Geometry of exile

September 13, 2026I look exactly like any regular inhabitant of this planet, but I do not belong here. I am an alien. I believe I fell into this world by accident through some treacherous intergalactic trapdoor at the other end of the universe.

And for years, I have been looking for that secret portal to climb back to my own world. I do not recognise this place. The people here do not understand what I say.

They cannot hear the music that I make and the songs that I sing. They cannot see the pictures that I paint, and they cannot follow the stories that I narrate.

Their language has no word for the messenger pigeon that dies of hunger just before delivering the last epistle of a consumptive love-lorn; for the first butterfly that sucks nectar from flowers that grow on the grave of a six-day-old infant and wither before noon; or for the man who kills his beloved daughter just to protect her from rioters who are about to break into their house for pillaging.

I cannot show them millions of shades of happiness and sorrows. Sometimes I have tried in vain to learn their language. Certain words still arrive at my lips, complete and perfectly formed, only to dissolve into meaningless sounds before I can utter them.

People smile sarcastically, believing I have lost my mind. On rare occasions I encounter strangers whose faces stir a peculiar recognition, as though we had met each other in my native planet. We exchange brief glances in railway stations, hospital corridors or crowded markets.

For a fleeting second, I almost remember who they are. Then they disappear into the crowd, and the memory closes behind them like water. If you were to visit my house, it would appear ordinary enough.

Estate agents would recommend it as an old but respectable place with five rooms. You should not believe them, firstly because my house is neither put up for sale nor available for rent, and secondly because it has more rooms than any estate agent can ever count.

My room—the so-called master bedroom—sits at the far end of the house. You can enter it only from the living area. However, I often wake up at night to find a new door appearing—sometimes on the wall on the right side and sometimes on the wall on the left side of the room.

Once, I awakened from a troubled sleep to discover an arched doorway even behind my bed. These doors do not lead me to any liberation but to a series of secret rooms. I believe they are fractures in the architecture of this world, or perhaps remnants of the very intergalactic trapdoor that dropped me here.

Behind some of the other doors there are places I never enter twice. One opens onto an endless library where every book chronicles the life of the eternal inmate of a different prison. Another reveals a railway platform on which silent passengers wait for a train that never arrives.

In one of the rooms, I find an emaciated old man lying on a dirty bed. He is probably paralysed, for he only looks at you with wide, frightened eyes, makes guttural throat sounds, and trembles all over with fright as you walk up to his bed.

I always find him covered in his own faeces. The stink is unbearable, and I leave the room in disgust. People think you die from age, disease, war.

I know you can die from a vision—from seeing something too ugly, too gigantic, or too immense to behold. Since my childhood, I have been trying to shake off the image of a beast that I once read about in a dusty old book.

This animal, the book said, is grazing along with innumerable others of its kind in one of the secret valleys of God—a monster gigantic enough to devour the entire universe in a single gulp.

This ghastly picture has stuck in my mind like an indelible afterimage, and while I manage to forget it during the daytime, it reappears at night in my dreams, often after changing its shape.

In all these dreams, I find myself sleeping under the open sky in a bed placed on an elevated vantage point, like a hilltop or the roof of a high-rise building. I open my eyes to see a clear blue sky.

At first, it looks vast and peaceful. But soon I discern something monstrous lurking behind the blue expanse—in the cold void of outer space. Sometimes, it is a hand with outstretched fingers slowly approaching the Earth to grab it like a pebble.

At other times, it is a towering giant—his feet on the ground, his head in the sky, and his wings stretching from the horizon in the east to the horizon in the west. I jolt awake from these nightmares in a sweaty panic, my heart pounding and my eyes wide open.

Once, they terrified me so profoundly that I woke to find myself covered in my own excrement. And it is then, gasping for air in the darkness, that I look up and see that the door on my right wall has opened again.

I walk in. There he sits on his dirty bed: that emaciated, paralysed old man, looking back at me with my own wide, frightened eyes, trapped in the same unbearable stink, waiting for a portal that leads nowhere.

This is a work of fiction. Any names or characters, businesses or places, events or incidents, are fictitious. The writer can be reached at farrukhkamrani@gmail.com.

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