Day 889

At present, everyone seems to be planning holidays – Easter or summer or random.

Arabic was the language he was learning at University. He would be spending half of his 3^rd year in an Arabic speaking country. So, we made an exploratory trip to Jordan. We visited friends and travelled around. It was one of our last few holidays together.

I ordered a Watermelon juice at one of the resorts. The barman mixed water and sugar into it. We noticed but didn’t say anything. Saagar took the drink from me, made his way back to the bar and politely requested the man to make it only with watermelon and nothing else. A few minutes later, celebrating his little victory with a smile, he brought the new drink back to me.

The sandstone cliff faces of Petra, the barren moody desert of Wadi Rum, the red and white sand, the pitta bread with zahter, tomatoes and olive oil, the exquisitely intricate Persian carpets appear in my dreams often. These are dreams about the places we have travelled. I understand now that these places reside deep inside me. I carry these places within me now. It will no longer be necessary to travel there.

Day 874

Posted by kidsaregifts20

(A door in Zanzibar)

The blue door from ‘Notting Hill’ stuck
on the wall paper of my memory
eons ago.
The glue must be super-strong.

A rectangular passage into a special space.
Simple and warm, fun and messy,
Open and cozy with many possible cups of tea.
A refuge for troubled souls, a place for stories to unfold.

A semicircle of glass perched perfectly on top.
Long panes elegantly framing from top to toe.
The door sat in the centre like a king.
The slit of a smile in the middle welcomed guests
Like messages, notes, post and parcels in.

They said it was draught-proof.
Not too heavy, not too light.
Just right.
The coir mat outside often had a black cat sprawled on it, claiming ownness.
A few yards away a waist high metal gate
sang a little note every time it opened
and another, every time it closed.

A flower basket dancing on one side
with pink and white petunias, ivy and pine,
grabbed a chunk of the sunshine.

Whatever the world threw at us,
The blue door made okay.
It took us in its fold of laughter, healing and trust.

One day one of us left and never came back.
The blue door waits and waits. So does the cat.

Day 860

Posted by kidsaregifts20

Surprisingly her train was on time. Today she was careful. She went to the correct platform. It was 12 noon. There were only a few people around, looking lonely. She boarded a quiet coach and was happy to find her favourite, forward-facing-window seat with a table, waiting for her. The only other person there was a young man sitting by the window opposite, immersed in his phone and lost in a world of his own, between the big black and red headphones planted over his ears. Both his feet, with shoes on, were resting on the seat opposite. Her head rankled aloud and she was filled with such severe disapproval that she nearly turned around and left.

But then she stopped. He was only a kid. In a strange way he reminded her of her son, even though he looked nothing like him. She could speak with him. What was the worst that could happen? She approached him gently and got his attention.
“Please would you mind putting your feet down?”
“What’s your problem?”
“Feel free to disregard what I say. I just wanted to share my perspective with you. The grime under your soles gets transferred on to other people’s clean clothes and children’s hands. It can make people sick. That’s all. Thank you.”

She smiled and backed off. She sat at the seat she had ear-marked for herself, just on the other side, across the width of the coach. From the corner of her eye, she saw both his feet descend to the floor. With a nearly imperceptible smile she continued to pretend to be looking out of the window and he continued to do the same and the world went by…

Day 826

Posted by kidsaregifts20

This forgotten book-mark in a book being revisited after two years is an origami crane – a symbol of healing in Japan. A school kid had given it to me at Hiroshima as a token of gratitude for helping him practise his spoken English.

Paper folding started in China in the first century and reached Japan in the 6^th century. Here it was cultivated as an art of understatement. Origami suggests. It implies without announcing outright. It intimates without brashness. In Japanese folklore, a crane is fabled to live for a thousand years and is held in high esteem. It is believed that folding 1000 paper cranes brings the folder’s wishes come true.

A young girl called Sadako Sasaki survived the Hiroshima bomb when she was only two years old. Less than 10 years later she was diagnosed with leukemia, a cancer of the bone marrow. The disease progressed rapidly and the prognosis was not good. She set out to make a thousand paper cranes. She could complete 644 before she died on Oct. 25, 1955, less than a year after being diagnosed. Her classmates, family and friends made more to bring them up to 1000 and buried them with Sadako.

2013-08-20-sadakobybushcropped

Her story captured the imagination of the country and the world. Today, we recognize the crane as a symbol of peace and hope.

“She let out both the pain of our parents and her own suffering with each crane.”
“Her death gave us a big goal. Small peace is so important with compassion and delicacy it will become big like a ripple effect. She showed us how to do it. It is my, and the Sasaki family’s responsibility to tell her story to the world. I believe if you don’t create a small peace, you can’t create a bigger peace. I like to gather those good wishes and good will and spread to the world,” said Masahiro, her brother.

Peace and hope to Sadako and to us all.

Day 793

Posted by kidsaregifts20

“Take a left and the M2 is right there. You can’t miss it”, said the man giving me directions. He had no idea what I was capable of missing. When I reached Bangor, I knew something was wrong. I stopped the car in a lay-by, rolled the window down and asked someone walking their dogs, “Can you please tell me the way to Antrim?” They tried unsuccessfully to hide their shock and amusement, asked me to turn around and go about 20 miles in the other direction on the M2.

Left and right is manageable but east and west is a bit much. North and south add further complications. My emotional and physical dependence on the Tom-tom is apparent from the panicked state I get into when it decides not to play. I feel abandoned without it. I can proudly claim to have successfully managed to go round in circles, despite a working sat-nav. Communication gaps between man and machine are inevitable. The small advantage is that the machine is not programmed to yell at me when I make a mistake. In a zen-like manner it states ‘recalculating’.

That’s our code. Si and I have chosen it as the most appropriate declaration at times of misunderstandings. It is a way of buying time, naming and identifying the probability of approaching danger. Luckily we haven’t had to use it much.

“Recalculating!!!”