Travelling alone

I woke up at 7am on Monday morning, the 21st of May. I had a few hours to finish packing, get dressed and head to the office to tie up loose ends before I boarded my flight for the long journey down under. I was waiting for Tahseen to pick me up and drive me downtown when my cell phone rang. It was my dad. "Where are you?" I always hated that question, as he usually knew where I was. "I'm just about to leave dad" I said with a bit of annoyance in my voice. Then there was this pause, the kind of pause that always means that the next thing about to be said will undoubtly be bad news. "You can't leave yet..." his voice trailed off for a few seconds, and then returning to tell me that my great aunt, Chachipasha, had passed away that morning. She has been increasing becoming ill over the last year, but none of us expected that her time would come so soon.

At this point I had a bit of a delimma. If I took my flight at 5pm as planned, I would surely miss the Janaza (Funeral), but I wanted to do both. I decided that I wouldn't make a decision about my trip until I went to the funeral home later that morning. I waited for my mom to get home before heading to the bank to get what I needed for the trip. I must say that I felt an incredible amount of guilt getting my things in order.

Finally, we loaded my moms car with my suitcase and headed to the funeral home. I decided it was best if I did what I could before leaving for New Zealand. I spent the next 3 hours helping prepare Chachipasha's body for the burial. I'd done this once before, when my own aunt passed away about 7 years ago. My responsibility is usually to make sure that the proper rights were being followed, and that no step was over looked. It's a wierd feeling, to wash the body of a grandmother you've seen all your life. To speak of her out loud, as if she wasnt there, and yet here you are, purifying her body for her final journey.

Finally at 3:30 pm, Tahseen drove me to the airport. My parents had been very concerned about my travel to New Zealand, as it would be my first international travel with no companions. But they didn't have time to dwell on it a the moment of my departure.

And then I found myself alone. Standing in line at O'Hare waiting to check in. Standing in line at the security check in. Standing in line at the gate to board the plane. After an hour of standing in various lines, I was finally on the plane to San Francisco, where I would transfer to my flight to Auckland.

The thing I realized about travelling alone, is that eventually we all find ourselves on a solitary journey home.

Glowing Prayer Beads

They waited every night by his pillow, for the early hour when his weathered fingers would grasp them. Iridescent by day, glowing green by night. He had bought them while returning from prayer in the holy city. He was my grandfather, Nana. For as long as I can remember, he would sit in his chair placed next to the open door of our home in India. His eyes would be cast upon the main gate, his lips softly moving, his fingers gently pushing his beloved prayer beads. Their green glow helped his aging eyes find them in the early hours of dawn. His routine every morning took him several hours to complete. He would read his wirds in two different languages: Arabic and Tamil. His beads never left his side through the day. When I would wake up, he would tell me stories, mostly his originals... hours and hours of stories. The story I remember most was called “Panch Phool ki Rani” which roughly translates to “The Princess of Five Flowers”. The story gets its name from its heroine, a Princess so delicate that she was compared to five flowers. He was a gifted storyteller, and I would sit listening to him for hours as he made up small and intricate details about the princess, her adventures, her quirks, her underdog prince charming, and her magical (non-human) friends. This was no ordinary princess, she may have been called as delicate as five flowers, but she was a feisty one. Only recently, it struck me that perhaps she was suppose to be his perceptions of me as a child. Unfortunately, I will never know for sure.

We talked about everything. He would often narrate to me the names and relationships of our many relatives... and then quiz me on them. We would walk around his garden, his personal pride, and he would tell me about each flower he had planted. Every afternoon, he would call out to me when the cotton candy man would walk by our house ringing his bells announcing his arrival. When I was ten I was in India during the FIFA World Cup finals. It was Germany vs. Argentina. Nana and I stayed up all night watching the game, and eating grilled corn rubbed with lime and chillies. It was the most fun I have ever had watching a soccer game. We were both a little disappointed when Argentina lost, and Maradona went home empty handed that year. He was the only person willing to sit through me reading my cheesy poems out loud, and then tell me that I was going to be a great writer.

When my grandfather passed away, my mother brought me his wird books and his misbaha (beads). For a long time they all just sat on my book shelf. I am not very fluent in Tamil anymore, so I couldn't make much of the books in Tamil. As for the books in Arabic, the one I immediately recognized was the Burda of Imam Al-Busiri. It was the most damaged of them all. The pages were mostly torn, falling apart. I had one of my more learned friends look through some of the other Arabic books with me, and we discovered that amongst his primary readings was the wird of Imam Abdul Qadir Jilani. But my most precious inheritance from him were his beads. They sit by my Quran on the shelf in my room. Some nights, I fall asleep with them near me, only to wake up and find them tangled in my fingers.

Someday, I want to write a children's story based on the Princess of Five Flowers, only this version will have a wise grandfather king by her side.