Grouching in the Shower

“Brrrrrrrrr!”

Having a shower sets me off talking to myself. Yesterday was a really bad day. The barber never understands what I want and I was thinking: should I tackle the same one again, or try a new one?

“Brrrrrrrrr!”

“What’s wrong with you? The water’s nice and hot!”

“I know, but it makes me think of Rugger and getting into one of those icy showers at school again after some muddy game.”

“Are you Pavlov’s dog? That was ages ago. In post-war England. Austerity. Cold shower daily after games. Ration books. Mr Chad looming over a brick wall: ‘Wot no bangers?’ Hot bath once a week and chess with the housemaster afterwards.”

“The Cairo winters are getting colder. Climate change is pranging everything, everywhere in the world.”

“‘Pranging’? What you need, kid, is a course in modern English. You’re stuck in the 40s of the last century. You’re a silly old fossil.”

“You think so?”

“Don’t you? Remember when you were teaching in that TEFL course in the 70s and you wanted to throw the text book out of the window because it made no difference between ‘May I?’ and ‘Can I?’”

“Yes. It was a bad book.”

“No it wasn’t. It was modern English. You were thinking of when you were at school and one of the bods asked the master: ‘Can I leave the room, sir?’ and the master said, ‘You can leave the room, Caruthers, by standing up and walking out. But whether you may, or may not, is another question.’ Caruthers was then told to ask properly and said: ‘May I leave the room, sir.’ Well, I’ll give you news. Those days are over. You can say, ‘Can I’ when you mean, ‘May I’ and nobody will even blink. You can bet too, they won’t have ‘masters’ at school soon, if they aren’t already abolished. Remember that chappie who started gnashing his teeth when you asked for the Station Master at The Firs station? What did your friend, Jim, tell you? He said it was ‘politically incorrect’ to ask for a ‘master’. Smacked of slavery. It’s ‘station manager’ now.”

“Yes. They don’t even say ‘railway station’ anymore. Now it’s the ‘train station’. And then there’s all that nonsense about “agreeing a contract” instead of “agreeing to a contract; “meeting with Mr Carstairs’ instead of ‘meeting Mr Carstairs.’”

“English is a developing language.”

“That’s what they always say, even when things are dead wrong, like in that ‘may’ and ‘can’ example. That’s what they said then. Now where is the soap?”

“You’ve forgotten. You’re in the shower and it’s shower gel. Stick your head out of the water, open your eyes and look for the bottle, don’t fumble for a bar.”

“Okay, okay. Soap is a developing something or other too, I suppose, it ‘jellifies’ or is it ‘gelifies’? Well, whatever it does. Anyway, they turn it liquid these days so they can sell it to you for more in a plastic bottle. Why can’t we have a plain bar of soap in the shower like we used to?”

“You can. You can. Go and buy one. Don’t depend on the lady for everything.”

“Fine. But if I go to the supermarket, I’ll have to do some shopping for the house and I really hate that. I don’t want to buy a net bag of twenty-five carrots, or a tray of fifteen cucumbers. We’re not going to eat more than a couple of carrots or cucumbers a day and by the third day they’re all soft. Why can’t we choose our own carrots and cucumbers and buy the number we really need!”

“Boy, oh boy, have you woken up on the wrong side of the bed this morning! Are you going to go through the whole day like that?”

“And why not? Its tooth gel now as well. Not toothpaste and you can’t get the last part of it out of the tube because the tube’s made of plastic. Not like when you were a kid and it was made of some kind of metal you could roll up gradually as you used the tube. Now it always looks full because it’s made of plastic and fills up with air as you use it. I stamped on it the other morning and it squirted the cat in the eye. The cat ran blindly out of the bathroom and singed its fur in the halogen electric fire and I had to take it to the vet. What is halogen anyway?”

“Don’t know.”

“Bet after twenty-five years the quacks will decide it gives you cancer. They always do that. Now there’s a row about plastic. Seems to me all we do is invent better and better carcinogens. That’s the word, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so.”

“You know, I never used to agree with people who said ‘what was good for my grandfather is good enough for me.’ Now, I know, they’re right. You know what the vet said? He said the cat had had a bad shock and would need some psychiatric treatment to be normal again. I’m sure my grandmother’s cat had some bad shocks too. Granddad didn’t like cats at all. But I’m equally sure Grandma’s cat never got treatment. People didn’t have psychology in those days, so cats couldn’t have had it either.”

“So what did you say when the vet said that?”

“Nothing. I left quickly before he told me to take it to Beirut.”

“Why Beirut?”

“Cheaper than Paris. I read they had animal shrinks in Paris. If they have them there, they’re sure to have them in Beirut.”

“How’s the cat doing?”

“I think it has fallen in love with the halogen heater. Sits there looking at it pensively.”

“Where did you read about the shrinks in Paris?”

“In a newspaper. I say! Something funny: the French have stolen a march on English-speakers. ‘Marseilles’ is no longer ‘Marseilles’ in French. The French have dropped the ‘s’ at the end. Same thing with ‘Lyons’. No ‘s’ on the end anymore. But, it seems, these places still keep the ‘s’ in English! So in English you can still say ‘Mah-sails’ and pretend that Lyon is really the plural of ‘lion’.”

