Jaunting Along

Just before we left Saudi Arabia in December 2008, I wrote this email since I had never before documented the Khobar massacre  which occurred during our time there, and in which we were all on lock-down over an extended period of time.  Desert camping with boys 2004 Saudi Aramco, Dhahran, December 2008:  It’s been years, literally, since I wrote about our life here in Saudi as opposed to our lives with kids. Today, strangely enough, I came across the beginning of an email I started exactly three years ago to the very day, touching upon what life is like here on Aramco, since it differs greatly from general expatriate life in Saudi. However, I never finished what I begun on the 7th August 2005 and three years later I still haven’t finished it. (And it took me a further six weeks of rumination, internal debate and external research, before I was ready to send this one off).  But somewhere along the line I felt it necessary to sketch in the background, and not just focus

My father as a young man My father should have died when I was two, but he didn’t. He died when I was thirty-five instead. Thirty-three years of living a life that cancer should have compromised to such an extent that for many people it may not have been worth living. And yet, every day that he woke up, he woke to work and loved his work, and though he seldom sang, his whole body sang with joy; he laughed, he joked around, he was a happy man. The more crippled his body became, the more his soul shone through. In fact, it was only when I sat there next to his hospital bed when his final bout with cancer finally took his life away, that I first saw the X-rays of his body, taken years before, and which finally mapped out to me how singularly twisted and sinister a disease had taken hold of him.  Sketched in white against the dark, I saw the bird bones of my father’s frame, twisted out of almost all recognition, deformed, alternatively thinned and knobbly, devastated by the cancer

Our trip along the entire north coast of the inland Sea of Marmara is marked by snapshot views. An old bridge, grey stone undulating like a long snake across the wide river mouth at an estuary, with roman arches tipped by the Muslim point, yellow flowers flourishing in the swampy terrain. Red poppies against a hill against a pale blue sky. A huge shrub sporting a mass of purple flowers in the midst of rocky ground. But first, we had to circumvent the outskirts of Istanbul.  Upon every hill, initially, there are bumper-to-bumper flats and then, without warning, we round a curve and there is - nothing. Then just as we are beginning to settle down into the relief of finally evading the drag-net of Istanbul, we are amongst bumper-to-bumper flatland again. All the flats and apartment blocks are four-square and four sided and they do appear to relish their jutting balconies. As we finally, finally left the massive urban expansion that is Istanbul increasingly behind us, Fem