#Other travels
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Becoming a Master Perfumer’s Apprentice
I will teach you the meaning of perfume, he said. You have to start with a name. Name is everything. Will you smell this, he gave me a smallbrown bottle to tell him whats inside? Yes you are right, it isCocoa , now will you try this second one. Something in me was telling me that I know this smell, it was pleasing to senses and homy, but I was not able to name it. It took me more than a little while to finally recall it was the smell of coffee (and for some reason it reminded me of my last morning coffee…
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Guatemala Diaries Part- II
The climb to Mount Pacaya was steep and I was sweating like hell, though this time it was not out of working my way up but because of the hot land of this volcanic mountain. The trek was hell black with volcanic rocks, where few months back the eruption destroyed seven hundred houses nearby. It was just 20minutes on the trek and one can already feel the heat around.This was my second visit to Guatemala after two years. Nothing was changed. For some reason I was remembering my dialogues with her two years back. Your theory of natural abundance and connectivity makes sense, i said, but what if people donot…
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Hammam… Human dirt, Wars
It was a hundred year old Hammam building, in the middle of a nowhere town in eastern turkey. Dirty, rusted, tiled up with old bricks, and like all Hammams had that distinguished smell of decades of dirt coming out of thousands of souls, scrubbed, massaged and cleaned to purity every day. As per the owner of the hammam, business used to be good in old days but now people seldom come. But today was Baiyram Night (Muslim Eid festival) and alot of people , mostly living in big cities were here to re-cherish their roots and identity. The town itself is called ‘Kangal’ and as the name suggests have nothing…
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Konya Flashbacks….
“But is it really possible to find beauty in the most imperfect of things” asked the novice Sufi to his Sufi Master. The Master smiled. In that smile, were images of years and years of memories, of joyful and sad experiences, of lost and re-found love, of hopeful desires and fearful reasons. The Master remembered his own time years back when he was young and asked the grandmaster a similar question on how to find true happiness when all things are so imperfect. He remembered his own disillusions and then the moments of epiphany where he finally realized, it’s not about finding happiness in life but creating it and often with…
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The tavern of my mind
The Sufi was the last person to enter the tavern. There had been a fierce argument going on the table of wisdom. Feelings showing their emotions, passions seeking their ideals, imagination was skyrocketing here and there with a total disregard of the achieved harmony and balance in life, and rationality speaking more with fears than with hope. All of them were trying to convince the self that they know better and that the self should follow their preferred way. For the owner of the tavern, it was one of those days when he had to worry about broken chairs and wounded faces, though he also knew in the deepest corners…
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Magnolia blossoms…
The season of yellow leaves and frightened trees is gone. Life is coming back to life. Luxembourg is blossoming… You see Neruda today sitting on a bench in a park. He seems lost in looking at two teenage girls on the grass, reading perhaps a naive love novel together and giggling for no reason. Just nearby a big magnolia tree is shouting at each passerby, “It is spring, it is spring, see what spring has done to me”. You take the seat with Neruda. Neruda looks at you and smiles, and you know what is buzzing in his mind and he too knows, what you are thinking….. I go so…
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First meetup . Bookclub – Luxembourg
For some old and rather odd reasoning, I always thought of Europe as a place of lonely individuals with shallow relationships and similar views about the depth-ness of communal life, a place where all values and ethics revolves around the individual self and one has to feel that loneliness to become a European. Was this because of my time spent in middleast and Africa ? where people are expected of thinking of others as a part of their own extended selves? and life is not just a collection of dots but a one big existence; in Shakespearean term full of sounds and fury? My time in Europe this time is…
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The dancing girls of Dar…
Dear Ertyaas, I should have taken you to watch the dancing girls of Dar, when you were here. You can call it my inflamed sense of protectionism or may be i wanted to keep something for you and me to come to Dar in the distant future. You had your Pani Puris and Indian food tasting here but the subcontinent is not just exporting food. There is a thriving and not so underground culture of dancing bars here as well , kind of a mini Chandni Chowk or Rung-mehal in the heart of Africa… can you imagine that!!! It was some months back when an office colleague told me about…
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Guatemala Diaries Part-1
“The only way to really connect with someone is if you are willing to connect to his/her dreams and reality” she said. “But what about my own dreams and my reality” “Why do you want to connect in the first place if you are so concerned about your own dreams and reality? ” I was visiting Guatemala City for business. The hotel lobby Having taken a long transatlantic flight I was feeling jet-lagged so I went to the hotel lobby. I found her there. She was there for some conference on Central American economy.I asked her if she knows English, and there we started, from basic small talk to politics…
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Zanzibar Dreams….