“Languages are impossible.”

“Yes. Take ‘one hundred per cent’ in Egyptian Arabic. It used to be ‘meeya fil meeya’. Now everybody says, ‘meeya meeya.’ I don’t know why that happened. Sometimes it’s something to do with whim, or fashion. Like when Jean-Paul Sartre came here in the 60s and announced he wanted to have “un dialogue”. After that the Arabic newspapers abandoned the word for discussion, ‘munaqasha’, and went for dialogue, ‘howaar’. Maybe they’ve reverted now. Don’t know. Don’t read newspapers much anymore, they’re only about people killing each other.

“Got to buy a new pair of trousers today. But where from? Have you seen what they want you to wear? Some sort of baggy reach-me-downs with a label on the back pocket that says La Luna Raiments. I think I’ll go to the South Seas. Grass skirts and all that.”

Stepping out of the bath, I switched on the immersion heater again and the switch dropped off. I’d pranged it.

“Why don’t you shut up! You’re dripping all over the floor and you’ll be in serious trouble. Whether you go to the South Seas, or not, you’ll still need a course in modern English. ‘Pranged it’, indeed! What next? ‘Oh, Wizard!’ I suppose.”

“Shut up yourself. I’m cold. It’s getting colder and colder here in winter and hotter and hotter in summer. Climate change. Nobody in Cairo needed ACs before 1980. They just went home on a hot day and closed the shutters. Now look at the buildings---ACs everywhere you look. The world’s last autumn was in Paris in October 1981. The chestnut trees on the boulevards turned a really fabulous russet and gold. Wow! Since then it’s been like spring or summer till early November round about Cambridge.”

“You still need…”

“Shut up. I know what I need and what I don’t need. I’m not on TV and I don’t need to keep repeating the phrase, ‘on the ground’, like a mantra after everything I say: ‘the troops on the ground, the conditions on the ground, the grass on the ground.’ Where else would the grass be? I think I’ll head for the barber first. The same barber. Can’t tackle somebody new. What I need is a short back and sides and he’d better jolly well understand what I want this time and not use his mini-lawn mower all over. I liked the 40s. I still do. For one thing, in those days Cox’s Orange Pippins and William Pears didn’t taste like blotting paper soaked in sugar and water. They were wizard! TTFN.”

Copyright © Yasseen

First published by BCA, Cairo, 'Chronicle'

‘Shtookas’ and a Hurricane

A Short Story

Alasdair disapproved of Seabreck and its owner, Miss Lucy Quigley, even before he saw them. Alasdair was eight, going on nine. His unruly brown hair contrasted with his neat khaki shirt and shorts. Taken together they told you he was a polite rebel. Seabreck was a plantation house, turned guesthouse, on a hilltop overlooking the Caribbean. Royal palms lined the drive to the house from the coast road.

Miss Quigley burbled on and on to his mother as they climbed the front steps between two Scotch Bonnet pepper bushes to a terrace of ferns:” When will this war end? Nobody can tell me where my brother is. Yours, I know, is in the RAF too.” Then to Alasdair: “You won’t have anybody to play with, young man. But you can keep me company. I only have Maude and Eliazer for that, my cook and yard boy. And they’re not much good.”

Alasdair kept getting malaria and his doctor-mother prescribed recuperative sojourns for him in the countryside. He wished she wouldn’t. He hated being away from home. He’d stayed with too many impossible people. Mrs Laing, who had looked after him during his last exile, had been an exception. But before her there’d been Miss Maple and her Scottie who ”saw things”; Inspector Greenwood who beat up Mrs Greenwood almost every night; and Colonel and Mrs Blys.The Colonel collected old weaponry and had blown himself up firing off a cannon in the garden. Mrs Laing liked the cinema and had taken Alasdair with her.

He wondered about Miss Quiqley. Something told him there’d be runny poached eggs at breakfast. “Do you have a dog?” he asked. Miss Quigley shook her head. They climbed to an upstairs drawing-room crammed with stags’ heads and fox hunting pictures and brass bric-a-brac from Egypt and India. These mementoes commemorated Miss Quigley’s father, who, his mother said, had worked all over the world. Miss Quigley, he knew, would tell him their history.

Miss Quigley was like a pale, nervous bird. He was sure she wouldn’t even let him swim. It was 1940 and everybody said U-boats prowled the Caribbean. Suppose, he thought, one surfaced and fired at the house! He’d have to go home.

His mother took a bottle of pills from her Gladstone bag. “Phone me if he gets fever. This is quinine. Instructions are on the bottle. Have you got a thermometer?”

Miss Quigley nodded. “Our phone’s been out of order since you last called. I can’t get them to fix it. I’ll telegraph you.”

His mother kissed him and he waved at the marl dust the Buick churned up down the drive.

