If you saw some footage on NDTV today of the air strikes in Libya, it was edited by me.
There were shots of the night sky somewhere in Libya lit up by what looked (and possibly sounded) like exploding suns. There were some shots of people being rushed into a hospital. There were shots of medical personnel walking about the hospital and treating patients.
What I wasn't allowed to show you was a shot of 3 dead bodies lying on stretchers in some quiet low-priority corner of the hospital. They were the dust-covered bodies of 3 Libyan men dressed in shirts and pants. Their heads lay slung over to one side, like deactivated robots. Their mouths were open, like dead fish. The faces themselves were unrecognisable because most of the facial features had been damaged. The eyes were either closed or had no eyelids at all. The bodies looked like ancient mummies. They were still, very still. Their skin had turned to various shades of yellow and grey. Dirt was in their tousled hair, like as if a sandstorm had raged through it. The dead men looked exactly like the corpses from the movie, 'The Ring'.
Long after the PG-friendly footage that I'd edited had aired without making a dent in anyone's existence, I returned to the original footage on my computer and paused at the shot of the 3 dead men, still lying motionless on those green stretchers. I wanted to see if they would breathe again, if a dangling arm would stir to my surprise. These men hardly looked like they had ever been anything but lifeless. Only a few hours ago they had had names and favourite foods and sleeping habits and desires and facial expressions and plans for the upcoming week. Now they were just APTN footage that no channel would ever air, that no audience would ever witness. Would they ever know that I was here, that I had seen them?
I believe that people really need to see what conflict looks like. They need to see beyond the hustle-and-bustle of its living version, they need to see the stupid stillness of what dies. No wonder the mere mention of war or conflict doesn't outrage us. We've dehumanised conflict. All we see on TV, all that we're shown in the media, are endless shots of living faces and night skies lit up by bombs and tankers rolling down streets that could be anywhere - just lazy passive pictures that lie about, that conceal something that's very wrong and very frightening. What's the point of showing you imagery about an issue when the real imagery is not shown to you in the first place? Have you any idea what you've been missing?
her hard eyes devour her reflection proud of a body in movie star clothes matching shoes that hide knobbly toes and dirty soles bad skin scratched by long dirty nails expensive lotion masks the smell of cigarettes grey skin grey gums grey lips lips that kiss hard words and curses a smile that never reaches her eyes this young woman her soiled body her crooked smile her crazed eyes a child of this city
At least that's what I think it was. I was 12-14 years old and in the middle of a lesson in my classroom in Muscat, Oman. Our windows that year had a view of the highway piercing through the rocky al Hajar mountains in the distance. The bright blue waters of the Persian Gulf lay unseen on the other side. That day the sky was the way the local newspapers predicted it to be the whole year round - clear to partly cloudy.
I don't remember what subject we had that period. I remember the teacher going on with the lesson and my classmates silently making (or passing) notes. I was seated at my desk in the front of the class, my upper body leaning over the wooden top, my face cradled in the palm of one hand as I looked on at the teacher with an expression of teenage boredom.
My eyes left the teacher and wandered over to the nearest window. Far in the distance, an object that looked exactly like a flying saucer was hovering above the mountains in the baby blue Omani sky. The UFO didn't move, it just stayed in that one spot for the whole 5 seconds I kept looking at it. I was still leaning over my desk, and my face was still cradled in the palm of my hand.
I shifted my gaze across the classroom and then moved it back over to the window. The UFO was gone. The mountains, the highway, the tiny cars zipping along the highway looked deceptively innocent.
"An Islamic government is charged with supporting all religions equally. It is a twist on the American ideal of separation of church and state, which forbids government from having any role in religion. In contrast, Islam says the state must support all religions!
The Islamic government is forbidden to seize the churches, synagogues, or temples of any group, nor can the government meddle in the appointment of religious leaders by each group. The treaty Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, made with a local Christian community is very clear: No bishop can be removed from his office and no church can be confiscated.
