serendipity

eid 2019

eid 2019 is something i will never forget.

we visited my grandfather's best friend. he kissed our heads and tried to ask us how we were. he spoke in inaudible mumbles but mama seemed to understand. she always does.

he said he was in pain. he said he was in so much pain. he pointed at his leg and said something i didn't understand but i think it was about pain. then he spoke about his time in makkah, eyes brimmed with tears. i think he said he missed it. mama said "please don't cry you'll go to makkah again, you will, himmat nahi harey, himmat nahi harey"

and it was then when he broke in to the most piercing wail i have ever heard. his cry was spun by the shock of loss and the fury of it. it was spun by "allah ka lakh lakh shukar hai" when the heart was bitter with complains. he cried at the stars and at the moon. he cried at the mountains that stood still when he couldn't and he cried at god. if the sky had heard him, it would have split itself in half.

i am sure of it.

i have never heard anything like it. let alone from a man. toxic masculinity runs in my family so hearing a man cry like this was something unbelievably extraordinary. it was piercing. so loud, it was almost deafening. any resolve to not shed tears was shattered and i found myself suffocating on the air in the room.

then he pointed towards the sky as if to say god and my mom nodded as if to say yes and his wife said in a strange tongue that i am all too familiar with, "you are making these girls cry. now bus. khatam. no more tears, ab rona nahi, okay?"

everything after that was hazy. i remember praying for him. i remember admiring his wife. i remember eidi being furiously pushed in to my hand despite the staged "please no" and i remember the unforgiving traffic on the way back.

i also remember thinking that one didn't need to be a master of any language to be able to translate the enormity of pain. dard as we call it. you don't need your french classes, or your arabic lessons or your spanish to understand how painful dard is and how incredibly human it is.

it is pain that is connecting us and it is pain that is breaking us. i hope we find something.

something beautiful to wake up to.

let it be a city, foreign and exciting.

let it be death, slow and painless.

let it be you, mine.