KEEP PLANNING – S. Taufeequddin Azher

1. greens for ana—peas, spinach, beans. arab sands. my father: yellow-eyed. apparitions resembling him follow courses unexplained to me. i pursue them. they do not turn back as he would to say, Stop. Do not. Ten years ago in the summer of 1996 a number of children were born in Japan that resembled frogs. I remember the news: a young woman speaking with the dignified restraint of the helpless. I was looking at the large map hanging on a wall in my grandparents' bedroom. I was looming over the light blue oceans and pale masses of land, wondering about the frogchildren. They resembled frogs, I had thought: not tadpoles. I did not want to encounter the frogchildren. I was frightened. Images of the frogchildren, bluish: they wavered before me: I before them. I had to avert my eyes from the television screen. Frogchildren made appearances in my dreams. At the ends of long corridors I saw them: flat-headed newborns watching me intently with dark eyes. They did not move. I fled: making pilgrimage across planes of consciousness, weightless. Every Tuesday after work I would visit the beach with a can of Persian tea. The only reason I bought that specific brand of canned beverage (DASTKAR™) was because of the packaging (I've always been interested in the graphic design of objects more than objects themselves: surfaces; the "reality" present at the interface upon which the world is projected. Faces, edges, etc.): oriental patterns crawled over aluminum: my eyes would trace them, disappearing into blazing spirals and resurfacing along the edge of an angel's wing, pursuing the great, wavering tail of the Simurgh wrapping around the can three times over—bright, pure. Scenes from the Shahnamah: pulsing upwards into tangibility; ultraviolet. The tea itself was alright. But I'd sit sweating on the sand, forearms glistening, my office clothes sticking to my back, sipping DASTKAR™ tea, watching seagoers amble about. I would sit there for long after the sun had set. I've never been able to relax in public: in libraries, in museums, on the metro, at the supermarket, at the park—I'd spend more time thinking about how I appeared to the giant eyeball fixating upon me—the audience of my life—than doing what I was supposed to be doing. So all those Tuesdays spent trying to relax or at the very least appear relaxed to the audience of my life and my fellow seagoers seemed to me a waste. Hours at the beach that took a heavier toll on me than working in an office ever did. Sometimes I took a book to the beach, but I could never get any reading done because I'd be thinking now more about how I seemed reading the book I was reading in public, especially when it was something embarrassing, like for example the time that I was reading a certain romance-fantasy-young-adult novel series that a coworker recommended to me and that I read because I was interested in said coworker semi-romantically for a while—interested enough to spend time on Tuesdays after work at the beach reading books that if I wasn't afflicted with infatuation I wouldn't be caught dead reading (literally—certain vices I've avoided my entire life for the dreadful apprehension that death will pass over me at any moment—I will not die transgressing: I will not die masturbating, I will not die reading a young-adult novel). But I felt guilty, too, because I really liked her, and when I'd read this series of poorly-written books in public I'd read it with an air of condescension about me. I mean that I'd act physically disinterested and bored and I'd shake my head and act all embarrassed and quietly scoff "to myself" every few seconds, as if I was in some way nudging everybody around me, as if to say, This is schlock, isn't it, and it felt as if I was betraying her in some secret way, and the worst part is that I actually really did kind of like those books, and so my condescension was insincere and unnecessary—I was a dimwit midwit pseud: a jerk to her, and dishonest to myself. And all for what? The giant eyeball fixed upon me. I don't think she ever cared what I thought of those books. But the point is I've never been able to relax in public. I'm always thinking: wasting away consciousness on trivialities. As others do. I'd watch seagoers. I saw at the beach: people for whom the heavy, fertile clouds of spring had arrived, for whom autumn winds were scattering withered leaves as they departed; people who were experiencing the onset of a soul-wide climate crisis, people who were containing internal apocalypses: personal nuclear fallout. Old men with smartphones cradled tremulously in their hands; lovers clinging desperately to each other; groups of schoolgirls laughing and taking flash photographs of each other holding up iridescent washed-up squids and men-o'-war: I sat on the beach sipping DASTKAR™ tea watching them all. 2022

*** S. Taufeequddin Azher (@staufeeqazher) is a writer from the Deccan. His work has appeared in Citywide Lunch and ExPat Press. 19 August 2026