As the days passed, he missed his bicycle at home and his friend Dom Chin next door more and more. There was nothing to do save read, stone wasps’ nests and hack off the tails of lizards that ran along the veranda rail. The bike, he remembered, needed a new lamp if he was to make it ‘brand, brand new’ again. He thought of his Dad who had died in a car smash like Mrs Laing’s husband and little boy. If only Mrs Laing hadn’t gone on holiday, he’d have stayed with her this time too. She had a pretty, upturned nose. He‘d decided to marry her when he grew up.

Miss Quigley would hum ‘Liliburlero’ and call him to listen to the Empire Service with her. “Five short and one long, Alasdair!” she’d shout, meaning the time pips were coming on. He loved ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ and once a man sang a silly song in a silly voice. “I love knitting pretty little mittens…A nice occupation for a good little girl.” Miss Quigley said the voice belonged to Arthur Askey and they put him on specially to annoy Hitler. That first evening the radio said Stukas were dive-bombing the beaches at Dunkirk.

Sometimes he tried to race the soldier crabs he found in the garden against each other. Maude made him fudge. Eliazer made him a kite. Miss Quigley sent him out with Eliazer for exercise, to fetch the letters from the post office. One day she gave him a telegram, “All is well. Quigley”, to send to his mother. He put it in his pocket, wrote out a new one in his room and handed it in.

The clerk held it up. “Wha’ it mean?”

Eliazer couldn’t read. Alasdair shrugged. “Shall I take it back to Miss Quigley?”

“No,” said the clerk. “No business a ‘mine wha’ she say.”

Alasdair hugged himself all the way back to the house, but the next day black clouds piled up over the sea and Miss Quigley frowned at the barometer on the veranda. “A hurricane’s blowing up,” she said. “We must batten things down.”

Alasdair felt desperate. His mother wouldn’t come now. He ran out and sat on the steps between the Scotch Bonnet bushes where he suddenly had a brainwave. He fetched a bucket from the kitchen, filled it with water and stood it a few yards downhill from the pepper bushes. Then he stuffed his mouth with peppers, chewed and swallowed. That, he thought, should give him fever. Fire flared in his mouth, sweat prickled out on his face and he ran, mouth open, to the bucket and dunked his head. He ate more peppers and dunked his head again and again until, feeling faint, he staggered into the house to bed.

Miss Quigley took his temperature. It was normal.

Despite a tummy ache, he fell asleep and dreamt he was in a square-rigger heaving in heavy seas, its woodwork groaning with the effort to stay together. A roar of thunder woke him. The room creaked. “Miss Quigley!” he shouted.

A ripping sound shivered the house. The roof lifted off and vanished and the wind smashed the heavy porcelain goblet on the washstand to smithereens against the wall. It tore the sheets off the bed and dragged at Alasdair. He flattened himself on the floor and crawled to the door and the stairs which turned into a waterfall as rain crashed down.

He made his way to the disused lower part of the house, where Miss Quigley joined him and they eventually slept, wet as they were, under a table.

Alasdair woke at first light. The hurricane had passed and all was still. Miss Quigley lay on her back, an arm over her face. A watercolour of huntsmen, the red of their coats running into the pack of hounds, lay beside her. He called her. She didn’t move, so he went out for a recce.
A lake had formed at the bottom of the drive and in the fields on either side. The house was marooned. At the back, the roof lay beside the chicken coop. Maude had taken shelter in the coop. She was so fat she appeared to be wearing it. Eliazer sawed at the wire with a machete. “Wheah Miss Lucy?” he asked.

“We’ll have to bury her,” Alasdair said.

“I’m not dead yet, Master Alasdair!” a voice protested from the veranda above.

Alasdair watched out for his mother, but no cars passed on the road. Then, at midday, he spied the Buick. It came to a stop beyond the gate. As he ran down the hill a brown Packard arrived and stopped at the gate. Alasdair flung himself into the lake and started swimming to the Buick. A policeman got out of the Packard, stripped quickly down to his underclothes, waded through the water and hauled him out.

A British army officer occupied the front passenger seat of the Packard. “A swim in muddy rain water when you have the sea before you!” he said banteringly. “What can you be thinking about?”

“I was going to my mother in that car over there.”

“I see,” said the officer. Then he spoke to the policeman: “Mallard, you’ll have to dry off discreetly behind the car. There’s a lady in the car ahead.”

He returned to Alasdair. “I think we’ll leave you to your mother, young man. A charming lady. I’ve had the privilege of meeting her.”

“May I go now, sir?”

“Yes. But before you go...” The officer took a piece of paper out of a briefcase on his lap and unfolded it. “Do you recognise that writing?”

It was the draft of his telegram. “DIEV BOMD BY SHTOOKAS, QUIGLEY,” it said in wavy capitals. The writing, he thought, gave the game away. “Yes, sir. It’s mine.”

“Why did you write that?”

“I heard it on the radio. I wanted my mother to come for me.”

“Ah, the Dunkirk evacuation. You know, you had some people in high office worried. Don’t do it again, will you. We’re at war.”

“No, sir. You won’t tell my mother, will you sir?”

“My lips are sealed.”

