“But why am I seeing this again?” Jawahir said almost in a whisper. It was the second or third time she was coming across it. She turned to her cousin with pleading eyes. It wasn’t that she was scared by the coincidence, no, she was beyond fear altogether. She simply just wanted to escape the maze, the endless questions and dead ends.

“I don’t know what to say, Jawahir,” her cousin replied as she pulled down the curtains over the bay windows that poured light into their living room. “Sometimes things come back in our lives, I suppose.”
“But why, Yumna? I’ve been racking my brain over it for the past week.”

Yumna cast her eyes down and busied herself with stacking books on the shelf. Finally she said, “Maybe, maybe it’s because you didn’t notice it the first time as it ought to have been noticed. Maybe you didn’t learn from it when it came as a teacher, or maybe you didn’t thank and embrace it when it came as a gift. The oceans throw out their pearls to the persistent divers, Jawahir. Maybe what we miss, we see again in another form and we think it’s a new matter. But it’s just a continuation of what was before. Life returns many things to us, sometimes so that we can overcome past pains, or learn to trust again after losses. Maybe Jawahir, it’s come back to put a full stop where you’ve been putting all those commas and question marks.”