AFTERWORD

AFTERWORD

A Note on Zakariya

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Zakariya is not a real person. Or rather: he is assembled from real things — from the texture of a city that does not make sentiment easy, from the pattern of a person who feels clearly and speaks late, from the experience of changing yourself for someone who was already leaving, of falling for the friend's sister, of fighting at the wrong moment and waiting for the wrong reason.

These things are real. The person assembled from them is fiction, which is what fiction is: the arrangement of real material into a life that did not exist before the arranging.

What I wanted to write was the story of a person who was not a villain and not a hero and not the protagonist of a redemption arc but simply someone who kept making the same mistake from different angles until he could see it clearly enough to name it. The naming is not the resolution. The naming is the precondition for the resolution that may or may not arrive.

Zakariya means: the one who remembers.

He remembers everything.

If something in his remembering is useful to the person reading this — not as instruction, not as a lesson to be extracted and applied, but as the recognition of a shape that some people's interior lives take: good. That is what the story was written for. Not to solve the shape. To make it visible.

If you recognized it: you are not alone in it.

If you did not: now you know it exists.

Either way, the story has done what stories can do.

— Syed Muhammad Hur Jaffri

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Zakariya means: the one who remembers.

He remembered everything.

That was the problem.

That was also, eventually, the beginning of the solution.

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