My parents would have been married 28 years today.
I wonder if I would have truly known my mother’s strength had my dad not been taken away.
Widowed at 27, she shouldered her world so squarely, so boldly. She is my daleela, my minaret.
I turn 27 this year, nowhere near the woman she was then and the woman she is now.
I ran one of those vintage photoshop actions on the photo of a window in Masjid Bilal. It’s just down the road from our flat in Madinat Nasr. I’ll be posting more pics soon. Perhaps I should retitle my 20-ken project to “The Year of Shooting Recklessly”. I’ve been a bit suck about the writing. Our place is on Naguib Mahfouz street, so I’m trying to channel some prolific writer spirit. So far all I’m filling up with is karkadey and basboosah. Good gorge, Cairo’s wonderful.
an attempt at memoir/nostalgic indulgence. crit most definitely welcome.
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We were second-hand lions; Hash, Batman and me.That’s what Batman would say, after a long day capped with a handrolled cigarette – cherry tobacco swaddled in a liqourice flavoured Rizzla.
We’d lean against the car, watch the sun slip into Florida lake, spin semantics and swop objectives. Hash would tell how he ran up the stairs at Wartenweiler to give a note to the Library Girl, the one who glided. Batman would laugh then, and I’d think what i’d always think whenever he smiled – gosh he really does look alot like Robert Downey Jr.
We’d ask Hash, “So when’s the wedding?”, because we knew she was The One, like all the others. He’d shrug and squint into the promise of twilight, lost to himself, while Batman and I counted the number of times Hash had handed out his heart at lunchtime.
The war stories we’d tell; threads of loves and losses, each of us carrying enough to tip us over the standard luggage allowance.
And what was I, the third to this pair of odds? Sans car, sans license, the only route to my post-grad validation via these veterans of the Campus Lift Club.
Wearing their fathers’ vintage shirts, way before Hawaiian hibiscus print came back and left in a hurry, they’d sit sometimes on the concrete outside the cafe in Newclare, promising to quit smoking after buying loose Stuyvies and buddy Cokes. I’d nod in earnest interest, trying to learn how to speak Cars. Batman and Hash would laud the merits of angel-eye headlights and colour-coded side mirrors, while I carefully weighed up what this meant in the greater scheme of things.
Such was Lift Club.
