Ayesha.

Sometimes she draws herself up to her full height- all eleven years and five foot one inch of her- and yells at the top of her voice about her unfair everything is. How they always take his side and not her's, how we ignore her because she's the youngest, how this friend was mean and that one so immature, how mid-dance class she looked at her legs and decided she doesn't like them and how her stomach hurts every once a month and she just doesn't want to deal with it.

Then she stops yelling and the tears come flowing. I let her put her head down in my lap and kiss her hair.

And then there are questions that I find impossible to answer. 'Aliya says it's haraam to kiss before marriage. Is that true?' 'Are you going out with a boy?' 'Why does your hair smell of cigarette smoke?' 'Am I pretty?' 'Why is he being like this?' And I always pause before answering because she's the one person in the world I feel I owe the truth. Because her hair falls exactly the way mine does, her laugh reminds me of my own and she roams around in my old tshirts.

I'm going to miss her the most. 

Visiting

They looked up as we drove by. Looked up from smoking whatever it is they were smoking, looked up from kick starting their motorcycles, looked up from chewing paan and stared as the sleek black car drove past them, hunting for a tiny house. We hunt for it every year without fail, meandering our way through narrow roads, almost colliding with anorexic donkeys and cursing ourselves because we come here, to this neighbourhood, every single year and have still never managed to find the place without calling them at least five times.

It's a small house as befits the neighbourhood. Small and untidy and unworthy of a second glance. Unless you bother to look closer and notice the graffiti, the peeling plaster, the cracks in the roof which fell in last year when the rains came and refused to go away. It's not worth smiling at the people until you notice that they've opened a new bottle of coke for you and the cake they put in front of you is untouched. They're not worth wasting your time on until you realize that you are the only family and friends that have visited this year. In fact, you are the only family-and-friends to have visited any year.

And then you smile as you politely sip your coke and show off your mehndi. You ask how the second daughter's MBA is going. You look at photos from some distant cousins's wedding. And you forget the peeling paint, the looks their neighbours gave you and the fact that their clothes are so different from your own.

After all, this is family,