Tag Archives: Bahrain

Nov16

Fajr, the morning prayer

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This is a fragment from something else I wrote some time ago…

Especially across the hush of the desert and the sand-coloured villas and high-rises standing like silent sentinels, you can feel it. That pre-dawn stillness when, for a brief instant, the ‘night life’ senses a shift that is not of the sands or the stones and it starts to turn in to sleep for the day. This is just before the ‘day life’ begins to awaken. The very stillness rings out like a clarion. Unbeknownst to themselves, the creatures of the day respond to it. They stir in their sleep, they mutter. The denouements of dreams culminate and bid farewell to sleeping minds still enwrapped in their tales behind closed eyelids.

An almost imperceptible warming of the chill night air is counterpointed by the chill of the night air that is not willing yet to surrender its lower temperatures to the balm of day. They are poised mid-step – Night and Day, Light and Dark, yesterday and today. The dance of their two winds is halted for a moment, captured in the tapestry of pre-dawn, the warp and woof of life. And they make a brief exchange in silence. The merest kiss of a farewell. And then the deep velvet of the bowl of night is tinged at its very edge with a lighter shade of dark.

It is at this time that the muezzin sitting in the minaret of his mosque can just distinguish between two threads and his practiced eye informs him which one is white and which black, when it is day and no longer night. Then he raises his clear melodic voice to the skies and chants in his pure tones, “Allah hu Akbar! Allah hu Akbar!” God is great.

 The sound reverberates through the as-yet dark streets and alleys, up stairs and down narrow lanes, past shuttered windows, through richly carpeted hallways and equally over mud-smoothed stairways. It floats over sack-covered spices in the souk, caresses the dates and figs in their baskets and stirs the flies. It sends mice scuttling for their warrens and cockroaches for their drains. It wafts past curtained chambers and beaded blinds, closed eyelids and the last cobweb wisps of dreams and nightmares alike. Pushing all away. Announcing to every ear in this island of Islam, Bahrain; the miracle of the birth of a new day.

Jul13

After tremors

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Having just finished reading Khaled Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed, I recall a conversation I had some years ago in the Bab al Bahrain souk.

 

‘You know, that guy,’ he says

Between the displays

Of Lapis Lazuli and silverware

‘The one who wrote Kite Runner?’

I nod, my eyes coveting

A single large bracelet

Woven with fine strands of silver

Into exquisitely painful

Circles and arabesques

Imprisoning

A myriad stones

Inscrutable opals, amethysts

As purple as bruises on a tender face

‘What about him?’ I ask

Half caressing the bracelet

And pointing at

A pair of earrings dripping

Blood-red garnets

Set in marcasite.

Thinking, ‘what does he know of

Kite Runner, he looks as though

He can barely read

Selling jewellery in a store

Over-stuffed with shawls, rugs, woodworked boxes

And glitzy

perhaps-these-western-tourists-will-like-them

Waistcoats and table runners.’

Then I see it

Desperation woven into tiny errors

in the embroidery

Startled by a gunshot.

So, I ask again

This time waiting for his response,

‘What about him?

The book was so moving, so violent.’

‘Ta-shakor’ he replies

‘But they were like nothing’

He whispers

Holding the silver bracelet up for me

Quoting a price and adding

‘Like the stories I have in here.’

He points at his head and his heart.

I see half a lifetime

As it leaks out of his hands

Torn fingernails

The intricate patterns

Woven by hard manual labour

Deep cuts on the side

From scrabbling down a mountainside

Hiding in caves

Or was it from protecting his face

Against knife attacks?

As he enters the sale

For the day.

Jun21

The Pearl Divers’ Songs

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Their music was so strange and distant
From hymns they sang straight to the sea
Or praises raised to mighty Allah
Those lovely songs, that fidjeri

Above the waves of Bas Ya Bahr*
The Nahhaaam raised his melody
Along with him the clappers played
The jahlah or mirwas, plaintively.
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Mar8

Writing exercise

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For a while at the Bahrain Writers Circle we used to have Creative Writing exercises that were started by Ana Paula Corradini, then continued by Shauna Nearing Loej and Anita Menon. The exercises began with a prompt and we were given about five minutes to take these forward wherever our wild imaginations took them.

Some, like the one below began with a prompt – as indicated by the opening lines – and then the coordinator would throw in random words, also in bold. The challenge was to incorporate these words and still tell a continuous, coherent story.

See what you would do with the following. Send in your stories and if I like them I’ll publish them here!

Wisps of hair quickly fell to the floor while words spilled from her mouth. She loved sitting in that chair pouring her soul out to a total stranger. Such therapy! She was harbouring thoughts of her evil deed and the words came out in code. The danger of speaking about this out loud wasn’t lost on her. She knew she shouldn’t say so much but she felt no shame as the hairdresser’s scissors snipped away her long locks changing her look completely. She was bewildered by the face that was emerging in the mirror. Did that look like a sinner? No. She was done. Changed. And then she rose, picked up her torch and walked into the night, knowing that the deaf hairdresser hadn’t heard a word. The soft velvet of the night embraced her.