His mother drove up next to the Packard and spoke from the window. “Good afternoon, Major. Thank you for rescuing my silly son.” The Major got out of the car. “Not at all, Doctor. I’ll be seeing Miss Quigley about our mystery telegram. I think loneliness may have got to her.”

“If you can get through that water I’ll come with you, if you don’t mind. She may need some medical help. Come along, Alasdair, into the car. Get out of those wet clothes and put on my raincoat.”

The Packard moved unsteadily through the pool in the middle of the drive. The pool was shallower than the one he had dived into, but the water still rose above the tires. When she returned, his mother was angry. “How could you disappear from her sight like that? I had to give her a sedative! I must come back to see her tomorrow. Poor thing. She won’t leave the house. She’s afraid it’ll be burgled. She says she’ll sleep under cover downstairs. But how could she stop a robbery? That telegram must have been a cry for help in her loneliness. But I’ll never understand why she said what she did.”

“She got it off the radio. I sent it for her.”

“Well. That at least explains the spelling.”

As he dropped off to sleep that night, Alasdair saw Miss Quigley in a half dream, lying under the table, her arm over her eyes, shutting out the devastation around them. A pang of sorrow and guilt went through him and his hand tightened on his broken bicycle lamp under his pillow.

His mother probed no further into the matter of the telegram and Alasdair’s sojourn with Miss Quigley turned out to be his last exile from home.

© Copyright 2004 Yasseen

First published by ‘Chronicle’, The Cairo British Community Association Newsletter, February 05

The Feast

A Short Story

"Ritz Cinema?" Abu Marwan went to the door of his shop and gestured down the street. The soldier who had come in didn't speak Arabic and Abu Marwan didn't know English. The young man had said, "Ritz Cinema, Ritz Cinema." It was clear he wanted to know the way to it. It could be dangerous talking to the soldiers and Abu Marwan wanted to get rid of him quickly. He was well aware that a friendly gesture towards the occupying army could be taken by some to be treason. He wanted the invaders to go as much as the men with the Kalashnikovs, but he was not a Kalashnikov man himself. He was too old and he had to earn a living.

Let me at least have a peaceful Feast, he thought.

Abu Marwan loved the little feast, Eid El Fitr, which came at the end of Ramadan with sweets and cakes and new clothes for the children. He was less sure of Eid El Adha, the feast at which sheep were sacrificed. He lived in a district which had many butchers' shops. When the feast came the entire district smelt of meat. At night, in the poorly lit streets, the carcasses hanging outside the shops over the narrow pavements often touched his face as he cycled home. His glasses misted up and then, somehow, the smell seemed to get trapped between his eyes and his lenses. His eyes would water and his bicycle would stumble against the curb, almost throwing him off.

The feast commemorated God's mercy to Ibrahim (Abraham) by allowing him to sacrifice a sheep instead of his son, Ismail. The sacrifice of a sheep and the distribution of meat to the poor were a religious duty for those who could afford it. Abu Marwan was too poor to do this. He was a bicycle repairman and sometimes at the feast a customer would give him a packet of meat to take home. He didn't often buy meat and accepted the gift gratefully. He thought of the sacrifice as one way God had established for providing for the poor. But when he was depressed, or tired, and asking himself questions that he could not answer to his own satisfaction, like why was he born, why had the world been created, or why was the sky blue, he wondered why a sacrifice had been necessary.

Eid El Adha was a joyous time. Boys riding bicycles, with strips of coloured paper intertwined with the spokes of the wheels, enlivened the little town. The feast also guaranteed more customers at his shop: children with punctured bicycle tyres, chains that had come off, or front wheels that had become loose and wobbly. .

This feast proved no different, though the town was occupied by a foreign army. The children ignored the tanks and armoured vehicles that patrolled the streets and stood at street corners. They avoided them, or wove between them and around them. There was one unwelcome addition to the scene in his street this feast: an armoured car stood at the intersection opposite his shop. It had been stationed there for several days. Abu Marwan didn't like it for itself, and he didn't like it because it brought idlers into his shop to chat about it. He remembered one particular conversation between a neighbour, who had been buying a dynamo, and an elderly, more educated looking type, who could have been a politician. He remembered it because he hadn't liked what he'd heard. The older man had come in to be out of the sun for a moment, Abu Marwan thought, because he hadn't asked for anything. He had glanced around the shop and after an exchange of seasonal greetings, had nodded towards the armoured car.

"Have you seen the kids in that thing? What do they know about war?"

"It's a topsy-turvy war, this one," the neighbour said "They say they are fighting terrorists and we must regard them as our friends. But they bombed our house and killed my wife."

"I remember England after World War II. Many British people thought the Americans stationed there were invaders and occupiers, even though their government had asked them to come and help them against Germany."

'They say they are bringing democracy," the neighbour said. "How can you make democracy with a gun?"

"They will give us a gun democracy. Our liberators will have guns. After they have liberated us they'll make us do what they say."

The armoured car was still there on the first day of the feast. Imad, his neighbour's son, came in with a punctured tyre. "Can you fix this, Abu Marwan, please?"

