves bowing under the weight of Tolstoy and gin bottles, basked in the quietude of a house that had, mercifully, survived our adolescence.

There we were—two brothers, born of the same mother and yet wildly divergent creatures—he, the sensible sort with a mind like a filing cabinet; I, a chaotic poet at war with socks and sobriety.

I swirled a glass of something I pretended to remember pouring, the amber liquid catching the light like mischief caught mid-prank. Leaning back with a dramatic sigh, I asked, “What do you get when you meld whiskey, wine and vodka, my kiddo?”

He looked up from his infernal Sudoku, eyebrows raised like an Oxford don presented with a haiku. “You get drunk. That’s what you get.”

“Naah!” I waved a dismissive hand, nearly decapitating a houseplant. “What you get when you meld whiskey, wine and vodka is a heroically outstanding spot of kindred spirits in a single, walking and talking embodiment, and that embodiment is you, my kiddo!”

He blinked once. Then, with the exasperated patience of a man forced to share a flat with a Shakespearean parrot, he replied, “Headache.”

“Huh?”

“That concoction will result in a headache,” he said, dragging out each syllable as though translating for the emotionally impaired, “if you happen to remember what happened to begin with… just like you,” he paused, eyes twinkling with impish delight, “are my biggest headache!”

A silence fell. Not the funereal kind, but the combustible kind—the sort that precedes either a duel or a bellyache of laughter.

And then we detonated. Boisterous laughter ricocheted off the walls, toppling decorum like dominoes. He lunged forward, gave me one of those rare, brisk, manly hugs—just long enough to convey brotherhood, but short enough to maintain dignity—and dashed off like some Victorian street urchin with an overdue library book.

I remained there, marinating in mirth, staring after him as though he were both ghost and gift.

You may have your scholars, your sages, your philosophers. But I, dear reader, possess a younger brother—a paradox wrapped in sarcasm, dipped in reason, and lightly toasted in charm. He is a walking contradiction, an accidental cocktail of virtue and vice, with just a splash of ridiculousness.

And let me tell you something most true.

My little brother is the coolest spirit in the room.

Death came for me on the 14th of June. No, it did not arrive at all in the way I had always expected it to – there was no blinding white light, or some demon dressed in black. It came like an assassin in an unruly ambush, and took me as I was, totally unprepared. 

It left me to grieve the loss of someone very dear. Only I’m just not sure who: whether it was the someone dear who went with bodily death, or us, that the someone dear left behind as dead, I do not know. I only know that this is going to be a yearly occurrence. 

In an hour of my having posted that on Facebook, the doorbell went off. I answered the door in my boxers to see a friend who said she was giving me exactly ten minutes to change into something more presentable. Once I was changed into jeans and tee, she towed me along to a place I had not been to before: an assembly of individuals who had faced the loss of a loved one. Not someone comfortable in unfamiliar environments, I began to feel queasy, but before I could have a word with my friend, a woman called out to me and invited me to join her and five people that had gathered in a small circle. I ambled along and drew a chair as a pleasant sounding man looked at me. “You are new here, right?” he asked me as I sat. Dumb question I thought, and wanted to tell him to get to the point, but, of course that was not how I would behave, and so I said nothing but merely moved my head in agreement. “What’s your name again?” he said. Another dumb question because I hadn’t shared my name yet. I turned and smiled at my friend collectedly, in order not to make her feel awkward, because I knew she was reading my facial vocabulary, and it reflected that I thought rather poorly of such support groups. I kept a straight face and stated my name. “Welcome, Mr Khan,” he said in his pleasant voice, “is there anything that you would care to share with us?” I shook my head. He didn’t take that as a rebuff and went on about how I should start to tell them who I was grieving for. I looked at the ground for a few seconds and thought that the floor could make do with a bit of cleaning. Then I breathed and looked up. “My best friend.” He gave me a look of having understood me, which I am certain he did not, but since he was trained to talk and behave in a particular way, he pretended he had understood me, and I pretended to let him fool himself that he had. “And did you lose her recently?” he asked. “A little over eleven months ago,” I replied. “And may I ask how you lost her?” I looked at him piercingly at first, and then calmed myself in a flick. “Suddenly,” I said, “I lost him suddenly.” He once again made a face with the expression that he had understood what I was feeling when he did jack. “Well, would you like to share with us about how you are feeling, or?” I shook my head and turned again to my friend who muttered a muted please. “Look, um, I don’t intend to sound . . .” I paused, reflected, “but this whole process,” I glared at the man directly, “I–I think that I’m at a different stage, or . . .” He cut me and said, “Well, the healing process of grief takes place in five different stages.” I was now furious at this dumb-fuck talk, and it was openly showing. “And what does this process do? Does it deal with my loss by helping me bring the person that I have lost back into my life?” He was flummoxed at my brazenness. “Any process is only supposed to act as a framework, a loose framework of the grieving process, accounting for everything from the grief of losing a loved one to the grief of somebody who is dying himself.” I lowered my head and reflected for a second, gathered myself and stared square into the man’s eyes – “Is there a difference?” He was quiet. “Is there?” I asked again. “Um . . .” he said, his demeanour a clear indication of his own inability to help me in any manner possible other than what his training or transcripts had taught him. I dipped my head, more as a token of politeness, and then stood up, winked at my friend, who was now thoroughly mortified at my behaviour and walked away. 