From the time of Prophet Muhammad (p) through the last Muslim Empire of the Ottomans Muslim rulers have been particularly concerned with the welfare of their non-Muslim subjects and their religious needs. For example, in the year 1076, the Muslim ruler of Bejaya, in present-day Algeria, wrote to Pope Gregory VII about the desire of the Christians in his land for a certain priest to be promoted to bishop. The pope was so overjoyed at this expression of religious respect that he wrote a beautiful letter in response, which concluded with the words: "We pray with heart and mouth that, after a long sojourn in this life, the same God may guide you to the bosom of happiness of the holy patriarch Abraham."
Has Muslim history had its share of despots and kings? Sure it has, but so has the Christian world. What is to be judged are the principles and not how faithfully they are applied."
- Yahiya Emerick, "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Islam, 2nd Edition"
In early 2006, Yohanna was a hundred years old. I was 24, but I felt a lot older, as if I had lived too much too soon. I was running on empty. I did not find the company of my chronological peers satisfying, which is why I had started volunteering at the retirement home in Tulsa, Oklahoma. That's where I had met Yohanna, the 100-year-old Frenchwoman.
Yohanna was tall and wore a short dark wig. I only ever saw her in pant suits. Her face was doughy and lumpy, as if it had been made of wax and had been placed too close to a heat source before being rescued. The thick downward folds of her skin gave her a permanent scowl. Her skin itself looked bloodless. Her voice was low and sometimes unclear, it was often hard to follow what she was saying. Her fingers looked bloated and shook often, her hands had age spots like freckles, and under the bright nailpolish her nails were surely yellowed and had stopped growing. Like her surroundings, she smelled of napthalene and floral airfresher. Sometimes lavender. Always overpowering.
Yohanna wasn't the sociable type. She mostly kept to herself in her room, or you could catch her shuffling down the hallways. That's where I first met her. It was my first day at the retirement home, and the head nurse was showing me around. She saw Yohanna from afar and whispered to me that she was from France. I had studied some French at university, so I sprang up to Yohanna and tapped her on her bent back. She spun around and gave me a hard look that almost silenced me. Bonjour, ca va, I managed to say. She immediately began muttering in French, too softly and too fast for me to understand. She almost sounded like she was talking to herself, catching up on some conversation she had left off the previous week. Plus lentement s'il vous plait, I said, asking her to please slow down. She eyed me harder. Je suis Khadija, et vous? I asked her. She rambled on in French, and then suddenly switched to heavily-accented English so fast that it took me a second to realise it. She looked at me even harder.
I introduced myself to her once again. She asked me how old I was, and I told her. She suddenly became very friendly with me and started telling me about when she was my age. She said in those days the soldiers would come to her town in France and dance with the local girls. (She often spoke of soldiers, I don't know what soldiers they were, maybe World World II?) She placed one hand on her hip and bent her knees and jiggled her shoulders to show me how they would dance. She stopped dancing just as soon as she'd started - she said she would've taught me those steps except that I was too young and the steps were too risque and the girls had been 'bad'. If these were the days when her complexion had some blood in it, she might've blushed. And we were friends.
I followed her around the rest of the day listening to her stories. She told me how she'd met her husband who had been much older than she was. She said she had never paid attention to boys or love until the day she locked eyes with the man that was to be her husband. He looked at her and she looked at him across a distance between them. That was it, she had told me, something intense was felt between them. She clenched her fists trying to find a word for what it was that they had felt that day, but she couldn't find one, and I didn't need her to. They got married soon after.
She once showed me a picture of her husband, a small black and white studio photograph of a kind-looking man in his early 40s with a round face and a Hitler moustache. I asked her for more photographs but she said she didn't believe in keeping any. Memories were enough, photographs were just things according to her.
She did fish out a photograph of herself a few weeks later. She had allowed me into her room, and I was sitting on her bed beside her. The bedspread was white with pink flowers on it, a very British tea set print. She suddenly put a small black and white photograph in front of me, not saying anything because she wanted to see my reaction, raw and instinctual.