Abu Marwan extracted the inner tube, pumped it up and put it in a basin of water. For a moment, he and Imad watched the trail of bubbles from the tube at the bottom of the basin popping on the surface of the water. He was just about to take the tube out of the basin when a brilliant flash of light lit up the entrance to the shop and then, with a roar, the shop fell on them.

When he became aware of himself again, it seemed to Abu Marwan that night had fallen suddenly. Then, slowly, he realised there were people around him and he began to recall what had happened.

"Imad," he groaned. "Where are you? Imad!" Then, confused, he called for his son: "Marwan!" He tried to sit up. A hand took hold of his shoulder. He could barely see over the edge of a bandage round the lower part of his face.

"I'm here, Dad. Can't you see? I'm Marwan. I found you in the hospital. I've been waiting for you to wake up."

"Oh, thank God!" He reached out to the nine-year-old. "What happened? And where is your friend, Imad?"

"They attacked the armoured car. Imad is over there. In the next bed."

"He was standing in the door when the blast hit us. Is he still alive?"

"He's alive, but he's badly hurt. Maybe he won't be able to use his leg again."

"You mean he won't be able to ride his bike!"

"Maybe not."

Abu Marwan twisted his head towards the slight, bandaged figure in the next bed and thought of the happy child who had come into the shop. Anger rose in his chest. He shouted under his breath: "Damn! Damn! Damn!" Imad, he thought, wasn't much younger than the soldier who had asked him the way to the Ritz cinema.

He felt sorry for the soldier too. "He is somebody's son after all," he told himself. What right have old men to send young ones off to hunt other young people? Maybe that boy had also been hurt in the blast that had destroyed the shop. Invaders and resisters feed off each other. And how would it be when peace returned? Whoever was in charge, a dictator or a democracy, there'd be embassies and garden parties and everybody pretending that nothing had happened. How many children would have lost their legs or their lives by then?

Marwan guessed his father was fretting. "He's alive, Dad. We have to thank God he's alive."

‘Yes,’ Abu Marwan thought. ‘Never mind his leg. God has shown us mercy. Are you going to ask ‘why’ over that as well? We must have faith. We must thank God he is alive. We must be thankful Marwan and Imad are still with us and I survived to see it. Next year I'll buy a sheep and give away the meat.’

"El humdulillah (Thank God)", he said aloud. "You are right, Marwan. We must always thank God for life."


© Copyright Yasseen,2004, all rights reserved. ‘The Feast’ was first published by Qalam

Oman, A Land of Pleasant Surprises

The plane landed in the wee small hours of that October morning in 1980. It was hot. If it's this hot at 5 am, I thought, what will it be like at midday?

In the arrivals hall at Seeb airport I wondered how my wife and two boys, who had gone ahead of me, were faring. Two blue-green birds crisscrossing each other's flight paths just below the ceiling distracted me. Darting hither and yon, they rolled as they flew, like fighter planes in an aerobatic display. They were Indian Rollers, as I later learnt, and they always flew in pairs.

Oman, I was to discover, is a land of pleasant surprises and we lived there for 15 happy years.

Arriving expatriates needed an NOC (No Objection Certificate). Your employer or your host applied for this on your behalf. You got it from the NOC office at the airport and joined the queue to the immigration official who stamped your passport with a visa. The Royal Oman Police are in charge, some in uniform and some in civilian dress. The latter is a white ‘dishdasha’ (robe) worn with a belt, a sheathed, curved dagger and a turban. My reception could not have been smoother and I was soon being driven away in a car sent by my employers.

If you imagine the figure of Justice holding her scales, with the summer heat in the tray on the left, then the tray on the right would be the one weighed down. It would be heavy with the country's advantages. A big one is the courteous nature of the officials and the people. Then, there is Northern Oman's striking, desert scenery of crags, canyons and oases.
(Hollywood Westerns could be made there.) There are the coves on the coast, good for swimming and picnics, and the centuries of history to which the country is heir. A great many castles offer sightseeing opportunities. Add to this a relatively violence-free society and you get a country that is one of the best in which to bring up a young family.

Air conditioning helps you withstand the hot season when temperatures can reach 48 degrees centigrade. An empty plastic bottle left in the sun can turn into a balloon. November, December, January and February are the months to invite relatives, or friends from abroad to visit you. Think of balmy Caribbean winters. Sometimes of an evening you need a pullover.

Guarded by the fortresses of Mirani and Jalali and containing the Sultan of Oman's palace, Muscat is a tiny, walled town built round a sickle moon bay. But today's Capital Area, as it is called, incorporates towns beyond Muscat's walls. Next to Muscat is Muttrah, with its traditional Arab 'suq' and white-washed houses with lace-like veranda decorations. The road then dips inland to the bigger shopping centre of Ruwi and Al Wadi Al Kabir and then runs north-west—the waters of the Gulf of Oman almost always visible-- to Qurum, Madinat Al Sultan Qaboos and, eventually, Seeb, 40 kilometers away from Muscat.

