إن شاء الله

This saying, so pertinent in Arabic culture – you hear it from the readings of the holy Qur’an to the taxi driver who has just let a slimy spit out the cab window – has been growing on me for quite a while now. Insha’Allah – God willing. And as you know it is not about god with me, by far, but there is something within that saying that wakes up my dormant fatalistic force of life, joie de vivre. Insha’Allah.

I think Stephen Hawking has once said that quiet people have the loudest minds. You just have to reinvent the ability to listen, which has been oh so painstakingly dying in this outspoken world. I have re-learnt this gift when travelling – one day, your feet, dead tired and blistered from walking, soaking in the salty healing waters of, say, Fraser Island, and you, exhausted and preoccupied with your own self, unwilling to even lift your eyes, suddenly hear a story you normally would have opposed to listen to, and you are suddenly confronted with the understanding how often you have failed to listen and how many stories you might have missed. It is a moment of a perfect A-frame wave barreling, with its quietly loud hum of the universe coming together at the end of the tube. Yes, that is exactly how it feels.

So I listened. As I was about to drift to sleep at the Doha airport in Qatar (after 9 hours of standing in line and finally receiving my ticket at 7 in the morning for an 8:30 flight) I heard someone shyly greeting me. “Hello. Hi. Sorry to bother you, but you probably should not be sleeping anyway, right?” – he must have heard my flight info when the Qatari were very discretely yelling it across the hall to me.

I unplug one earphone to signal that I can answer to whatever he needs to know and that he should be going briefly after that. He rambles. He is from Nepal, living in Paris after moving there from Columbia. Does not look Nepalese – all suited up, the kind of fancy faceless businessman you get used to seeing in Doha. I see the sun slowly climbing up outside the glass airport walls, airplanes taking off and landing, the soundtrack of “Drive” still quietly ringing in the one unplugged earphone.

He asks to see my palm. I laugh – is that a new pick-up technique? He explains it is a tradition in Nepal – fortune telling from your palm. He looks intensely, face expressions changing rapidly, curiosity and dismay written all over my face. He says I scare him and that my palm is like nothing he has ever seen – yeah, right. He says he is not very good at this – well, isn’t this a revelation.

He says the palm tells him that I have never studied and yet I am wise beyond anything academia can offer – ha! Finally somebody has acknowledged that, I laugh. He says I am restless, never happy with what I have, always wanting more and ending up risking everything and sometimes one too much. He tells me I need constant supply of adrenalin to remind me that I am alive; and that I have very few people to trust. He says I am naïve and cruel all at once, and that I ask for more than most people are willing to give.

And many more soul undressing, terrifying and enlightening out-of-the-blue revelations, which will remain written on my palm.

He offers to someday raise money, jump in a car and drive with him from Paris to Nepal, doing charity on the way. And then he leaves.

I drink a first good cup of coffee in eleven days and stare blankly at an Italian who is trying desperately to charm me. I do not mind him sitting down next to me and I hear his talk on his telecom business in New York, but his voice drowns somewhere in the smell of time-appropriate Cappuccino and the sun above nothing but desert. What do I care about telecom on a Qatari morning…

(I was told to never end any writings with an ellipsis by an idiot professor once so there you go)

Watch Malick’s “The Tree of Life”. It was beautifully refreshing – it has been long since someone has created a movie about life as it is and had not stumbled on banalities and clichés.

I know winter has come when I step into a teashop after the three or four months of coffee being my only warm drink. It is very inspirational and I am happy to go tea shopping again. Cheers.