the ties that bind – Poems, Pictures & Prose by Saaleha Idrees Bamjee

For sure.

For so many of us.

Newly-married people. N00b-Earthling-rearing people. Single people. Mingling people. Committed relationship people. Constructs-beyond-definition people.

Your 2008 was all about travel, epiphanies, discoveries, major milestones, messing-up, doh!-forehead-smack s, loves, losses, newness, learning, changing, life-getting, brain-using, creating, destroying, beginnings, endings, more opposites and juxtapositions etcetera etcetera.

And then there was, in no particular chronological order; burning foreigners, madness in Mumbai, load-shedding, horrible crimes and angry tears, bloodless coups and we get a new president and health minister, bail-outs, Zimbabwe had a mindfuck of an election(wait, there was an election?), they switched on the LHC and then it broke or something, the US got their audacity to hope, Somali pirates don’t say ‘Arrr’ apparently, Trevor’s getting married, will you COPE?, The Rand gets a drubbing, Bush ducked the now legend Size 10’s, Satan holidays in Gaza and civilians are incinerated in their beds, etcetera etcetera.

Some year eh?

I went and got married, and yeah, life tends to change just a tad when you do that.

Somewhere between fate and free-will, it happened. Beyond the febrile caricatures of what we thought it meant to love to the real deal of not being able to imagine a life without the grocery lists, the saturday morning errands, the socks on the floor, the waking up to your completion made manifest beside you; snoring and kicking your shins.

And it’s just so much to feel sometimes, yet it’s only just a scratch off of what is to come.

It’s fucking beautiful and I am so so so grateful to the Almighty for where I’m at.

Happy fat included.

Muharram Mubarak, Love and Prayers to all, especially the bereaved, the abused, the oppressed. Amandla.

“There are indications from clinical studies that the mild antimineralocorticoid properties of the Magic Kiddie-Stop Beans result in a mild antimineralocorticoid effect,” Jane carefully read aloud from the tome.
“Anti-mineral-o-corti-coid,” she mouthed with all the slow-nooooo effect of a Zee TV daytime soapie rani lunging at her son who was about to drink the poisoned lassi meant for her mother-in-law.
Were they saying the properties of a substance that suppressed the secretion or opposed the action of mineralocoritcoids, would result in the suppression of the secretion or the opposition of the action of the mineralocorticoids?
Jane’s left eyeball was suddenly spiked by a spear of blinding pain.
All she wanted to know was if the little beans would make her bloated, grumpy or suicidal.
Reading the little booklet that was packaged with the magic kiddie-stop beans made her feel bloated, grumpy and suicidal.
Dros Pirenone and Ethin Ylestradiol sounded like her eastern-european neighbours who led an alternative lifestyle and had just adopted a two-year old nepalese child.
Too many syllables. Too many acutes. Too many thromboembolic disorders. Too many scary sounding things she didn’t understand that related to parts of her body that sounded rather important to have without the complications of itis, emia, oma, opia or esis.
Jane reached that point of confusion where the only thing that made pure and perfect sense was to go shopping for a new pair of shoes and a breastpump.