A Single Lifetime | Novella

The sun didn’t stayed behind the clouds all day. And Fajr got the chance to enjoy the cool weather.

They spent the day together as Zareen filled Fajr in on her secret projects. Answering a question her daughter asked a few days ago. “I may have found something...someone, like us. But nothing is confirmed.”

“Wouldn’t it be cool if it was true? There would be a new world filled with people who could do things like us...more Extentives.”

“I’m going to have to get used to that word,” Zareen joked, munching on a samosa.

For the next few days, they stayed up late and they watched movies, trying to cross them off their neverending cinematic list and cooked biryani.

“I don’t get the point of it,” Fajr complained. “I just don’t.”“It tastes better, trust me.”

“Elaichi in biryani are not compatible, Amma,” she argued. “Whoever concocted that recipe needs to be arrested.”

The all-nighters came with the occasional talk that Zareen deemed necessary for her daughter.

“Time isn’t something that will ‘hit us’,” she explained. “Time is...all around us. We have enough of it. It may not feel like that right now. But, think about it. In an attempt to freeze time and stop to look around us, we aren’t actually looking around us. We’re cheating. We’re not looking at a moving world, we’re looking at people frozen in place. Perhaps by getting distracted with freezing time, we’re the ones not looking around.”

Fajr’s lips became a thin line, pressed against each other in consternation.

We’re just getting lost in our own time bubble. She swore to cut her tongue out if she ever said that out loud, because she still wasn’t ready to hear it.

The thought of even reducing the usage of her powers seemed absurd to a Husani woman...it was frightening.

“I can’t promise that I won’t use it at all,” she said and Zareen instantly cut her off.

She gripped my shoulders. “Just promise that you won’t use it to trap yourself in infinity.”

Trap myself, she thought. I didn’t see it as trapping myself until mere seconds ago.

Even now, she didn’t. It was something that she was using as a defense mechanism. For her greatest fear was not having enough time.

“I’ll only use it when I’m deserpate. But it’ll be hard at first,” I explained. “Because I wouldn’t have this power if I wasn’t meant to use it.”

“Good girl.”

“And, we don’t need to find the time. We just have to use as much as we’ve got wisely,” Fajr blurted, surprising the both of them. “See? I’m getting the hang of being all wise and responsible...in a different way, this time.”

Zareen decided to take a sabbatical and stay at home for a few days. Or, maybe it was a few weeks, or an entire month…

Fajr had lost track of time and for once she was glad she had.