Thank You Sir ... Happier Were Those Days

     Happy memories can heal.Strangely, sometimes of a thing that can cause a bleeding wound.A word before I tell you what I wanted to. This photo was shot this evening as it caught my eyes in a traditional market, popularly known as Tuesday Market in Abha. It opens all days but for their big day is Thursday.The Arabic word for this decorative object is Jambiya.The one in the frame is a wooden model displayed in front of a honey vendor.This stall sells honeycomb too, interestingly. 

     It did bring all the memories back again.You are less likely to forget that. Don’t worry though. I can take you for a walk.A lovely piece of accessory you gifted me the day before I left for Saudi Arabia. It was a beautiful keychain holding a small replica of a silver-colored-knife, the kind that traditional Arab tribesmen wear on their waist belt. I hadn't thought of it in years, nor could I even remember where I had left it when I was in a hurry to get my stuff ready for departure. But … a thing we do in love won't go unremembered for long.

     A couple of summer vacations ago, my sister handed me her home keys so I could let a cleaner in while she was away. I was on my way to her home fidgeting with the bunch of keys when the object chained to the keyring caught my attention. It seemed very familiar. Oh my gosh … it didn’t take long for me to realize it was the keyring with the knife you had gifted me. I was really surprised by the way it had resurfaced after so many years in hiding. And It has been in use ever since. A million thanks…

     Dear … I often miss you all - though, looking back, I am not happy with the way I conducted my sessions at the time. I could really have done a lot better. Hope you were not too disappointed with the way I was handling my first hour-slot for nearly a year. Thank you

Love at first taste:Hummus;a dietary obsession ever since

It was Nasarka, a family friend of ours for years, who recommended the dish for the first time. He put it in such a way that I had the urge to try it out then and there ... which I did. My taste buds judged the result to have come out perfectly, which was very unusual for my personality type, as I typically take time to befriend and love someone new I meet. But this was definitely love at first sight. The dish thrilled the neuroreceptors in all of the six tongues in our little family. It has been a firm favorite in our household ever since; a delicacy of Anatolian descent, but a guest no more.  

 If you still wonder what hummus really is, I can’t put it any better than the American Heritage Dictionary, which describes it as "a smooth, thick mixture of mashed chickpeas, tahini, oil, lemon juice, and garlic, used especially as a dip for pita". Let me add that the preferred oil is olive oil, since the original and authentic recipe calls for it. If you guessed that the dish originated in olive-growing countries - present-day Turkey, Greece, Italy, Cyprus, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel - you would be entirely correct. It has become a standard part of Middle Eastern cuisine around the world, so you can find it even in the remotest corners of the world these days.

Interestingly, hummus is not a cooked food; it involves no boiling, steaming, baking or grilling. Just soak the chickpeas and, once softened, blend together with the rest of the ingredients for a creamy texture. This way it is guaranteed that nothing will be lost in the process. Take note, though, that some people don’t wait for the chickpeas to soak, but cook them instead. Either way, they will have a smooth texture after blending.

Feel like trying, and want me to share my recipe? I confess I will have to plagiarize then, and I won’t look good if you go online for more information and discover my plagiarism. So google it yourself. Google will surprise you with about 34,400,000 results in 0.57 seconds, with thousands of variations and permutations. And as my friend Lourens Erasmus used to say, tongue-in-the-cheek: "If it’s on the internet, it must be true".

The Dawn: The Light 'n Sound Show of Nature

      This is a show to which your entry passes have already been issued in unknown but specific numbers, whether you believe in predestination or not. You have no choice but to enter. However, you are free to use an eye mask or a pair of earplugs. It is totally up to you. Some do use them, consciously or otherwise.
      Ever since I grew old enough to wonder about the phenomenon of dawn and dusk, it has set my imagination on fire. In winter, mostly on Sunday mornings, I would prefer to stay in bed: warm, huddled up, wrapped in blankets, wide awake. I was all ears - though we can’t move our ear pinnae – attentive to the crowing of roosters in the chicken coop, the cawing of crows flying by, other birds’ chirping, the mooing of the cow in the shed with its calf tethered, the bicycle bells of the newspaper boy, the stirrings of my younger siblings, and my mom’s never-ending quarrel with damp firewood reluctant to ignite – to mention but a few. The new day had dawned like a grand symphony performed by a host of musicians.     Like a bottom-feeding fish surfacing to take a gulp of air, I would emerge from bed, not sure If I could call a wooden coat with a mat made of screw pine fonts (Pandanus fascicularis) on top, a bed. Rubbing my eyes and taking time to accustom them to the sun’s rays, my eyes would feast on a vast swath of land lying bathed in the sun. The timing of the sun’s rising and setting varies from day to day. Though the rituals remain the same, they are ever new.
     I am reminded of the quiet folding and unfolding of giant umbrellas designed by Swiss-based Liebherr on the piazza of theProphet’s mosque in Madina, the illuminated city: 25 square miles of umbrellas symbolizing leaf surfaces opening their trillions of stomata to receive their share of the sun cooking food to feed the whole planet. If you are doubtful of my eloquence, here is the quote fromThe Secret Life of Plants by Peter  Tompkins and Christopher Bird: “Altogether, 25 million square miles of leaf surface are daily engaged in this miracle of photosynthesis, producing oxygen and food for man and beast” (p. viii).
     Let us suppose we have a pair of microscopic eyes with 360-
degree vision, and a pair of ultrasonic eardrums. How thrilling it would be to marvel at the transition of day to night, and night to day - day in, day out; year in, year out. It would teach us what all the published works, and the yet-to-be-published ones, could never hope to. Stay tuned to the rhythm of nature, though there is no-one to acknowledge your doing so, or to thank you.
     The fresh morning breeze awakens our sleeping soul, and enlivens it to teem with fresh ideas. Let it caress the hair strewn all over your largest sensory organ in the geography of your physique, and pass through all your pores. I think souls are pollinated by the wind. Winds of change, and a whole day to, as Mic McGroarty put it, “Take care and, by all means, stay inspired”.

