Ten June

On 10 June 2018, something inside me gave way.

A vessel burst. A hidden river crossed its banks. The body survived, but language became a distant country. Words that had accompanied me all my life suddenly stood on the far side of a fog. I could see them. I could sense them. But I could not always reach them.

A week later, my daughter Bilqis wrote a simple message on Facebook:

“A week ago today, my dad suffered a stroke.”

There was relief in those days. No paralysis. No slurred speech. Alhamdulillah.

Yet recovery is a strange thing. What the eye does not see, the heart must learn to carry. The tongue remained, but the pathways of language had shifted. Names disappeared. Sentences fractured. Familiar words arrived as strangers.

For a long time, I thought recovery meant returning to the person I had been before. I know now that this was never the task. The task was to learn a new way of inhabiting the world.

I should have listened the first time.

I should have paused.

Instead, I pushed. I became frustrated. Angry. Impatient with what I could no longer do.

Yet there was a mercy in it.

The words were not gone. They were asking me to slow down.

The body was not my enemy. It was teaching me another rhythm.

The silence was not empty. It was trying to speak.

But I was not listening.

I learned patience from unfinished sentences.

I learned gratitude from ordinary things: a remembered name, a completed paragraph, a conversation that flowed without interruption.

I learned that language is not owned. It is entrusted.

And I learned that beneath words there is something deeper still.

When language faltered, witness remained.

When memory stumbled, meaning continued its quiet work.

When the road became uncertain, there was still a direction beneath my feet.

In a few days, I will turn another year older.

Eight years have passed since that morning in June when the world tilted and nothing seemed certain. Between that day and this one lie essays, notebooks, posters, friendships, losses, prayers, recoveries, and countless acts of mercy too small to measure.

I do not look back and see a triumph. I see a crossing. I see the hand of Divine in places where I did not recognise it at the time. I see doors that closed and others that opened. I see a man who thought he was losing something, only to discover that he was being asked to listen more carefully.

“Our Lord, You did not create this aimlessly. Transcendent are You.”

Not the fear. Not the silence. Not the waiting. Not the years that followed.

The stroke became part of my story, but it did not become the whole story. The witness continued. The journey continued. And by the mercy of Divine, so did I.