My friend followed up behind me. “I took you there for a reason you fool,” she scowled, “I took you there to help you overcome your grief, and also because I am so fucking worried that if you don’t talk,” she halted and looked about here and there, “that you might also end up dead . . . so at least you could have heard them out, right? At least!” I took in a lungful of air. “This ‘at least’ is what fucks everything up,” I told her, exhaling the air with a rather dramatic air. She narrowed her eyes and glared at me frostily. “People say all sorts of rubbish and then fit in words like ‘at least’ which are most unnecessary.” She hit me on my chest with her bag. “You’re being an arsehole,” she said. “Am I?” I asked, “Because as much as I appreciate what you are doing for me, I think that each of us have our own narrative of how we would like to deal with our angst . . . and the last thing anyone wants to hear is bollocks like it will be alright, or at least they lived long enough, or it was god’s plan, or they would want you to, or the classic – everything happens for a reason, etcetera, etcetera.” She hung her head down. I could see she was mildly ashamed. “Come on,” I said, grabbing her hand, “let me get you an ice-cream.” We got our cones and sat quietly on a bench as we watched people go by. “Were those people that repulsive?” I licked my ice-cream, spun round and faced her. “Like I said, everyone has their own method to process their pain, there cannot ever be a formula for it. Telling people to look at the bright side of it is like un-ringing a bell.” She smiled and repeated softly – un-ringing the bell. “What?” I asked. “Nothing,” she said bashfully. “When someone is in agony, being real may sound a bit rough perhaps, but it helps,” I said, “Something like – ‘I know what you are going through is hard, and I cannot say I understand what you are going through because I don’t, and I only hope that in time you will come to terms with it.’, can be one way to make someone feel real about it.” She reached out to my cone, took a swirl of my ice-cream and handed it back to me. “What’s been the hardest part of this for you?” she asked as she ruffled my hair. “Also, ‘Would you like to talk about it, or would you like to talk about something else?’, works splendidly too,” I replied. She smiled. “I get it.” I smiled too. “We just have to let people know that we are with them . . . we shouldn’t be putting words into their mouths because that is not what they would be needing. Practical support, even if it means to be with them in silence, is sufficient to get most ships across to the shore.”

When a person close to us dies, everything changes. It is as if a cyclone has swept and washed everything away. Everything appears meaningless, unfamiliar and empty. Some even tend to question who they are considering that a large sense of their identity was bound to the person they have lost. Dogmas, optimisms, aspirations seem utterly vain and tend to dissolve with time, and as cliché as it sounds, time stops. 

“So what form of death do you think is the hardest to accept?” she asked, slurping from her hands a large drop of ice-cream that had trickled down. “You think one can rate one over the other?” I asked, rather puzzled at her query. “I mean, you know,” she said stammering. “It could be the passing away of parents, siblings, partners, friends, spouse, it could be the loss of an unborn child to abortion or miscarriage, anything can cause bereavement.” She was absorbing what I was telling her, and it was evident that she was thinking something as I was speaking. “Out with it,” I said. She giggled. “I think tragic and violent deaths might cause more pain than the others.” I rolled my eyes. “Say an accident, a murder, a drowning, or suicide,” she paused, “disease, heart attacks too.” I nodded at her rather harsh reflections. “Expected or unexpected, gradual or sudden, any death is devastating,” I added. She got up and walked a few steps ahead, spreading her hands wide as the cool breeze caressed her skin. “Why did you behave that way in there?” I got up and walked up to her. “Really? After all that I’ve told you.” 

While she thought that talking to strangers would help me get over the loss of Sushant, it would have been impossible for me to make her understand not to meddle with the agony of others after I had already made my mind clear to her. What was it with some people, I wondered to myself – they are helpful and they are caring, but do they ever get anything?

“Tell me? Tell me!” she nudged me. I said nothing although I knew that her intentions were noble, only her intent was enormously incorrect – it was difficult to make someone understand that you miss the time you had with them, and that you may get over the pain in time, but you don’t really get over the passing of someone important to you, and this is the fundamental aspect of mortality that the world at large gets fully wrong. The people who care about you, they want to help you, they are worried about you, but the truth is that nobody can help you, nothing anybody says can make a difference. 

“What are you thinking now?” she asked me. “About the positive side of loss,” I answered. She studied me warily. “I think that while the death of the loved one destroys you, there is also a great positivity to be found in it.” Her eyes now became attentive. “We change as people . . . radically change . . . and this results in people becoming more open, intuitive, realistic, self-loving and gentle.” She slipped her hand into my hand. “I know what you mean,” she said kind-heartedly, “I have observed that people adopt a fresh set of values in life. They develop a stronger desire to help others, contribute to the world, prioritise relationships over money and materialism and spend more time with the ones they love.” I grinned upon hearing those words from her as I thought to myself that the one thing that is clear is that life chugs along, you accept and adjust without the person in question, but you do not get over the bereavement, ever. 

