Category: Getting Personal

Personal reflections shared with all and sundry.

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Blog Getting Personal

“Don’t let your throat tighten with fear. Take sips of breath all day and night, before death closes your mouth.” Rumi

Nooj and I celebrated celibacy last night. Enthralled with our own prolonged states of unwedded bliss, we assured each other, men, real men, men the way we want them to be, are an endangered species. It’s long since that we’ve been disabused of fairytale expectancy, and we’ve hailed Fay Weldon for pointing out, “To believe a Mills and Boon novel reflects real life is to live in perpetual disappointment.”

It’s the sistahs that our Lord has so kindly cushioned our existence with, who inspire within us the deepest affection. So we say what we have to; what we must; what we need; to keep each other sane, to reassure ourselves that we are not alone, that we are (well, most of us anyway) not lost causes.

I’ve come to realise that any position, no matter how obscure, in religion, social sciences or even the art of being cast in or out of the narrative of love is easily defended by some astute posturing from the repository of recycled wisdom. But the little victory dance of vindication that this self-justification inspires in the cerebral colony of one, is just as easily refuted by the self-same information spewing repository. I’ll admit we are often masters of our delusion.

Beyond the brouhaha surrounding marriagabilty, there is a plain which upon reaching you realise nothing about the decisions you’ve made is right or wrong, good or evil, fair or prejudiced, there are simply differing shades of interpretation, depending on your vantage point.

For all the bravado I’ll admit that I still yearn for that unpretentiously clingwrapped marriage, clingwrap and not the distracting bling of aluminium foil, clingwrap so that I’m assured everything therein is kept safe, clingwrap so that the facade and the inner self remain consistent, clingwrap because it’s microwave safe.

Essentially too, clingwrap is easily dispensable.

And just as soon as the spirit is assuaged; the real inevitability reveals itself. Mohamed Arrington was the husband of Zaiboon Motola, the founder of Al Huda magazine. The first time I met this couple they took me out to a coffee shop for a cappuccino and regaled with me tales about their experiences with the magazine. When I left that coffee shop that day I prayed I didn’t disappoint these people.

They have been humble, affable, ready with a word of advice for any reservations I may have had…. And when my first effort was published and I cringed and suffered at every error I saw, it was Uncle Mohamed’s call that settled me. His joy was infectious; I can still hear the pride beaming through his voice. I couldn’t but go along being happy with him.

While paying me a surprise visit last week I noticed how comfortable they were with each other, they radiated happiness in each other, with each other. I was fascinated.And this morning Uncle Mohamed suddenly passed on.

May the Almighty ensconce him in His mercies and grant him the highest place in paradise.

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Blog Getting Personal Quoting Others

"We do not remember days, we remember moments." Cesare Pavese

I have a rather embarrassingly high stack of unread books. Mj’s got it right when he says I’ll probably ask for a bunch of books for my mehr. They are at once my weakness and strength. So thumbing through one volume that’s served its time on my side table, I’ve come to love reading all over again-not that we ever revoked each other, reading and I, but this adulthood thing has led me to have a mind too full, days too busy and inclinations that are recalcitrant of previous affirmations. The reward has been learning all over again what makes reading so special, the vindication of thoughts, one-time ideas and “I would never say that alouds,” leadng one to feel less deserted of common-sense and infinitely more human.


Reading through excerpts of Sylvia Plath’s journals, after having recently read some of a volume of Ted Hughes’ poetry, I’m spending this Monday morning revelling in the potential for human experience to so often be universal.

Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see, I swallow immediately.
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike
I am not cruel, only truthful –
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me.
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

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Blog Getting Personal

For sudden Joys, like Griefs, confound at first — Robert Wild

There are people in our lives, they are not the everyday fundamentals, they are a lot like film extras with occasional starring roles, but the knowledge that they are there, a phone call or road trip away enriches our lives. And just as often, these people are snatched away from us. We do not question His will, His master plan, we must learn to roll will it, be one with it, but there is that watershed moment in which we realise the vacuum created by the loss of just one person.

 

My younger sister is generally the better liked of the two of us among family friends. She’s more chatty, more boisterous and generally better at ease. But I was Uncle Anver’s favourite, so much so, he wanted his son and I to get married. We were momentarily foolish enough to like his idea and think we liked each other, thank the Lord he met Mary soon thereafter. One night , while Uncle Anver sat chatting to Mum and Dad, I offered him a chocolate and belatedly realising his diabetes told him he couldn’t have it after all, he teasingly unwrapped it and told me one chocolate wouldn’t make much of a difference. Four days later he was shot dead on his way home.

Uncle Hoosen was a business associate of my dad’s, during our trips to Mpumalanga we looked him up, became family friends and long after the business relationship became redundant, the familial relationship stayed. During a trip out east two years ago, I remember standing on the upper deck of a restaurant on the banks of the Sabi river in the Kruger National Park. Together with my brother, we watched the hippos in the river below, a consensus of silence between us. He passed away this morning. I haven’t found the space to cry, it’s a little surreal, some part of me still expects him to be there when next we’re out in the Kruger.

To Allah we indeed return.

 

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Blog Getting Personal

Living up to words

 

“Here might not be a permanent, but is there a possibility?
Or does it remain a far-fetched utopia?” 

I haven’t felt this way since I was a wee lass getting onto a roller coaster for the very first time. I was eight, or nine, and my (still) fantastically, brilliantly, awesome friend, Fatima sat beside me. I think it was a first for both of us, the rest were better schooled in the disambiguation of the world-out-there. We were only just catching on. It was a primary school field trip to Gold Reef City, but I can recall the way I felt as if it were yesterday, a mixture of terror and excitement clenched like a flyweight’s fist in the pit of my stomach. 

A minute later, I got off that roller coaster, Fatima and I smiled at each other and rejoined the queue, “Please Sir, a little more of the same.’ But that second time, exciting though it may be, never lives up to the first. Roller coasters lose their potential to exhilarate after a while, so much so that you can be sitting on a mega-roller coaster and yawning during the biggest dip. Walking away from the theme park you eventually realise how wonderful it is to be a child, experiencing the world for the very first time.

But then years later, it happens again. I hold the controls to this roller coaster. Fatima’s not beside me yet, but the adjacent seat is filled with a number of great people, so many of them, friends, and I’m grateful for here and now.

There’s still a child of the world within.