I didn't recognise the woman in the photograph. She was incredibly beautiful though - a dark-haired woman with long hair loosely tied away from her face, full lips with dark lipstick on them, very 1940s. Her eyes were large and bright, her face was full and glowing. She was sitting under a wall in a button-down shirt, looking straight into the camera. What a beautiful woman, one of those who could not see her own beauty, the best kind. You could see it in the demure look in her eyes as she shyly looked at the photographer, as if it was not her usual habit to look people directly in the eye. A soft, effortlessly beautiful, healthy, fresh-looking woman.
I turned to the skinny old woman with the molten face and the pant suit hanging off of her bones, the photograph still in my hands. Is this you? I asked in disbelief, you're so beautiful. She waved her hands in dismissal. Oh I was nothing, she said. But she looked pleased.
Then she suddenly remembered her dead husband. She told me how much they had loved each other. The tough old woman who prowled the retirement home on her own and never betrayed any emotion suddenly welled up. Her voice began to waver. It had been 40 years, she said. Her husband had died 40 years ago. Then her voice strengthened again and her back straightened as she declared with pride that she had never loved anyone since.
She got up and pulled his photograph out of her dresser. She lovingly stroked his face as she told me how she had started shrieking at his funeral when his casket was being lowered into the ground. Her family had had to hold her back. I don't know when she came to America or how many children she had had, but she definitely had one daughter in Tulsa. She had put Yohanna here in the retirement home because it was tough for young people to take care of their parents, what with how busy they all were with their own lives and jobs and children. I had seen Yohanna calming another lonely old woman at the home with that explanation.
And then Yohanna remembered that she needed help with a CD player. She started rummaging through her closet and pulled out a portable player, holding it like the frighteningly unfamiliar piece of equipment that it probably was to her. A CD was still in it. Someone had helped her set it up so that she would just have to press the play button, but something had gone wrong and she wasn't able to listen to her favourite music anymore. Music was pretty much all she had of her past life now, and I could see how helpless she felt around this new piece of technology.
I wasn't very confident about my hardware skills, but I saw that the player was set to radio, so maybe all I had to do was turn the knob to CD and hit play. I did, and soft music floated out of the speakers almost unexpectedly. Yohanna clasped her hands and then reached out to hold mine. Her hands were clammy. I could feel the loose flesh and cold skin hanging off of her bones. Oh my darling, she exclaimed, thank you! She took a few long steps across the room as if she was dancing with a ghost. The music played on. I would listen to this blessed song over and over when I was young, she almost sang to me, thank you, thank you. Por ella, she trilled along with Julio Iglesias.
I smiled awkwardly not sure how to receive her gratitude over such a small task. I didn't even know if I was supposed to join her in the dance, she was swaying to the song with her eyes shut. I felt like I would be intruding, so I decided to just sit there and watch an old woman escape to a happier time.
I did ask her once, how would I know if a guy really loved me? You will be able to see it in his eyes, she had said, he will not be afraid to show it.
I made my mom meet her once at the home. My mom was visiting me for a few weeks, and by then, Yohanna had become my escape from the world I was living in. I would spend time with her every weekend, listening to her stories and asking her questions about life that everyone else seemed to just be lying to me about. I took my mother straight to the home and made our way to Yohanna's door. Yohanna was happy to meet my mother. She immediately started saying something to her in her heavily-accented English. My mother, all 5 feet of her 60-something self, froze with a terrified smile on her face as the tall thin Yohanna adjusted the short wavy locks around my mother's forehead, telling her to take care of her hair like a mother would. I noticed how young my mother looked in front of Yohanna, and then I realised that Yohanna was probably as old as my mother's parents would've been. Maybe even as old as one grandmother of hers. I began talking to Yohanna, and pretty soon I noticed my mother asking me, almost desperately, to leave. Once we were outside the home and back to the living world, my mother told me she felt frightened inside the home and that it smelled funny, like a beautiful farce for the barely living. She remained agitated about the whole experience for the rest of the day.
I met Yohanna every weekend for a couple of months. The first thing I would do every visit would be to find her and start talking to her about things. She told me once that she noticed I was a lover of beautiful things. I had been happily holding a flower then. Once I had held the door open for her and had insisted that she go first despite her feeling awkward about it. She tried to make me change my mind for a minute, and then she came close to me and looked into my eyes with that crazy look she would sometimes get and told me that I was a good person, a very good person, and that some people would take advantage of it, so it was important that I knew when to stop being good and with whom.
