The Qareen

The Strange Ordinary

The world has a bad habit of slipping. It is never anything dramatic—no tears in the firmament, no shadows growing teeth and whispering in the dark. If it were, I would have the good sense to be terrified. Instead, it is subtle. The kind of tiny, inexplicable glitch you brush off because acknowledging it feels like inviting madness in through the front door.

Like the streetlamp outside my window flickering three times at precisely 4:12 every afternoon.

I noticed it because writers are professionally conditioned to notice things nobody else cares about. Or, more accurately, because I had been staring at the same stubborn paragraph for twenty minutes and desperately needed an excuse not to fix it. The lamp flickered.

Once. Twice. Three times.

I glanced at the clock: 4:12.

“Obviously,” I muttered, tucking a stray hair strand behind my ear. Faulty municipal wiring. Mumbai had survived far worse.

I turned back to my laptop, where the sentence stared back at me in silent judgment: She loved him despite everything.

I deleted it. Too obvious. I typed it again. Deleted it again.

Then, because self-flagellation is an essential part of the creative process, I wandered into the kitchen and ate half a slice of leftover cake. Being a successful fiction writer was mostly just this: romanticizing your internal suffering while systematically avoiding your own deadlines.

“Alizeh!” Ammi called from the kitchen stove.

I froze with the fork halfway to my mouth. “Yes?”

“Come here.”

That particular register could mean anything from I made samosas to we need to conduct an intervention regarding your life choices. I set the fork down and walked over. Ammi was standing beside the stove holding a plate, looking suspiciously pleased with herself. Two samosas sat upon it—warm, golden, perfectly folded. I inspected the plate, then her face.

“You’re bribing me.” I raised my brow.

“I’m feeding you.” She tried to reframe the bribe almost appalled at the thought.

“Same thing,” I retorted.

She rolled her eyes and nudged the plate toward me. “Your eyes are going to drop straight out of your head if you keep staring at that screen.” Her nose crinkled at the thought.

“My eyes are fine.” My feeble cover up did nothing to reassure her.

“Your glasses say otherwise.” She pointed out.

“My glasses have zero authority in this house.”

“They’re the only things keeping you from walking headfirst into a wall.” She tried to hide her smile this time.

I took a samosa, the hot pastry crunching under my fingers. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

That was the dialectic of our household: affection disguised as criticism, criticism wrapped in bone-deep concern.

“Tell her the laptop will be needing glasses soon, too.” From the living room, Abba’s voice drifted in.

I laughed. “See? Ammi, your husband understands nothing.”

“I heard that!” Abba called out.

“You were meant to!”

“Ungrateful daughter.”

“Dramatic father.”

“Both of you are insufferable,” Ammi declared smoothly.

And just like that, the apartment settled back into its familiar, domestic rhythm. Warm. Lived-in. Safe.

Our home was not particularly grand. It was a comfortable Bandra apartment where bookshelves had slowly colonized every available wall, and faded Persian rugs lay stretched across the tile—rugs Ammi refused to replace because they were “still perfectly good.” The windows were usually propped open, the ivory curtains fluttering in perpetual disarray. There was always a forgotten cup of half-empty tea sitting on a coaster, and always the steady pulse of city noise, the hum of traffic below, street vendors hawking produce, the occasional impatient horn, and the distant, rhythmic rush of the Arabian Sea. I had grown up believing this was what safety sounded like. I didn’t know then how fiercely a person could ache for something simply because they hadn't yet realized it could be lost.

I walked to my room the door almost left ajar, the familiar scent of vanilla and lofi jazz tunes rushed to comfort me. My bed was made, on top lay an open romance novel, my white desk had an open laptop and bunch of notebooks surrounded it, I glanced at my fairy lights encircled bookshelf mounted just above my desk searching for a particular novel. My black chair was already packed with my half written manuscripts in pink binders. I set the samosa on my desk, picked up my manuscripts and took my seat facing my candle adorned window again. Outside, the late afternoon sky was bruising into violet. A monsoon evening was rolling over the coast, smudging the buildings across the street beneath heavy, gathering clouds. I leaned back in my chair, resting my gaze on the glass.

Movement caught my eye, a stray cat perched on the metal framework of the fire escape. It wasn't doing anything remarkable, merely sitting in quiet feline meditation, watching the street below.

Then its head snapped upward. Not toward the road. Not toward the alley. Toward the empty, open air right beside my window. I frowned. The cat stared into the void. I stared at the cat.

“Okay,” I whispered. “You’re being weird.”

The cat blinked slowly, then turned away with supreme indifference. I shrugged. Cats were inherently strange creatures. I looked back down at my laptop. Five minutes passed, the room dimming until my reflection materialized on the dark glass of the pane.

Except, for half a heartbeat, the image wasn't just mine.

There was something standing directly behind me. A shape. Tall. Immovable. And beyond it, where my bedroom wall should have been, stood an archway forged of dark, seamless stone. No street below. No apartment. No Mumbai. Just the cold stone arch and an impossible, cavernous silence stretching out beyond it.

I spun around in my chair.

Nothing.

My desk. My chair. The cooling cup of tea. The grease-spotted samosa plate. Exactly as I had left them. I turned back to the window. My reflection stared back—messy hair held together by a singular pencil, black frame covering my tired eyes, a streak of blue ink smudged along the side of my hand. Completely mundane. I let out a long sigh.

“Tired,” I muttered to the empty room. Fatigue was the easiest, most rational explanation for almost anything. I snapped the laptop shut.

“Alizeh,” Ammi called from down the hall, “check the window latch before the rain starts!”

“On it.” I walked over to the kitchen and reached for the iron latch. The window was resting slightly ajar. I paused frowning, could have sworn I’d shut it earlier.

As I pushed the frame closed, a sudden, sharp draft of cold air swept across my face.

I froze. The soles of my feet against the smooth tiles of the kitchen suddenly felt cold.

It wasn't the damp, humid chill of the coming monsoon. It smelled fundamentally different, like crushed leaves after a severe frost, like wet, ancient stone.

For one terrifying, impossible second, the scent felt intimately familiar. Not in the way a childhood house or a familiar perfume strikes you, but in the way a half-remembered dream resurfaces upon waking. Something I had never witnessed. A place I had never walked.

And yet, my blood recognized it.

“Alizeh! Where did you put my keys?” Abba shouted from the front hall.

The cold vanished. The illusion shattered. It was as though I was manifesting my imagination and suddenly reality slipped between my own thoughts. It was safer to imagine it that way rather than admitting the other way around.

I blinked, pulling myself back. “On the side table!”

“No, those are your mother’s!”

“Then I have no idea!”

“Extremely helpful!”

“I do my best!” I smiled despite the lingering chill and turned the latch shut. Outside, the rain began to hit the pane in heavy, rhythmic thuds, sending crooked rivulets streaming down the glass. The strange scent was gone. The cold had evaporated. The city remained, vibrant and solid. Mumbai. My home. My entirely ordinary existence.

I rested my forehead lightly against the cool glass. For reasons I couldn't articulate, the sound of the rain felt oddly distant—as though somewhere, infinitely far away, another storm was falling through the dark at the exact same time.

I smiled at the absurdity of the thought, turned off the light, and joined my family.