We lived at Madinat Al I'laam, an enclave on the slope of the mountain on which the radio and television stations in Qurum stand. It consisted of cottages for radio and television staff. A mix of Omanis, Egyptians, Jordanians, Germans and Britons lived there. All were friendly and helpful. Until we bought a car, colleagues gave us lifts to the shops and the Intercontinental Hotel at the foot of the hill where we joined the Pool and Racquet Club.

My wife and I were employed by the TV as a team. There was no nursery and, at first, we had to take our seven-year-old with us to work Nobody minded. (Children, fortunately, are generally treated as honoured guests in the Arab world.) Our work started at 3.30 pm, translating, video-editing and scriptwriting, before reading the news at 9 pm. We soon settled into a routine of early morning gardening in wide brimmed hats, shopping at the Madinat Al Sultan Qaboos and Qurum supermarkets, lunching at home and then walking up the hill to work.

Weekends were fun. Some of our friends went fishing; others went yachting, windsurfing, diving, or paragliding. Ham radio fanatics locked themselves away with transmitters and spoke to other enthusiasts in remote locations. Most in our community loved gardening. Our German neighbour was often the host of weekend barbecue parties and his manicured hedge and lawn guarded a male date palm tree whose pollen was much in demand for fertilizing female trees in season. Zinnias, we found, did well in our front garden.

We often went sightseeing, or picnicking. The 17th century fortress at Nizwa, a former capital of the country, and Nizwa’s ‘suq’, where traditional Omani jewellery, 'khangar' daggers and 'dalla' coffeepots are sold, were attractions. Bandar Al Jissa, a cove on the coast, which we first visited by motorboat, was a picnic spot that A.E. Houseman, had he known it, would surely have added to his list of "the quietest places under the sun". The dramatic Wadi Al Dayiqa canyon, the Empty Quarter's sands of different colours, and a lagoon called Yitti were particularly memorable.

The road to Yitti lay along the stony bottom of a 'wadi', or valley, which could only be tackled in a four-wheel drive.' Wadi bashing' has its risks. Most 'wadis' are dry but they can suddenly flow if it rains in the mountains. Vegetation is sparse and rainwater crashes down bald cliff sides at high speed, creating flash floods. This wadi, I am glad to say, remained dry for us. It ran to a lagoon a few hundred yards away from the fishing village of Yitti. We'd heard that the lagoon filled up at 60 km an hour at high tide. We saw its low tide rush to the sea... Its most extraordinary feature, though, was that at first sight its waters appeared to be pink. A closer look revealed that hundreds of flamingoes had settled on it. Strangely, too, when you waded along the edge of the beach, fish gathered to nuzzle your toes as though humans were new to them.

Bandar Al Jissa is now served by a road and there is a paved one to Yitti. Fortunately, H.M. Sultan Qaboos, Oman's ruler, goes on personal inspection tours of his country and ensures that the environment is always respected. Muscat, for instance, is refreshingly clean. I call it 'the Oslo of the South'.

Our one regret when we left Oman was that we had not visited Dhofar and Al Jebel Al Akhdar. We only saw them on TV. Dhofar, which forms the southern part of the country, catches the south-western Indian monsoon winds, between early July and the end of August and though there are no permanent rivers, great waterfalls pour off the cliffs into the sea at this season. The time to visit is September when the mists have cleared, revealing a landscape reminiscent of Hawaii and Scotland: white beaches with coconut palms backed by lush green hills with cattle on the sides. It is the land from whence, according to tradition, the magus bearing Frankincense to the baby Jesus came and, to this day, Frankincense is still a major product of the area.

Al Jebel Al Akhdar is a peak where really low summer temperatures can fall slightly below zero in winter. People there grow roses for rosewater.

Omani customs to be aware of? Leave your sandals or shoes at the door when entering an Omani home. Watch out for that coffee! It isn't American filter; it isn't Egyptian 'mazboot ' (medium sweet) or Turkish. A cup is only twice as big as a thimble, but two cups of the brew can pitter-patter your heart and spin your head as wildly as a roller-coaster ride. Your host, pouring it out of the 'dalla', won't stop replenishing your cup till you waggle it in your hand to indicate you've had enough.

© Copyright 2004 Yasseen

First published by Real Post Reports of 'Tales from a Small Planet' magazine

A Bridge of Clouds

“Yasseen, Hurricane Ivan mauled Jamaica too. The old school, Munro, suffered...”
“Did you have to tell me! Another piece of our past destroyed!”
“Damaged, man. Damaged.”
(From a recent Instant Messenger conversation.)


I could imagine the clouds that built up before Ivan struck. I learnt to watch clouds as a child and became a cloud watcher. Nowadays, I watch televised cricket matches in the West Indies for the clouds that appear above the pavilion and the palm fronds.

Clouds have nationality. You can’t see West Indian clouds anywhere else and they have the power to take me back to my childhood: waking to the pre-breakfast chatter of crockery in my grandmother’s pantry; the taste of sal’fish’n’ackee; the earthy smell of Caribbean rain; and the pandemonium of colours over the sea at sunset.