Once I met her after an interval of two weeks. I flew around the home, all smiles and happy to be back, asking the residents and the staff where Yohanna was. They said she was in her room. I made a beeline for her door and knocked on it. Yohanna opened the door slightly with the chain locked and peered at me suspiciously with one eye. I started - I was not used to Yohanna looking at me with that kind of a hard look, as if she was being aggressive just to protect herself. It's me, Khadija, don't you remember?
She didn't. I never went back to that retirement home again. I didn't have it in me to start over.
"You're sitting with some guys, and you're playing and you go, "Ooh, yeah!" That feeling is worth more than anything. There's a certain moment when you realise that you've actually just left the planet for a bit and that nobody can touch you. You're elevated because you're with a bunch of guys that want to do the same thing as you. And when it works, baby, you've got wings. You know you've been somewhere most people will never get; you've been to a special place. And then you want to keep going back and keep landing again, and when you land you get busted. But you always want to go back there. It's flying without a license."
- Keith Richards, "Life"
"Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return."
"Afterward, for many days, Kunta hardly ate or slept, and he would not go anywhere with his kafo mates. So grieved was he that Omoro, one evening, took him to his own hut, and there beside his bed, speaking to his son more softly and gently than he ever had before, told him something that helped to ease his grief.
He said that three groups of people lived in every village. First were those you could see - walking around, eating, sleeping, and working. Second were the ancestors, whom Grandma Yaisa had now joined.
"And the third people - who are they?" asked Kunta.
"The third people," said Omoro, "are those waiting to be born.""
This is not about Kiran Bedi the celebrity. This story is about me. I realised this while waiting outside her house in South Delhi with the rest of the camera crew from NDTV.
It was only last year in Muscat, Oman, that I had been spitting mad about missing out on Kiran Bedi's visit to the Indian Embassy and to my alma mater. My father had had passes for the event but for some reason had not thought that any of us in the family would have been interested. And I was interested! Growing up outside of India, one could only keep up with the newsmakers in the homeland through the TV and newspapers. You just didn't have the kind of access to these people that you might've had if you'd been living in India. As Indians, you felt like these public figures were yours in some familial way. In India you might be able to run into them at malls or at a rally or something. Somewhere. Anywhere. Not so overseas. So I was mad that I'd missed Kiran Bedi's visit to Oman. I'd lost my chance.
And so an improbable year later I was waiting to enter her house as part of an NDTV crew. A few minutes later I was in her office watching the camera crew set up for her interview as she quietly read some newspapers at her desk. I let my gaze wander about the numerous framed items around her office - a picture of Swami Vivekananda, a 5th grader's handmade sketch of Mahatma Gandhi, numerous awards and plaques, and images of the Hindu deity Ganesha. A small tower of books stood upon a table behind her desk. One of the books was about the influential women of India.
I started as I caught sight of two framed silver Omani khanjar daggers high up a wall. The sudden sight of those familiar objects from a faraway Middle Eastern childhood threw me off for a second - I felt a little bit off kilter as I got confused about which country I was in. Then I remembered once again that I was in India and that the khanjars must've been presented to Kiran Bedi when she was in Muscat last year...during the trip I had been so close to attending. A soft feeling of homesickness for an alien nation warmed my cheeks because I had discovered that another person in the same room had stepped onto its soil as well.
I stayed back in Kiran Bedi's office for a minute after the crew had packed up and left. I told her that I was raised in the country that the khanjars were from and how close I'd been to seeing her there. She smiled. Then I adjusted the tripod bag that was slung across my back and left, not angry about last year's passes anymore.
there is shit in the air and when the breeze blows it's like getting a shit facial the flavour of the breeze coats my windpipe a thick coat of shit i can almost swallow sometimes it's urine pungent like knitting needles through my eyeballs into my brain tickling my tear glands but not enough giving me a dull headache like cigarette smoke but not quite the smell of old ammonia and something worse
Today I spent about 5 hours at the Patiala House Court in New Delhi standing and waiting for the 2G scam accused to step out after a bail hearing. A fellow intern and I arrived at the court complex at 1245am with a reporter and a cameraman and were only able to leave 5 hours later after standing for most of that time on an empty stomach. The hearing was supposed to be from 2pm to 4pm, but the ending kept getting delayed in increments. It felt like waiting for a late Indian train which has no intention of arriving before a delay of 14 hours (that happened to me once).
