Ahab Mullick (b. 2000, Alexandria) is an award-winning Pakistani-American Filmmaker based in Brooklyn, New York.
His work is known for its compassionate and nuanced portrayals of people, rooted in his unique textural style.
His work is known for its compassionate and nuanced portrayals of people, rooted in his unique textural style.
He saw her standing by Video Village with a repose so brilliant that it seemed nearly photographable. He was reminded, in brief, of an old adolescent confidence of his that had been destroyed over the years of husbandhood and fatherhood and working in the industry. When he looked back at that time, he felt that those memories belonged to someone else.
His daughter had come to him with a pained and constricted look. Can you actually help me and get Antonio to move the light over to the cue?, she asked. But the cue was where the light had been blocked to best hit the actor. And the cue was where the lens had finally found focus and the cue was where everything had been staged. He explained to her that it was only a step over and that it would be inconsequential in the context of the story. She told him, with a knowingness both admirable and condescending, that if he wants to stand there, we gotta go to him, he can’t come to us. The film has gotta go to him.
A deep, confused frustration he had never before felt for his daughter pervaded him. Even when she was a child, when he worked in the old study, in that old basement room, he could never once recall raising his voice, even when she spent the entire day clamoring with pots in hand behind him near the lamplight, pretending she was a tribal leader.
He felt an embarrassed expression occur on his face - one he, after a physical bout with his father when he was seventeen, contentedly imagined hiding all his life from his children. Just do it, will you? He’s not gonna do it unless one of us goes up to him, she said. The truth was that she was not blindly assured, but genuinely adept at her newfound craft. Like a lock slipping into place. She had a charisma that he had not seen in a woman that young, this closely, since he was in college and he had dated Reva.
Reva, he thought, Old misunderstood, Reva. He thought about the way she would beat him when she was drunk and lock him in her small apartment pantry closet with the chair from the study bound against the door. And the way that she had ascended quickly through the ranks and had become a visionary student and the ideal doctoral candidate.
She wasn’t terribly smart, he thought. It wasn’t that she had some secret knowledge or gift. She just spoke in a way that made the stoop on everyone’s shoulders drop a little. She brought their rushing sensations to a halt.
That’s what it it was, he thought. And that was the skill he spent most of his time attempting to master after he dropped out of Ithaca during his second year in the Chemical Engineering Program.
At once, his mind took hold after wandering and he scanned the room with an urgency to find Antonio, but found his daughter there instead, who had gotten to the boy first, and who was laughing loudly with him in a way that made him seem personal and familiar to her— like he was her brother or child or old friend. And he watched keenly, as if he were looking through an old television screen, as Antonio’s shoulders relaxed.
2 The Silences, by Ahab Mullick
We haven’t spoken in over three months. After bitter texts wrapped up our permanent separation, there was nothing left to do but ache til the bitter end. Perhaps this was my mistake. I should have taken it with wisdom (whatever that is) the way old folks do. Maybe then it wouldn’t have torn a goddamn hole in me.
I ordered out again today. I read about an ecological living facility. I wondered if one of those off-the-grid communities would make sense for me.
I stormed the gym in my building after six months with that pervasive desire to right my wrongs, but instead I just stood there stuck. I kept frozen at the edge of the room with the big mirrors across from me, staring at myself — my stomach unrecognizable.
Her little sister called me and let me know that she was shocked I yelled, that my actions were repugnant and that she hoped I’d get LaGuardia and die. I tried to explain to her that it wasn’t my fault. I also told her that LaGuardia wasn’t a real disease, but an airport, and that we were screwing with her when we told her it was. She slammed the phone in my face.
I scoured Indeed for work but nothing materialized. I couldn’t reach out for my dream anymore. Why did I move here?
Over the course of the last four weeks, I have learned as much as one can on the subject of typewriters — Olivettis, Olympias, Smith-Coronas, Royals. The simple typing actions, the urge to achieve a new experience. I want a Hermes 3000 but I can’t afford one.
I found a typewriter in my area for $45. The keys stick, but I am okay with it.
I can’t seem to get a move on on this book. I can’t seem to read anything I used to love.
I ordered a Pizza Hut pizza today and ate it over the sink like a raccoon. It was the warmest sensation I’ve had in a long time. It felt ways away...
