Qurrat ul Ain Raza Abbas​
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The Soil of Gods
 
 
You are born of the soil that loves gods.
Mother God—who has heaven under her feet.
Father God—whose curse, they say, can plunge you into belly of hell.
Teacher God—your Rohani Maa Baap, they say, your spiritual parents.
Family God—who loves by taking.
Husband God--Majazi Khuda, your demi-God.
In loving Gods, you water their feet.

At 3, you start remembering. A Mother God bites your cheek because it looks like an apple, she says, laughing. Your skin sears with pain, but you learn to taste the love that hurts.
 
At 4, your male cousin God pushes you into an uncovered sewer in a fit of childish anger. You remember the gray of the water, your eyes open, your body weightless, like trash in its dense embrace. A dark hand in a yellow uniform pulls you out from its murk. You only remember the flax-colored boy whose arms reached for you in the dingy water, saving you.

You also remember being told by your Gods that those in a peela government school uniform, like his, were not one of us—impoverished and abject. Perhaps that is why. That is why they weren’t afraid to touch your tar-gored elbows, you think, while gaunt faces watched you bob in and out of the blackness. Was it then that you learned, against your Gods’ sermons, the color of plunging hands in the goo—that of reaching—is abject citrine?

A Teacher God laughs a few years later, hearing this favorite family anecdote, and says, perhaps as a well-meaning joke, that this is why your skin is dark and why you still reek of sewage, too.

At 5, your bladder wakes you in a room full of Family Gods and a dingy hotel in the city of Qoum. A bathroom snarls and warbles at the end of a long, eerie corridor. You don’t want to wake any of the matriarch gods. You soil your pajamas instead, throwing them in the bin of the closed room. Maybe your Gods never find out.

At 6, your mother tells you that no one will recognize anyone on the Day of Judgment—Qiyamah. None of your worldly Gods will remember you. Your body writhes in pain from the wires, hangers, and rods that sock your skin whenever your Mother God is angered by your Aunt Gods, Money Gods, or Dripping Tap Gods. You cling to your Mother God’s thigh a little tighter.

At 7, you wait at the threshold of your Parent Gods’ temple. You dare not cross it. Fever veins through your body, papules crown on your bare brown thighs. Their bellies rise and fall in sleep. You and your scabs are alone through the night until dawn breaks.
 
At 8, your Mother God’s student accidentally plunges you into the ocean, water swallowing your hair once again. You called him Bhuya God. The Arabian Sea salt presses through your ear conch, drumming like a deafening bomb. He grows smaller as he runs to the shore in his red bunyaan. You don’t remember who pulled you out, only that you couldn’t hear without brine for days.

At 9, you move to a bungalow. A house to keep for your Amreecan aunt living abroad. First, with an unobstructed view of the sky and a strip of garden to weave sugar cane vine through the trellis. The one where they say it was safe to play on the streets. One evening, as you grasp your saved coins tightly to secure an ice pop, a thick-mustached ice cream cart man feels for change in your pocket, laughing and joking while he does. Calling you a cute, chubby baby who perhaps eats too well. He tells you, good-naturedly, not to eat so much sweet, otherwise you will grow fat and no one will marry you. You feared, or perhaps forgot, to tell your Mother God.

At 10, your Father God loses wages and a friendship, leaving him with debts to fend as a keepsake. Everything is to be liquidated, diluted like the warm milk bottle of your few-week-old Baby Brother in the evening. Gripped by a nervous breakdown, they say, your Father God remembers no one. He only remembers you—the endearing title his father gave you: his Naina Pasha, his big-eyed daughter, his beti. Left with the soiled clothes of your Brother God, still just a baby, he cries with half-crescent creases above his lips and laughs with Europa craters cornering his eyes. You cook meals in the poverty of caretaking. You learn young to weaken your broth to sate love, your Parent Gods losing wages and scanty sanity, shattering. A Qiyamah.

At 11, you wait for Teacher Gods under the scorching sun to usher you into the shade of ceiling fan classrooms. You wait in Maidan-e-Hasher, in the assembly ground, rows of children in biscuit-colored uniforms. Your Amal Nama—your deeds—are handed to you in public. Another Mentor God tells you that you are worthless, their galaxy palms still burning against your left cheek, a peal of laughter scalding your skin worse than the Karachi heat. It was because you couldn’t wash your only uniform the night before. Seen. Two thousand sets of eyes. A Qiyamah.

