"Who I am is who I have wanted to be" T.A.

The Girl and the Beast

       I came home from the Quranic School that fine summer afternoon. I was heading a worn path between the huge palm trees of my country. The wind was shaking the leaves of the trees violently trying to say something I could not understand.

Holding my slate as I was walking, the sight of a girl entangled in her white long head cover, and strangled by the rope that supports to her back the container she was using to collect grass from the field took me by surprise.

Moreover, the rope passes from one side of the container to the other over the girl’s chest which complicated the situation. The girl also had what looked to me like a wild animal sticking to her arm and moving its tail sideways. It acted like a lamb sucking a sheep’s udder. How it got to the girl and how it attacked her is still unsolved mystery to me. The beast was thirsty for blood.

I just stood still knowing not what to do. The poor girl called my name and said: “would you please come and get that rope off of me”.

I could not really move one tiny little inch forward. I was the most scared city boy who spent a summer holiday in the country on Earth seeing the bloody inhumane image at a young age. It made me go cold in the feet, and frozen to death. It scared the life out of me!

I took one, two, three and four steps backward until I disappeared from both the beast and the girl’s sight angle. I was shattered and frightened to go next under the merciless beast’s fangs if it smelled me. I turned around and took to my heels as fast as I could. I jumped off the bank of the dry rocky river, crossed the valley and made it to the other bank.

There I found my grandma and aunty sitting on a rock talking after they finished working in the field. They could see the terror in my face and hear the fear in my voice. I was fainting as I was telling them what I saw. I insisted that the poor girl needs help immediately or else there will be a funeral this evening. I also told them that she was nearby in a place called “TIGHZRIN”.

They did not wait to hear the rest as I continued saying that there was hope she could be saved. They hurried to the location of the bloody and dramatic accident. The beast was still busy sucking blood from the girl’s arm.

My grandma took the wild animal firmly by the neck and put her knees on its hind legs to control its movements. Then my aunt handed her a thick stick that she tweaked from the trunk of a palm tree. Right after that my grandma proceeded by giving the beast some “anesthesia”. She gave the bloody animal good blows on the head. In the mean while, my aunt went to call for help from a group of country men who usually sit at that time of the day by the mosque waiting for the prayers to start.

She led the group of men to the place. They could not believe their eyes as they got there and saw the scene.

Bobker quickly took a heavy rock “let me smash its head with this boulder” he burst.

“What! Don’t you see that you gonna smash my head too if you take that action” grandma retorted in a firm tone.

“Well, then step away from the animal, now!” said one of the men.

As my grandma let go of the beast, it made a move on her, right to her throat. It jumped high, but my grandma already moved away a good distance.

The minute gravity pulled the damn beast to mother earth, a heavy rock came down on its head, then another one and a third…. One moment it was breathing and the next it was not.

The poor girl was taken in a private vehicle to the closest hospital that could provide assistance with situations that involve massive hemorrhage. The clinical facility was, as it is today, 24 kilometers from the spot of the dramatic event.

All is well that ends well. Sometime later, I received the news that the girl was saved. Now, she is married and has a nice family.

R.I.P

         Air France jet landed in Salé airport. Around the check-in desk, people were waiting to meet their “arriving” or see off their “traveling” relatives with smiles, hugs, flowers or hand waives. The Smokys were standing together near the receptionist’s. Thirty minutes after the five o’clock plane landed, almost all passengers had left the place. There were still a couple of suitcases turning around the carousel but nothing was coming for The Smokys. They waited until they could no longer take it. Ahmed took two steps to the receptionist.

“A big wooden box to be delivered to the Smoky; may I know if it is ready or not?” Ahmed asked, and added “Ah, it was supposed to be in the five o’clock flight. I am in charge of it.”

“The plane has not yet landed. It is going to be late sir. Sorry!” replied the receptionist.

“Oh, hogwash; I can’t believe it! What you are telling me is that I’m not even here in front of you. I just got off that jet,” said Ahmed.