I remember it happened to me some time back, I was traveling a lot back then, and one day I woke up unable to remember which country I am waking up into, the hotel rooms all look the same after a while. Took me some time to figure out I was in a west-african country with noisy Atlantic ocean. But that was nothing compared to what happened to me this time when i woke up. I was visiting Zanzibar islands and for a change stayed in the old town, in a 500 year old building converted into a hotel, with colored glasses and extended Jharokay (جھروکے balconies) made of wood,…
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Saffron Stockholm nights…
“We Swedish love saffron in our foods” she said. It was my last days in the cold windy Stockholm and I was invited for dinner at her place… the apartment was kaleidoscopic in its own humble way… as if the the colors of time and space were dancing all around her living room, sometimes beaming with oldness and the coziness that comes with old buildings , and then as you look on the other side the contemporary sofas and sitting tables and ipads and lcd screens brings you to present times… seeing on one side the African handicrafts hanging around, takes you back to the continent of raw hope, and…
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Masoomiyet Muzesi (The museum of innocence in Turkish)
Dear Ertyaas, Your butterflies are not leaving me anywhere in the world. They start flying from the books of Gabo, they show themselves in the museums of your city, and now this time this single one appears in this first shelf of Masoomiyet Muzesi, the house of Kemal where he is collecting all the objects that reminded him of her beloved Fusun. I was standing in front of this shelf carrying the ear-ring of Fuson’s in the form of this tiny little butterfly about to fly into the unknown, and i was thinking of you….. Orhan Pamuk who built this museum of innocence in downtown Istanbul once said that, “If…
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Inner most desires…
Its funny, whenever I ask someone what his/her inner most desire is, they always tell me of their fears. Then I have to correct them, telling, I am not asking about their inner most fears but inner most desires. Is it something to do with the uncertain times we are living in, that people have forgotten the difference between desires and fears, or is it the fear taking over our inner most pure desires like a virus, to the extent that we have forgotten the difference…. It was Ertyaas, who asked me the same question first time, about what my inner most desire is. I still remember we were sitting…
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Gabo is forgetting things….
Gabo is forgetting things…… Gabo once said that, all days are the same Tuesdays…. Am sitting now in this far eastern small town in turkey, smelling the same khushburnu chai(tea) , listening to the same old Turkish music, seeing the same faces talking to me…. its the third time i am here in this town, and it seems like life is becoming just another Tuesday….. Is it the eventual re-occurrence of things that makes us start forgetting, is it the same way we forget our breathing because of its eventuality and abundance that one day we start forgetting about life too … can life be forgotten because of abundance of…
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Neroli Lady….
تجھے صبح بازار میں ،بوڑھے عطار یوسف کی دکان پر ،میں نے دیکھا This morning in the bazaar when I saw you At old Yusuf the perfumer’s shop تو تیری نگا ھوں میں وہ تابناکی تھی …….. In your glance was that shine (Excerpts from N.M.Rashid’s Hasan the pot Maker) I am sitting now in this Lebanese restaurant called ‘Epidor’ in the oysterbay area of Dar es salam, and for no reason I am thinking of this Neroli lady i happen to meet in my trip to U.S. It was my last day in America before flying back to Africa, where my hosting brother took me to this old Pike-place…
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Hopes , fears, love , guns ….. Choices.
“I dont know how it happened that I the admirer of logic and rational thinking became obsessed with the world of feelings and hopes and love and beauty” I said to Ertyass. She smiled and said ” And you still worry about taking this decision? ” We were sitting in a beach bar in a nice big costa rican’s resort enjoying tacos with Guacamole dips and black bean souce with Zacapa. It was my first trip in the Caribbeans and i was already feeling at home in the lovely world where Marquez’s butterflies were flying, Neruda’s cherry blossom was happening and every created thing looks like Octavio’s fountains of water……
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The wedding night (Sheb-e-Arus)
For no apparent reason today i immersed my self with the Oudh and sandalwood oil i bought from the perfume souq in Dubai, and burned the incense all over my apartment .No apparent reason, just an urge coming from the hidden corners of my heart. And then i found out that today is 17th December, the wedding night of my beloved Rumi…..How can i forget that. I have to prepare for the “Sema” and I thought i should do it on a much bigger scale this time within my mind. (The sema is a ritual followers of Rumi perform to celebrate Rumi’s reunion with his beloved). So little by little,…
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Traditions… Gender…. Equality
Last week we had good discussions on gender equality and how it affects traditions and at the end I was thinking we both were talking about two different sides of the same coin. She was talking more about fighting for one’s rights and I was more of romanticizing the imaginition-practices one associate himself with, and though everything is fair in love and war but that doesn’t mean love and war are the same things. She was insistent that women should be given even opportunities, and in sweden still most of the C-level and management level positions are held by men. I was of the veiw that although women should be…
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Dreams…
Aaah! the world of dreams… What a world… no body wants to come out it if inside, and no body allowed to enter once he wakes up no matter how hard he tries to stop the lights entering into the door of his eyes …. So it is in this world where the first time i found my self talking to you, in a room ful of smoky noises and dancing shadows. I didnot remember who you were,where was I and how I happened to be talking to you…it was as if I was talking to you for ages, as if I was just born in that fixed setting for…
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August….Partition…Heroshima…Independance
When I say ‘Hiroshima;, Will people gently respond ‘Ah Hiroshima’? When I say ‘Hiroshima, I hear ‘Pearl Harbor.’ When I say ‘Hiroshima, I hear ‘Chinese Nanking Massacre.’ “What is she trying to say?”,I asked the Japanese lady sitting next to me in an event remembering Hiroshima with some poetry recitals, and she replied ,”that was another partition happened somewhere in the far far east in the same month of august, the only difference is you people celebrate on the death of 500,000 people and millions de-homed and we drop a tear every august in remembrance of all the same number of stories that died,and this poem is describing the views…