*In memoriam of my friend Sushant Singh Rajput (1986-2020) 

This is a voice that need not be raised to be heard

This is a sign so vivid that it will one day

Protect us from ostensible doom

This is a name so virtuous and just 

That it will amend

The very path of antiquity

And reinstate us as victors 

As we have always been victors

But had fallen under the dimness of despair

This is my ode 

For the endless reign of my brightest star

It is my prayer for the health of my dearest brother Fazza  

The sky over Elderwyck was a brooding canvas of bruised greys and twilight blues, as though Heaven itself had fallen into introspection. The lawns of the West Terrace, manicured to an almost monastic perfection, swept down in emerald gradients towards the forest’s edge. Above us, the great turrets of Halberstone Palace stood like sentinels of stone, gazing out over a realm that shimmered somewhere between myth and responsibility.

We had escaped, he and I, from the suffocating velvet of the great drawing rooms, where lords twiddled rings and duchesses whispered like wind through lace. The air outside tasted of damp earth and impending spring—a contradiction as complex as the young man beside me.

“How does it feel to be a—” I paused, mid-sentence, as one does before crossing a philosophical Rubicon.

He was slinging the loop of his leather satchel across his shoulder with the sort of studied ease one associates with an Oxford don who lectures in Latin but moonlights as a mountaineer. He looked up at me with that maddening twinkle that was forever on the tip of teasing.

“To be a what?” he enquired, arching one eyebrow with such aristocratic precision that I momentarily lost my grammatical footing.

I faltered. “You know.”

“I would know only if you spell it out now, wouldn’t I,” he said, with the weary patience of a tutor coaxing a reluctant prodigy.

I cleared my throat like a guilty vicar. “A sovereign, my brother.”

He smiled—not the sort of grin that emerges from mischief, but something gentler, weightier, as though he were quietly admiring a relic few still understood.

“Hah, that,” he said, and with poetic softness added, “the sovereign, my brother, is just a man, after all.”

I grinned, in spite of myself.

“I reckon you envision me in an armour... wielding a weapon even, right?” he asked, stepping over a puddle like he’d been born doing it.

My eyes gleamed. “Exactly!”

He stopped walking and turned towards me, his coat catching the wind like a flag on a cusp of battle.

“A sovereign serves his people,” he said with a clarity that made the air still, “and the day the people serve the sovereign is the day the empire falls. Remember that, if nothing else.”

I rounded my mouth, as though trying to form a thought large enough to match the sentence I’d just swallowed.

“And yes,” he added with an offhand thumbs-up, one that belonged more to the cricket field than the court, “my armour and my weapon is my imagination.”

“That,” I said, pointing with mock solemnity, “is a disappointingly bloodless choice of weaponry.”

“Oh, is it?” he quipped, strolling on. “Wait till you see what it does to ignorance. A good metaphor slices cleaner than any blade forged by man. And it never rusts.”

We descended onto the gravel path like pilgrims of banter, our footfalls quieted by the soggy hush of evening.

“So,” I said, adopting my best professorial tone, “if you are armed with imagination, does that make me your royal jester? Am I to juggle abstractions and tickle the soul of the court with existential humour?”

He turned, walking backward now, hands in his pockets. “You are far too tragic for a jester and far too witty for a priest. I’d say you are the whisper in the corridor of the king’s conscience.”

“Marvellous,” I said, “a metaphysical earworm.”

“Indeed,” he nodded gravely. “And if I ever start naming ships after myself or speaking of the populace as ‘my children,’ do me the favour of pushing me into the ornamental lake.”

“With pleasure,” I said. “Though it may take some explaining to His Highness.”

We passed the old sundial, now barely readable beneath moss and time, and stood at the edge of the garden where the palace fell away into shadow. The evening deepened into that peculiar English melancholy—a dusk that sighs rather than falls.

“You know,” I said quietly, “I sometimes forget you didn’t ask for any of this.”

“No one ever does,” he murmured, “not truly. Thrones are like shadows—one doesn’t notice they are following until the sun begins to set.”

A crow took off from a nearby branch, and we both turned to watch it, its wings carving calligraphy into the air.

“I suppose,” I said at last, “you’ll make a fine king.”

“I’d rather be a just man,” he said, “kingship is only ever noble when it’s forgotten in favour of duty.”

There was a pause then—profound, unscripted, and gently aching. The kind that comes when boys realise they are becoming men, and that the world is waiting, always waiting, with a crown in one hand and a lariat in the other.

We turned back, walking slowly towards the golden-lit palace, where titles waited like masks at a masquerade.

“Just out of curiosity,” I said, breaking the mood like a boy throwing a pebble into a sacred lake, “do you ever try the crown on when no one’s looking?”

He smirked. “Only when brushing my teeth. It helps with posture.”

And we both laughed—loud, irreverent, deeply human laughter—echoing down the walkway of dusk, where the prince was only ever a brother, and the kingdom, for a moment, was just a garden at the end of the day.