At 12, you answer a question on antimatter, a few fun science facts spoken aloud. You devour them from second-hand encyclopedias that put you to sleep every day. Your Teacher God beams—the spark simmers in silence when your peers jeer:
"Shut up."
"She makes it up."
"Seriously?"
"It’s Raza’s theory."
They shorten your name, the fullness of the syllables inconvenient to their tongues. Unbelieved.
​A Qiyamah.

At 13, you win a prize on stage, facing a sea of heads you cannot count. You sing a Nayyara Noor song for the first time aloud, remembering how your Father God, with his enviable collection of ABBA, Elton John, and M.J. cassettes lining his shelves, warned that modest girls don’t sing in front of men. Your Teacher God takes your trophy and promises to give it to you at a school assembly—a redemption, finally. But they don’t name you the next day. It is your school that won first prize in all of Karachi, they say instead. Another Teacher God asks why your stomach hurts all day. Unnamed. The trophy webs in a glass showcase amongst others when you leave the building for the last time, three years later.

At 14, you dress in a white linen kurta shalwar, blotched with blue flowers. After one wash, it’s spangled with lint. You walk into a class party, and with a voice horrified but sympathy-laved, your Friend God asks if you have nothing better to wear. It was the only new dress you had. A fee voucher crumpled in your hand, the boys roar in unison, smelling fear, asking if you have enough money to pay for it. You drop out because your Parent Gods didn’t. Shame will not let you remember their names, even when, years later, with scruffy beards and burgeoning tummies, they greet you with their three children and prompt, “Remember me, I am Sha…”

At 15, for a microsecond that felt like years to you, you stand rooted in a bazaar, when a hand finds your flat-chested form. You look to your scared Parent God, realizing how your body’s age is now to be perceived on this brown soil. Your God, in the newness of duty, the dull shame of the discovery—the womanhood of your body—looks away.

At 16, you share with your Female Friend God how a man catcalled and followed you in a dark alley. You were scared, you tell them, pacing to outrun him on a lane with failed streetlights. Stranger to the place, you were waiting for a bus after a group study.
Without blinking or offering balming words, your Friend God tells you, with some vivacity, a treasured anecdote she knows of—of her Someone’s Sister’s Friend God, violated for asking directions.
 
“Tch tch. Good girls don’t take public buses or roam the streets alone.”
Your Friend God asks, "What did you do to make men follow you?"
You overhear them, Comrade Gods, calling you "desperate" for waiting for the bus under the shade of a crippling banyan, near the same spot the next day.
While Friend Gods get whisked away in cars, you don’t tell your Mother God why you sat locked in the bathroom that night, washing your hair a little longer, lest she tells you to stay safe—out of school, guarded by a Mijaz-i-Khuda.

At 17, you are wounded several times in your three-yard dupatta; vagrant phalanges reach for thighs, white uniform in public places. You stop covering your head to dress like the ‘fast woman’ they fear will scream. You pretend to be one, donning jeans and your Father God’s man kurta every day. It is a sin to be a small girl in your salt-aired home.

At 18, you start forgetting to eat, surviving on cans of carbonated drinks, church keys, and the stay-tab rings you wear on your pinkie to count. Four on some days, two on good ones. You tell a Friend God that some guilt gnaws at you. "What have you done wrong?" they ask. You try to dig deep to number your sins. You pray five times. You recite the Quran once in the morning. You took zero Lover Gods, never touching one in love.

At 19, a doctor in a clinic invites your mother’s audience, in the embrace of walls smelling of Povidone-iodine, and hands her your diagnosis. "Depression," he says, his verdict. Your Mother God objects, as if struck by a curse with the prefix of "mother" in it. It is not her fault. You drop out that year again to pay for your Sibling Gods’ schooling. Your Mother God wants you to marry instead. Your Physician God prescribes it too. It is imperative you think of your body’s future as a Mother God. May be that is what the depression is all about.

At 20, a Friend God wants to become your Lover God. His earlobes glint golden in the sun, his Kehwa-algae eyes translucent. His breath is heavy from having lost his Best Friend God to an accident. You wonder if the Grief God guided the fuzz of his knuckles, accidentally grazing your index finger, to clasp it firmly.

At 21, you choose to stay.

At 22, you choose to stay.

At 23, you choose to stay.

At 24, you flinch when your Lover God tries to inch closer. Can Gods be touched? Hurt, your Lover God’s small self dissolves. They don’t speak for days, the quiet characteristic of their Godness.

At 25, you remember but learn to want, to trace the coiled brownness of your Lover God’s brows. You want to be held in a full embrace.

