Restless Nafs Syndrome
She has the house, the husband, the children, the life that looks, from the outside, like... everything.
When a family crisis rearranges everything she’s spent eighteen years arranging, Hafsah discovers that the most dangerous stories are the ones we tell ourselves.
Restless Nafs Syndrome is a novel about marriages that hollow out slowly, and how the same restlessness can drive a person out the door or to a car in Alexandra.
Coming Soon
This novel is currently with the beta readers and will be available to the public soon. Stay tuned for the release date, cover reveal, and details on where to get your copy.
Want to know when it’s out? Follow me on social media for updates.
What I Set Out to Explore
Enough is Never Enough
The oldest trick of the nafs is to make sure we are never satisfied. The wanting is never really about the thing we are chasing, and the moment we finally have it, there’s another thing to want: the next object, the next milestone, the next anything at all. And the dunya never runs short of things to want. We can spend our whole lives wanting, and never feel content.
The Marriage Bond as Victim of the Restless Nafs
The Quran speaks of Harut and Marut in 2:102, of a magic used to drive a rift between husband and wife. But so many of our rifts need no magic at all. They are the work of the nafs, and of how we store the past. Marriage is meant to be the place without garments, where we can be entirely and unguardedly ourselves. When that place is no longer safe, when our nafs and theirs stand between us, where is left to go? What do we do when we can no longer be open with the very person we chose to be open with?
Unseen Labour
Death, tragedy, crisis. Anything can happen, and still children need feeding and houses needs cleaning. We tell ourselves the bigger the house the better, but brick by brick we build ourselves into dependence, until a home cannot stand without an entire staff to hold it up. And yet somehow we’ve decided this is what success looks like. The less we do with our own hands, the more we successful are apparently are.
Inherited Patterns
We choose far less than we think we do. Long before we are old enough to decide anything, we have already absorbed the invisible rules of society and community and who is “suitable” and who is not. As South African Indians, we carry a unique inheritance: a post-caste mentality layered over a post-apartheid one, so that drawing lines comes naturally to us. The lines have changed over the years, but they are still lines. And when we finally step back and look at what we have used to divide ourselves, we begin to see how ridiculous it all is.