I like visiting the past as it was, not what it has become. Damn Ivan!

I see my friend Vincent again, laughing fit to burst, near the Montego Bay Creek. I’m collecting scattered oranges, tomatoes and mangoes, returning them to a donkey’s hamper and apologising -- from a safe distance-- to a market lady sitting on the ground before an omelette of raw eggs and broken shells.

Vincent and I, six-year–olds, or thereabouts, had rollicked downhill on a couple of adult-size racing bicycles, from Jackson Town towards the Dome. Head down, streamlined, I hadn’t seen the donkey and my front wheel had rammed it between its back legs. Language! The donkey had had a lot to say. So had its mount when she landed in the street!

One day clouds gathered above our old, red brick house at Church Street, harbingers of a hurricane that blew down our giant guango tree. That was when I began cloud-watching.

Later, we moved to a farm in the hills near Brown’s Town. We lived with oil lamps, a radio powered by a car battery and a tank for rain water. Reading, horse riding and the wartime broadcasts of London Calling in the Empire Service were the entertainments. On holidays from Munro, my brother and I made charcoal for our antiquated stove. We churned the milk and made butter for the house. We also made mango chutney, though I couldn’t tell you the recipe today.

The farm, it seemed to me, could somehow generate huge clouds. It was like a fountain I saw on a student rag day in Birmingham. Puck had thrown a bucket of industrial detergent into it and bubbles as big as baby elephants sprang from it, one on top of the other. Foam and suds flowed down a nearby statue of Queen Victoria. On storm-threatening days, a similar show in cloud form developed above the farmhouse.

Eventually, the illustrations in the outsize edition of Milton’s “Paradise Lost” that lay on a table in our drawing-room came to life above us. Angels fought with fiery darts and set the coconut trees afire. Rain extinguished the flames. Celestial artillery roared. The house trembled.

I left Jamaica in 1947 for England and visited it in 1984, and then again in 1993. Our Montego Bay house had disappeared. My great uncle’s house, once next door to it, had become a police station. A bicycle hung incongruously from a veranda rail. Union Street had been widened, eating up the front garden of my grandmother’s first home. Her last home, opposite it, had vanished.

My great aunt’s Jackson Town cottage, once known in the family as “The Doll’s House” for its air of prefabricated perfection, had become a slummy schoolhouse. Dust patches had replaced its lawn and croquet hoops. Children had stoned the painted carving of a man in a tamarind tree at the gate, crumbling his morning coat, pinstripe trousers, shoes and spats. A fraction of his face remained.

In contrast, a small, circular Georgian house, that I had known as The Round House Surgery, was a joy to see. Once my grandfather’s medical clinic and then that of my doctor parents, it had become a ritzy restaurant. That, I thought, suited it better.

Open cast bauxite mining, somebody said, had wrecked the farm. So, we stayed away, and on my last visit, the family took a bus trip from Montego Bay to Black River and YS Falls. On the way, we traversed the Pedro Plain. The Santa Cruz Mountains appeared and, perched on a pinnacle, was Munro College. The school’s football chant echoed in my head again:

"In arce sitam quis!
"When we shoot, We never miss…"

Beyond Savanna-la-Mar, signs announced Bluefields, but where was the plantation house that had inspired “A High Wind in Jamaica”? I had known it as a hotel. It had been visible from the road. And where was the ford? Our bus should have splashed through a stream, but the road was dry.

The stream had tinkled down the hillside behind the hotel and run through the hotel garden on to the road, across a beach and into the sea. My brother and I, on holiday there, had often waded downstream to the beach, putting a basket under the cascades, pulling it out to look at the wriggling crayfish we’d caught and then throwing them back into the stream.

Suddenly, the wisdom of Oscar Wilde’s aphorism on ignorance struck me. I swallowed my questions. “The foliage blocked your view of the hotel,” I told myself. “Drought has temporarily dried up the stream.” I didn’t want something else to regret.

Our oarsman at Black River, who told us the names of the river birds in English and Spanish, was a magician. He knew where the alligators hid and could summon them to the surface.

“We must go quickly if you’re to see the Falls,” our guide said when we returned to the bus. “There’s a storm at YS every day at four o’clock.”

A few frayed cotton buds sped across the sky. Nowhere in the world, I thought, are storms predictable to the hour!

I soon revised my thoughts. As we bounced towards the Falls, darkness overcame the afternoon. Sheet lightning flickered and a monsoon-force downpour of rain washed the bus. What better climax could we have had to our trip, I thought, as we watched forked lightning claw the river. The clouds had come up trumps.

I should have asked our guide how come there was a storm there at four o’clock every afternoon. I forgot to. But then, I had a fairy tale to take home with me. “Ignorance,” as Wilde said, “is a like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.”

I guess I’ll be watching West Indian clouds on TV for some time yet... I live in Cairo with the call from the minaret, the sight of date palms under litmus skies, the silence of the desert and the smell of ‘molokheya’ soup...

Sorrel, that cooling Jamaican drink, by the way, is called ‘karkaday’ in Egypt. Somebody did ask if we drank it here...

