Driven by Curiosity…

Now this entry is totally incoherent! There is one thing in common between the three paragraphs… they are all Afghani!

The book: Kite runner.

Whenever i have been into a book store, i saw it in the best seller section. I kept avoiding it till i could not avoid it anymore( i was not in the mood for a depressing reading), so i bought it… Now, after i am done with it, I am seeing flashes of scenes in this book, and i honestly believe it is a very good book. I am not going to give information to ruin the pleasure to those who still want to read it… but i will talk about some scenes… One of the scenes i found so powerful, was the confrontation between Aseef and Amir… he is being beaten in a life and death situation and he is laughing! laughing because he is finally free… the other one was the confrontation between the boy and Aseef… I laughed from the bottom of my heart thinking “Hallelujah God exists!” The third scene was at the ends when he says for you a thousand times… it was the best ending that could possibly be for this book…
This book made me feel what one of my good friends keeps saying on situations where whatever you are running away from finally catches up with you ” life works in myseterious ways”… it is true… it is better if we face our fears from the beginning, because no matter how hard we try, we will have to confront them eventually.

The store: an Afghani store in Germany called the “Schwartz Elefant” or the Black Elephant. This store has a very interesting business idea. They have furniture and home decoration items.. all antiques, and if not they were very good imitation of antiques… beautiful stuff, leather chairs, dark wood, wooden figures, animals, Buddhas… colorful fabrics…cultural items… absolutely gorgeous. Their business idea was to locate temporary storage spaces, and keep moving their stuff from one location to the other, the same city, in different cities, and sell whatever they have at the famous sentence ” we are moving, everything is on sale”… and people would buy…i dont know how ethical this is, or if they actually make money at all… but i suppose they do, because they have survived all the three years i have been there.

The movie: a movie called Osama, it is set in the Taliban cruel phase, where women were not allowed to work or go out. The story is about a woman and her daughter who are on the brink of starvation because they dont have an male relatives to work for them,( if they do, they are starving themselves, and can not feed other people) so the mother disguises the little girl as a boy, and has her work to save their both lives… the girl goes into the world, confused by the cruelty, and trying hard not to get caught…. a powerful movie, and a good one…

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As I was listening to our beloved Nancy Ajram.. I heard a song that made me think of a conversation I had with my mother (among all people you would think about when you hear Nancy!) the song was saying that it is 7aram he betrays her trust… and if this was love then God help her, if this was a sin, then she repents, and if this was her destiny then she will endure the pains… A very sad song!

We were at the embassy in Amman few months ago. When we ran into this very shabbily dressed young lady… I looked at her because the emotional reaction on my mother’s face (my mom is very good at not showing emotions) was very unusual. I looked at mom inquisitively when the girl hugged her… her name is Kristina… I did not have the chance to talk to her because another lady came and ushered us all inside…. The lady told us proudly that Kristina’s mother was her friend and she is a true martyr!

I could barely wait to get into the car to ask mom. She told me that, Maria was their friend; she died few years ago a miserable death. She fell in love with her husband when they were young, got married , gave up her life to come with him all the way to a place called Jordan. Mom said with a sigh, “Ya reit ma ijat” I wish she never came.

With time, her husband turned into an abusive sociopath! Who made her life a miserable hell… she developed an ovarian cancer after 2 daughters and many years of marriage. He did not want her to have an operation, she will not be able to have kids, and cancer ends with death anyway…what is the point? (I remembered an incident when I was younger. My parents had to go visit some “people”, where my dad had literally to beg the husband to allow him to perform an operation on his wife Maria)… Dad performed the operation, but Maria has lost her appetite for life… last few days of her life, her death bed was moved to the living room, while her room became the room of another wife. Her two bracelets (which were promised to Kristina and Salma) were taken from her hand as a wedding gift to the new bride….her two daughters Kristina and Salma were reduced from daughters to servants…The only cosolation in her last days was that all the foreign ladies that belonged to the same community in Amman stayed with her to help her die despite of the husband. Mom told me detail above detail of that heart breaking story… by the time she finished…we were both crying in the car! ( we kind of have this habbit, wecried together when we saw all about my mother, which is one of my most favorite movies in the world)

Something mom said will always stay with me “ I can not understand, how a human being is capable of mistreating someone else’s trust like this….It is the biggest sin of all, because you kill someon's faith” Maria put her life in this man’s hands, because she trusted him…

Maria died… Alma and Kristina were never allowed to finish high school…until Salma got married to a decent human being, who brought sunshine to her heart… They live in between Amman and Europe now, she has a daughter who is called Maria. Salma managed to convince the father somehow to allow Kristina to come and live with them…and that is why she was in the embassy fixing her papers. Maybe luck decided to finally smile to that poor creature I saw…

Unfortunately our society does not punish sick individuals who are the protagonists for many several stories… he is still a respected pharmacist in his community… but what is truly sad is that this is the story of many women around the world…women who are decieved by their own trust.

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