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 much to brag about. So I came to clean my human dirt  in this rustic place , a foreigner, naked among many friendly Turks in the same Hammam.

Laying on the hot Hammam marble and waiting for the turk cleaner to come, for some reason I was thinking of Syria and Ukraine and Gaza.  Though calm and relaxingly sweating in this ancient building in this nowhere town, I could imagine fighting was happening all around me.

Some 300km down south is the city of Allepo near Syrian turkish border. No one knew this city until a year back, and now noone wants to go there . A mess, made out of inflated egos of monarchs and super powers and tribal affiliations and now  religious topping on top like a rotten cherry on a gone-wrong cake, which nobody wants to eat or own it anymore. A while back I was served tea by a Syrian child of age 10-12 who is forced to find work here, when all he cares about is football and games and petty jokes, and all there is left is that innocent smile of a 10 year old.

Further south few hundred kilometers, is the eternal war going on. As usual both sides blaming each-other and the world powers sending measured responses , measured enough to say they care and they don’t care….. Children of god dying…..

And north, just accross the black sea. a proxy cold war has started again…  the MH17 travelers who were watching movies and eating boxed lunches in the comfort of their cozy airplane seats were reduced to ashes , all their desires and ideas of living gone, in an instant. The missile, god knows coming from east or west or may be from the sky this time….

At the Hammam, the turk cleaner man finally asked me to lay down on the floor and with all Turkish hospitality
smashed and rubbed and cleaned all the dirt out of me like a dirty rag (all with good and honest
intentions) and all I could do was just to swear at him and laugh at my own situation and hoping of no
broken bone in this adventure.

Long after, sitting at the town’s Khavenesi(Tea shop) I was thinking, if from unknown a giant cleaner man can come and scrubs and clean us all from head to toe in pure Turkish style, so we all start seeing each other purely as humans again and not as Zionists or Palestinians or liberals or conservatives or western or oriental (and the list goes on). But is this dirt only skin-deep, which can still be scrubbed and cleaned? and has not gone down in our hearts and souls? and has not made its own hate colonies all inside us, to the level that we cannot call ourselves as humans anymore. I would like to believe in the former even if it is not true…. All than is needed is a just good Turkish cleaner…

And just heard now the news of few children and woman killed in my country by angry mob (the so called Namaloom afraad, which we all know) over some Facebook religious status update…. Certainly Strange times and no good humanly news coming from anywhere.

Anyways my rumbling will go on forever. Baiyram and Eid mubarak to all of you from this nowhere town.