I hope they restore the school to what it was.

(C) Copyright 2004 Yasseen

This article originally appeared at Scribecentral.com

Rising Star

I miss my friends at Appleton and I miss the milk. There's no milk like Appleton, Wisconsin, milk, says Rula Zaki
Rula, 29, a rising star amongst Egypt's singers, tells us in her best known song that we live on an indivisible planet.” Love the world, we are one," runs the lyric her father, Galal, wrote for her. It commemorates 9/11 and is a message of love and peace to the US and the world.

Rula sang it originally at the Cairo American College (CAC) 9/11 anniversary and then at the Maadi Community Church and the American University in Cairo (AUC) reunion. She also sang it at a British Embassy fund raising event to send Egyptian Special Olympics entrants to the games in Ireland.

Rula, who is from a Muslim family, is herself proof of the indivisibility of mankind. She sings Western melodies with the same verve and polish she devotes to the quarter tones of Arab music. She sings in ten languages: Arabic, English, Italian, French, German, Spanish, Turkish, Greek, Korean and Hindi. But, perhaps most surprisingly for someone who can sing to Arab-style music, she received her education and voice and musical training almost entirely in US institutions.

What is she up to now?

She recently sang on Egypt's Starmaker TV programme, which is similar to American Idol in the US. She sang, "You needed me", by Ann Murray, and "Its Impossible", a version of which was once sung by Perry Como. The producers put Arabic words to the tune. Then she sang an Arabic song to Arab music, "Meen ily goa fi alby (Who is in my heart).

"The program was aired throughout the Arab world and a woman in Saudi Arabia wrote a poem and asked me to sing it and do a video clip for her dad's birthday. I'm still working on the tune."

Three people are helping her to make a tape in Arabic: a lyricist--Baha El-Din Mohammed--who has written songs for two famous Egyptian singers, Amr Diab and Samira Sa'eed, and two others who are working on the tunes and arrangements.

She also now sings at the Peking Restaurant in Cairo’s Maadi suburb on Monday evenings and does a karaoke show at the Nile-side Hard Rock Café with her husband. "He is the karaoke jockey and I am the host. I sing three songs."

She is the mother of a two-year-old baby boy, Karim, whom her husband and parents help to take care of when she is away in a studio or at a performance.

She began her school and singing career at the Cairo American College (CAC) where Larry P. Catlin, the school's Director of Music, was her music teacher and private vocal teacher for seven years. Rauf Zaidan, the founder of Cairo's New Opera House Choir, worked with her from 1982 when she was nine. Her voice, he said, had "all the makings of a magnificent natural soprano" and she sang at the Cairo Opera House as a young child.

While still at school she gave soprano solo performances in the Faure Requiem (Pie Jesu) and the Vivaldi 'Gloria' (Domine Jesu). She also performed in the operas, 'The Merry Widow' and 'Carmen,' as well as the musicals 'Starlight Express' and 'Carnival'. The climax came with a stunning performance in a school production of "My Fair Lady" which brought her acclaim beyond the walls of the school.

The school's Music Director "took me to New York where I stayed with his parents and went to the Crane School of Music. His parents were good people. They really looked after me. I was 12, the youngest in the school. I won an award as the most outstanding vocalist."

In High School she was offered seven scholarships to reputable US universities to study music. She and her parents and music advisers plumped for Lawrence University in a small, quiet town-- Appleton, Wisconsin. There, on a four-year-scholarship, she obtained a Bachelor of Music degree in 1995.

Since then she has taken the lead roles, acting and singing, in Walt Disney's Arabic version of 'Little Mermaid'; 'Toy Story 2' and 'Cinderella'. She sang at the opening of the 36th International Advertising World Congress (IAA) in Cairo, in May 1998 and at the launch of Egypt’s First Lady's 'Give a Kid a Hand' worldwide campaign.

She has sung professionally for TV and radio in Egypt, Jordan and the USA as well as acted and sung in numerous TV commercials. While at school she won the Arion award for vocal music and she was the Grand Prize Winner of the Cairo 2000 International Song Festival.

"My dream is to tour the US and Europe and sing for love and peace. I feel our part of the world has been negatively stereotyped."

She says she never felt foreign in the US. Her time at CAC and her travels to other American schools in Europe – in The Hague, Vienna, Belgium and London— to take part in honor choirs helped her to fit in easily.

Her CAC High School fees were very high by Egyptian standards, she says, and once she couldn't afford to go on an honor choir trip for which she had been chosen. "My chemistry teacher, Marcia Mett, paid for me. I'll never forget her kindness."

She is still in touch with Marcia and the Schultz family of Appleton, "They sort of adopted me. I made a lot of friends. People would ask me where I came from and when I told them Egypt, they'd say, 'Wow!' and start talking. I'm still in touch with many of them .

"We e-mail and telephone each other. The Schultzes came to visit us and we went to the Red Sea and the Mediterranean coast together. They loved it and want to come again."

(C) Copyright Yasseen 2004

This article first appeared at Scribecentral.com