Thanks to Diagonal Crossing

Almost all of my friends I went to school with are now far away from me. Some are gone forever. Others (who were never in my immediate circle) stay in touch, as do the ones I went fishing, swimming, biking, cashew-nut-gathering and foraging-for-wild-berries with. A chance meeting would make the latter group reconnect inseparably almost instantaneously - an instant anti-aging medication. Nothing seems to bond people as strongly as good times shared with one another.

We went around wading through run-off rain water during the monsoon, and diagonally crossing the tilled paddy fields, trampling solid dry-as-dust lumps of soils into a single-file walking trail. Roads were dusty in the summer, and muddy during the monsoon. That was a time when our village was not fully free from open defecation. It reminds me of a line from Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: “The excrement dried in the sun, turned to dust, and was inhaled by everyone along with the joys of Christmas in the cool, gentle breezes of December”.

 Experiencing the bliss of ignorance, people did just this as a bus or lorry passed by on sunny days, and they must have got infected by fecal worms and germs when wading through run-off water. We survived somehow, though, thanks (in part) to modern medicine and (in part) to better immunity those days.

We had numerous shortcuts to go to places, crossing rivers and canals, climbing hills, trespassing farmland, exploring courtyards of houses in the neighborhoods, and even cutting across swathes of emerald green paddy fields. These fields would turn golden as harvesting season drew near. My eyes feasted on the lush greenery as I made my way to my mother’s home. Walking on muddy boundary walls raised knee-high forming squares or rectangles wasn’t short way though. As a tradeoff, the dewdrops in the blades of grass washed our feet in the morning.

Harvesting season brought happiness to all. But for us kids, it did so for different reasons. It goes without saying that our long list of demands – whose fulfillment had been put off until “after the harvest” - would mostly be met at this time. The golden grains were reaped by the elders, and the grains that fell to the ground from the ears and stalks were for us kids to glean. Note that these were not left behind for cosmetic reasons, as in present-day commercial farming. We kids would enjoy a rice flake party with homegrown finger bananas. Interestingly, harvest time coincided with the summer vacation, so the kids would have a free playground until it started raining. And we were free to cross the fields diagonally, saving time and steps to go places and reach home earlier.

We didn’t know about Pythagoras’s theorem - about the three sides of a right triangle - then. This theorem states that the square of the hypotenuse (the side opposite the right angle) is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. It is wonderful to realize that natural laws, as they find their expression in geometry, apply even if we don’t know about them.

Everywhere Present, Elsewhere Potable

Before I tell you what I am really setting out to write about, let me remind you: I don’t endorse the use of bottles and disposable cups for storing, transporting, or even for drinking from. It is one of the losing battles I waged against myself after resolving to abstain from using non-biodegradable disposables.It is one of my only failures. All I have managed to do so far is to minimize their usage. It is certainly better than nothing, and a step in the right direction.

Photo Credit: Dr. Ajmal

Around 71% of Earth’s surface is covered in water. That doesn’t mean you will never go thirsty regardless of where you go. Forget about the 97% which is saline; the remaining 3% fresh water is mostly not in potable form as 68% of it is stored in icecaps and glaciers. I wonder how Samuel Coleridge Taylor knew all these statistics as early as the Romantic period when he lamented in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

“Water, water, everywhere, / Nor any drop to drink”.

 It is said that 57-60% percent of our body mass itself is water. It is even greater in kids and slim beauties. We need water for everything. We can’t survive without water for more than three days, whereas we could stay alive for about three weeks without food. Obviously this rule has exceptions, but it would apply to most people as it is based on scientific consensus. It also makes sense intuitively. We have read stories of people who died simply because of dehydration … even in the middle of the ocean, which holds 96.5% of all Earth’s water. The same fate befell those unfortunate enough to be stranded on small islands after being shipwrecked or airdropped.

We’ve been told that some plants can absorb vapor - the gaseous form of water - from the air to keep them hydrated. After carbon, water is the only substance I know that is found in all three states of matter: solids, liquids and gases. This is truly amazing; I wonder if water could transform itself into a plasma state as well. However, evolution hasn’t equipped us to switch to that plant mode even in a case of emergency.

I am equally fascinated by the phenomenon of rain as the very object it showers on us. We are living on a planet where a good number of people are experiencing perpetual hunger, simply because of a lack of rain.

Sacred water, thou are truly - as the wise men of yore put it - the elixir of life, though nobody I know of has ever built a temple in your honor.