I drove back home to see my mother but she wasn’t there. A note on the basement door for a flood damage repair man let me know she was boating up at Lake Eerie. Earlier this year, she shacked up with an insurance agent in Panama City, dismissing any notion of genuine compatibility in the process. To her selection doesn’t matter. It’s silence she fears.
I banged my head against my car’s plexiglass window while adjusting the seat. There is now a swollen bump that hurts upon contact.
There were kidney beans in the fridge my mother hadn’t eaten. That night I cooked in what must have been five months.
I called my friend Joanie to talk about my lack of focus. I can’t sit still long enough to think anymore, I said, but before I could finish my sentence, she had shoved her wrist at the camera, telling me to look. She’d gotten a tattoo of a clock, like the one in that Dalí painting, all misshapen and warped. She told me they wouldn’t let her get it because it was someone else’s artistic property, whatever the hell that even means, and so she went to her friend’s house and he did it for her, stick n’ poke style!. I feigned pride for a moment to please her, but before I could talk about my grief she told me she had to go real quick and do her tax stuff. (It was August?)
I walked out into the street and found my neighbor urging his dog to defecate on my mom’s yard. I yelled that I would call the police, but he said that if I came near him he would swiftly slap me into hiding. So I stood there and watched as his Lagotto Romagnolo unloaded what must’ve been a week’s worth of intestine failure onto our yard.
I received Low Cash Balance notifications in an email I no longer allowed myself to check. In there, pinned, was a photo she had sent me during Basic Training. I often recalled how she once asked me to hurry upstate and get her. I brought her back and tried to feed her while she cried about the violence she swallowed.
I buried her shame somewhere deep in my chest while she talked about the way they had leered at her as she changed naked.
Writing is a bust. Did I know that this was a decade-long uphill climb?
I am a fraud.
I called Joanie again begging her to be gentle and listen. But she said she couldn’t because I was refusing to think about her feelings and simply trauma dumping. She ended the call so I could think about what I’d done.
My mother returned from her trip, called me and began waxing at length— under the influence of what I could smell through the receiver to be a single malt whisky— about the incredulous beauty of life and the many ways we failed ourselves yearning for companionship. That we must learn to accept the silence because we can’t bear existence any other way. I began to speak when she abruptly screamed, cutting me off, saying she’d call me right back because her Panamanian boyfriend was finally calling after dodging her for three days.
I walked and I walked and I walked until that fucking Vanmoof fall started aching again.
A child cried as his mother took his pet giraffe away from the front seat. A woman gave a man the finger for driving slowly in the far left lane.
The treadmill in my building refused to work so I took on a membership at a local gym. I didn’t eat before and was a half a mile in on the machine when I saw someone come in that looked just like her when we were sixteen. My heart convulsed and burned so much I had to run out of there.
Whose tender nature can you ascribe to caring for you? When the lights are out and you’re in bed and your pulse won’t quit racing — who rushes to the forefront of your mind?
No one has touched me in a year.
I’ve shaved my beard but my skin still feels rough.
Today I went to HR and complained about Suzy cursing at me whenever she calls my name. I tried to explain that I had dignity and I deserved better. They told me to stop yelling because my eyes were bulging out of my skull and then sent me home without pay for a week.
I couldn’t look at my typewriter anymore so I tossed it.
I read an old draft of something I once was very proud of, but now just found it garbled and twisted.
I found her wedding e-vite page and couldn’t sleep until five in the morning.
Something in me ached to write something true today. I tried and I failed. But I tried.
I cooked my mother’s kidney bean recipe again.
I’ve learned that I can sit at length in front of my window at night and weep. It doesn’t cause me any shame. I think I understand what this is now.
I said goodbye to Joanie. She left for her masters program at Columbia today. A fifty dollar bill was folded in her hand while she sobbed and apologized, telling me she’d see me on the other side. She had the time on her Dalí clock tattoo changed and had saran wrap shielding it so it could heal.
I closed my eyes tonight and pretended to be in my childhood apartment on Seminary Road. I visited people that are gone in my mind. I weaved in and out of time. I slept for nine hours.
My mother left me a voicemail in hushed tones to wake up to in the morning, slurring between phrases, letting me know I am her best friend. And then it grew all so silent while the sun rose.