There was no place for the press to sit, and some photographers eventually decided to sit down on the very filthy ground. I could only bring myself to a squat after around 330pm. The photographers got so bored that they started taking pictures of each other, "for Facebook" someone joked.
When the accused eventually stepped out one by one, cameramen (there were no camerawomen there) ferociously descended on them from all sides in an overwhelming God's Wrath sort of fashion. Who were these guys? Where were the sweet cameramen I had just stood with for so many hours? It was a stampede, the ground was shaking. My heart came into my mouth, and I sprinted out to a safe distance. Tall men with cameras that looked like the Terminator's machine gun were swarming around (up, down, and on the sides of) the accused like giant cyborgs, yelling at each other as flashbulbs went off like juggernaut lightning. It was like a scene from a pilgrimage gone mad. You couldn't see the accused in the middle of the crowd, but they kept moving, trying to get to the safety of their vehicles out on the main road. I felt somewhat afraid that someone would get hurt badly in that chase. There was so much shouting and aggression in that crowd that orbitted around the accused, I realised later that I had held my breath waiting for the sound of a cracking camera or skull. I am still not sure if I'd be able to tell the difference between those sounds.
It was not a short way from the courthouse to the main road. The accused and their suffocating envelope of cameramen pushed and shoved all the way to the outside and rocked the security walkway and a metal gate on their way. The guards kept their distance mostly out of shock. Bystanders both inside the courthouse and outside kept asking us who was being chased. An older man in the court complex huffed and puffed - photography was not allowed in the court complex! An old dust-covered toothless man sitting near the main road was watching the accused dive into their cars. He kept chuckling and calling out, "Ayyy Raja Babu!"
But that was a learning experience that I am grateful for. The real memories that I will be taking with me of the Patiala House Court in New Delhi are:
1. people taking long luxuriant naps on the court lawn 2. a dirt-covered boy of about 4 standing in the middle of a court courtyard with his pants pulled down to his feet and peeing with all the glory that God had intended. He just stood there with his lower body completely exposed, urinating on Indian judicial property as lawyers, judges, and maybe some media personnel walked all around him. They kept walking after the boy had put his pants back on and left. Some walked right over his urine, by then an anonymous puddle in the middle of the courtyard. 3. a lawyer blowing his nose hard and letting it drip to the ground outside a court where the camerapeople , including my fellow intern and I, were standing and contemplating sitting on the ground 4. dogs and cats wandering about the court complex 5. swarms of flies (and much worse?) around all the food stalls in the court complex 6. everything smelling of excrement and urine, especially when the breeze picked up 7. dirty walls that I eventually convinced myself to lean against when my feet began to hurt
Today was a small sample of the paparazzi experience. I expressed my surprise at the aggression of the cameramen to a reporter, what if the accused had got hurt? A fist fight had almost broken out out there on the road. An accused had been unable to get into his car at first because the crowd had pushed him to another car.
The reporter shrugged my concerns away with a grand disaffected declaration - so what, he said. What's more important, getting the visual or keeping the subject safe?
Long after the PG-friendly footage that I'd edited had aired without making a dent in anyone's existence, I returned to the original footage on my computer and paused at the shot of the 3 dead men, still lying motionless on those green stretchers. I wanted to see if they would breathe again, if a dangling arm would stir to my surprise. These men hardly looked like they had ever been anything but lifeless. Only a few hours ago they had had names and favourite foods and sleeping habits and desires and facial expressions and plans for the upcoming week. Now they were just APTN footage that no channel would ever air, that no audience would ever witness. Would they ever know that I was here, that I had seen them?