Instead, one day, you are left with a failing voice, made to tell your Family Gods of the transgression of their beloved male disciples. Fairer in skin, lighter in eyes, a few months younger than you, loved as a baby brother, Cousin God. This God’s unrazored beard found your bare, sleeping neck to nuzzle against in the darkness of a drawing room. You, a full-grown woman, spoken to tenderly in reverence until that night.

You tell them—you tell them you had sunk into a post-sunset sleep after offering Maghrib prayers. A water, diluted with some sweetness, was offered to your thirst. You floated in your failing body, pushing the towering Cousin God with trembling elbows and hands. You stumbled into a room, fumbled for the keys, and locked God out, fastening, latching, and frail fingers. Your stone Gods sit dumb, uncomfortable, quiet, shifting their weight on sofas the next day. You look them in the eye, unmoving, your gaze desperate and stony. They offer you the prasad of collective silence.

"It could have been worse," they say, hoping for hurt to burn out like an agarbatti.

"Maybe you misunderstood."

Did you make him do it? Did you make him look at you differently? You a fast woman? An infidel who speaks? While he the worshipped Zeus, reigns on a throne in garlands upon garlands on his wedding day. Smiles plastered on Family Gods’ faces.

You squeeze out all the tears from your body, hoping your neck and eyes won’t burn at the photos of shared childhood, your arm intertwined with him on a Cyan Vespa, your bug teeth small self beaming at you from now-blotched photographic paper. In the static images on Facebook the Family Gods crane their necks with his. Choosing him again and again as you pull an inventory of scarring memories of that day. What were you wearing? A full dress. What were you doing? Praying 6:02 pm, fully awake. and 7:10 pm? and 7:18 pm?

Time ticking like an inexorable bomb against your temples. Waiting. What if the revered Family Gods offered to ask? They recluse in their tombs of Godness instead.

At 26, you believe you remember nothing. Yet, your cycles begin to eclipse. Your body, the vessel, holds the tide.

At 27, you inherit new Gods through marriage. After three months in the bind, the nouveau Gods declare you banjh—barren. Your Mijazi Khuda is silent but repeats this, frantic and fearful, in a text to his Friend God. The betrayal of believing his Gods. A Qiyamah

At 28, a statuette you love hands you a letter.

Folded so many times, the creases strain against further bends, their Adonisian body a stranger to them, it reads:
"I am not who you think I am."

If your words had faltered that afternoon, crushed by an indoctrinated cower--
if that infidel, warm devotion hadn’t injected courage before you were ready to say,
"I love you, and so does our Divine God"--
they might not have stayed
beyond that day.
Them, you have saved.
They say.
You fear you are transcending into a God too, the sprout of cartilage poking and spraining your spine. You are shingled in the winged weight you are gaining.

At 29, in a hospital, they hand you an untouched child.
Your body, drained of blood and amniotic fluid, the cord that once connected you to them--
you sit, crowned in your sack, a Mother God.
A Mother God whose body failed to make way for them, laboring for thirty-six hours.
A Mother God who didn’t try hard enough, they say—an easy way, veins, spine, incision, and scalpel.
A Mother God, the first in your generation, with no Friend Gods of birthing age,
no hands to guide you in feeding your fleshed, puny god.
You, a small, grey Mother God, failing for twelve hours, alone in the phenyl-scented room,
soiled sheets, shackled by IVs.
You have no water left to wash the feet of your Gods.
This little life, wailing with a red mouth,
will now prostrate to you.

It becomes louder: the fever, the fear, the weight of Godliness--
growing, gnawing, grotesque, devouring your dreams and senses.
You imagine laughter outside the room, screams echoing, bells tolling from churches,
gongs from temples, and the long, haunting wail of a conch shell.
Then an Azaan—a call to prayer. Hayya alal falah—come to the path of wellness.

You choose to stay.

At 30, you choose to stay. The Baby God calls you Mimi.

At 31, you choose to stay. The Baby God says, "I love you."

​At 32, you shed. You become a mother human. An iconoclast, wielding a borrowed staff of Abraham, truth as dark as kohl, gods crumbling to dust.

You promise your baby human, who does not share your dusk:
You will see. You will hear. You will wake.
You will hurt. You will hold. You will break.
You will scream. You will dream.
You will be Abject, the Soil, and the Citrine.
 
 
 

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Qurrat ul Ain Raza Abbas (Q.) is a Pakistani writer and academic currently pursuing her MFA at the Jackson Center for Creative Writing at Hollins University. After 18 years as an educator and creative, she now writes full-time from a cabin on a tomato farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Her nonfiction and hybrid work explore themes of illness, shame, collective amnesia, and matrilineal histories. A 2025 VONA and Abode Press Fellow, her work is forthcoming in Homespaces: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry.
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