The receptionist went red in the face, grabbed the phone and mumbled something to someone at the other end of the line. She got back to Ahmed and said: “Ok, you will have to go to the Goods Delivery Exit at the air terminal end.”

The Smoky rushed to the exit immediately and there was the brown box with the name Brahim engraved on a plate firmly fixed to it.

“Here is the key to the box in case you guys want to take a look at it,” said Ahmed to the Smokys.

The airport authorities demanded a copy of Mr. Smokys ID and death certificate before the delivery could take place. This meant going outside the airport to make copies of the original documents. Ahmed who was a close friend of the deceased felt his blood simmer. “Mérde!” He shouted, “c’est pas vrai! un aéroport sans photocopieur ! Waini t`nz nwarradn aya”[1] Ahmed said to himself.

An ambulance was already waiting in place. A man in white came with the medical statement which was handed over to the ambulance-man. The casket was carefully placed in the ambulance. Finally, the vehicle headed to the nearest morgue at 6:30 PM.

At exactly 7:15 PM, the casket was at the morgue gate. Much to everyone chagrin, the mortician or rather the morgue keeper, because it was night and the mortician went home; therefore the keeper replaced him, refused to let in the dead body since he had not been notified by any authorities. Ahmed protested but then, in a desperately calm tone, confided that that was the only place they could leave the body; besides, the burial was due the next day. After some long negotiations, a moment of silence -the smell of death started emanating from everywhere. Should the corpses stink in a morgue! The place had been enclosed; in addition, the morgue’s coolers had not been functioning; to add insult to injury; it was really hot down there. All that made it impossible to stand there for half a minute without your stomach coming up your throat. There were some bodies wrapped in white shrouds with stains of blood all over them and all over the place- The guard mentioned in passing that some bleeding car-accident cadavers were brought there which allowed blood to get there. He then gave the Smokeys some forms to fill out, which they started working on soon. The ambulance-man handed him the papers he was given at the airport.

“Some original papers are still missing,” He said to Ahmed.

“How come? These papers have been checked and rechecked a thousand times,” Ahmed exclaimed in bewilderment and asked “Are you sure?”

“Positive,” answered the morgue keeper with his nose in the air.

B.M dug deep in his pocket. Before he pulled out his hand, the mortician had anticipated his move. He stretched out his hand too and got it back immediately into his own pocket. He then said: “you can go now; I’ll take care of the rest. Have a good night.”

[1] “Waini t`nz nwarradn aya” to express the situation as childish and not serious. 

Morning  Ride

After three straight years of practicing bat-ride in buses, which indeed is long enough an amount of time to make a person, who spends hours a day commuting between an educational establishment and home, become a human of another kind; a human bat. For I believe the bus is a special world, follow me along these lines and get to see what it is like to take the bus at an ungodly hour in the morning and act bat. You know, it is easy to find yourself just like that without really being conscious that you are in the process of transforming into a bat-man.

How does one become a bat in a bus?

Don’t worry; the answer won’t come down on your head like a ton of bricks. It’s simple though; buses for people to get to their workplace, school or wherever they go at that early time of the day -which usually is in the neighborhood of 6:00 AM- are a rare thing. No surprise then that the morning bus should get crammed and it takes luck and guts and energy to sandwich yourself in a vehicle that looks like a bus when you see it coming. But pray! It’s a different world inside. Presto! The first thing that happens after you are successfully and neatly stocked in and the operator slams the automatic doors closed by batting a red button is that your lungs start longing for half a square meter of oxygen to keep your eyes open and not faint at the sight of the transparent window-screens altogether cutting you off the outer space because the weather within the bus is just a little bit beyond foggy, also because passengers give out hot steam; plenty of it! Well, that is another story for another day. Maybe the weather forecast will comment on it in the evening news. What is really of more importance here is the fact that you have to dodge the molecules of water that fly in the atmosphere and grope the ceiling until you grab the horizontal bar that is usually screwed to the ceiling for purposes of security. It also gives the dignified passengers a golden opportunity to avoid harsh physical contact -which in fact is a source of great evil … the other day two people entangled in a fight for rubbing shoulders- and make a comfortable journey.

