Tehran, Tel Aviv and The Enfant Terrible

We all just sit, watch and wait it out. 'What's gonna happen?' I ask no one in particular. 'Who knows?' Some voices carry apprehension in their tone. "You tell me," some sound irritated as their minds, hijacked by social media, are suddenly coerced into thinking. Shrugging off the question, they return to watching reels. 


the koils are at their best singing innocently their two-note song, over and over again, making the humid morning sticky with its cloying sweetness. They came in late this year, the koils. Without their encircling lyricism the mangoes couldn't ripen, and if they did, the magic of their luscious taste was amiss. The inkling of their first arrival reached our ears in the last week of May...and now finally, we are relishing the best mangoes of the season, thereof convinced that without the koil's song, this king of fruits we so rejoice will remain deprived of its royal delectability.

TV screens explode with relentless fireworks-like images which according to the news anchor is an  exchange of ballistic missiles and drone attacks. Was it Tehran, or Tel Aviv? No one knows. Everything is shrouded in deafening whorls of sirens and the rising spectre of indiscriminate destruction. 

'Surrender', the king calls out from his golf course. “I may do it, I may not do it…I mean, nobody knows what I’m going to do,” he  announces to the media as though he were playing a video game. The child in him thrills to uncertainty.  The smirk on his face lights up the faces of robber barons dead and alive.

freshly-laundered clothes hang on the clothesline, swaying gently. A parade of pearly clouds saunters overhead, each one cast in a new protean shape, each one fostering a promise to bestow upon us mortals the nectar of rains...cruising high above them are tiny dots of birds: six of them in pairs, circling around each other, flirtatious and free. Smell of burning capsicums lights up olfactory follicles and feet scamper hurriedly down the steps...visions of hands laboring over a burnt pan takes over and a sigh escapes. 

"If Israel ceases to exist, the world would implode", author and journalist David Segal's statement resounds in the memory, a mirror wanting to be shattered. What would an imploding world look like? In his heyday Segal used to be an advisor to President Truman, on issues specific to Middleast. Funnily, I never associated him with being Jewish...to me, he was just a jolly good friendly American, with a beautiful wife called Ninel. Ninel's mother had fought alongside Lenin during the Russian revolution. But that's another story. And  the crossroads the world stands at right now, nobody is in the mood for one.

Nobody...and yet we all like to dream of fairytale endings.






 





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