Why I Chose It: Michigan Quarterly Review reader Connor Greer introduces Anitha Ahmed’s short story “Couplets by Ghalib” from our Spring 2021 issue.You can purchase it here.
Anitha Ahmed’s “Couplets by Ghalib” makes demands. It places me, as a reader, in the role of its narrator, Rashid, as he recounts a memory. He tells of a time ten years prior when he met Faisal, the son of the wealthy principal of his school, and how he began to tutor him. Though it is a memory, I am with Rashid as he experiences Faisal’s “palace of a home,”
a three-story mansion with a winding marble staircase and a cupola decorated with Islamic mosaic. It even had an interior courtyard with beds of roses and jasmine, black steel benches, and a fountain” and I, like Rashid, do not belong in this place.
We do not belong there when Faisal proves to be less than diligent as a tutee either. We do not belong in Faisal’s world of leisure, playing ping-pong in lieu of studying. We do not belong when Faisal’s sister, Hinna, begins to sneak downstairs to spend time with them,
when she reads Couplets by Ghalib aloud: “With what haste you spend your life, oh Ghalib — / Or else you’d find in every corner—diamonds!” We do not belong there when she touches Rashid’s hand while teaching him calligraph we know why the moment is charged
Yet it is difficult to resist imagining myself among this family. It is difficult not to feel a kind of relief for Rashid, a calm in the story’s exquisite prose, in the description of Faisal’s family life, a moment for Rashid to be free from precarity.
It is intoxicating. Try to resist it. Try to resist feeling what Rashid feels as he meets Hinna, as he comes in contact with a slim and incomplete vision of this other version of life, and comes to believe,