So now that your hands are up and you are held against your will, tied to the cold horizontal bar like your fellow grim-faced morning passengers, the bus hits the road again and you get pushed ahead little by little leaving a foothold for the morning riders to get in and share the cozy atmosphere.

Sometimes people seem to forget to move their weight for some unknown reasons. Not long ago, I happened to trap myself in a real crowded morning bus and as I got to pass those who forget that there are rules to follow, of course taking all necessary caution to keep my distance and avoid physical contact especially if the person I am to pass by happens to be a female. I glance at their faces. To my surprise, they are asleep. I do not know if that is because of lack of the vital element in the air or they had a black night! My guess is that those guys probably had been doing the same thing over and over again and as time went by they inevitably picked up the habit of resuming their sleep while holding tight the metal bar, pretty much like sleeping bats but upside down. The same thing is happening to me except that I don’t sleep. I really wonder how they manage to sleep at home after these circumstances have inculcated the habit in question in their systems. They must be giving their wives hard times. Anyways I move on without disturbing their peaceful journey.

Some buses do not even have the bar which is an exigency of life and a luxury in case you do not have a seat, especially those busted buses that I would never allow into circulation if I were the company CEO. No wonder why so many people avoid those buses; not only do they lack the equipment necessary for people to bat-ride but let out a real thick black smoke any time the operator stamps on the gas pedal after dropping off a passenger and closing the automatic doors.

If you do not know about that you’d better get my warnings. If you are planning to visit the place and take a walk, I recommend that you wear an anti-gas mask. It is a biological war in a very civilized manner; no casualties at all, but mind you it’s lethal… My mind thinks about twenty things at once. The idea of buying an anti-gas mask is engrossing me -knowing that the climate change is already a threat to our peaceful life on this planet, a bus with excessive toxic smoke emission would be the straw that breaks the camel’s back- but considering my current financial situation, it would be better to let it drop.

The idea of looking back to see the number of people gluing their hands to the bar is irresistibly taking hold of my brain, so I can not help twist my neck and at that point I almost wish it was not broken. Though it gives me some pain, I managed to turn my head and take a look. I get some stares from faces I can barely recognize. The number of hands moving towards me is multiplying and this automatically pushes me forward and I suddenly am between the driver and the front side door.

Just then a guy behind me wakes up. He shakes his head in disbelief, rubs his eyes with the back of his hand and is on the brink of losing balance. He leans on a seat to look through the window but can not see much. He wipes the window with one hand while still holding to the bar with the other. Suddenly, his face wears a strange and unmistakable expression; he must have missed his stop. He fumbles, looks around him and jumps to the door. Thankfully the operator makes sure the doors are closed first thing, otherwise so many people would have committed suicide inadvertently.

I really wonder how these folks will be able to do their jobs knowing that a bus ride of this sort will make a person sound or look as if they are addicted to hard drugs. I myself started to feel the blow; my performance at school is lately plunging and the morning bus ride is to blame.

I really did not plan for this, but I can say that it is one of the rare moments when circumstances stop conspiring against me for a while; the place where I should stop is just some feet away. There I go. I move on an inch and turn. Now I am face to face with a door covered with streaks of water slowly running down across its windshield. I don’t know what laws of physics water undergoes to get oozy. Well it didn’t take the driver long to get the hint that I am waiting for the door to open. Apparently his mind is still working efficiently; at least he’s got a window by his left side through which he can get some fresh air. I painfully walk down the stairs paying strict attention not to fall.

My lungs are getting instant signals from the brain for there is an urgent need for oxygen. I say to myself: “hold on, you are going to break free right now”. By the second I inhale some air, things start to look gradually as they are. I stand for as long as it takes to catch my breath then walk east, to another bus stop where I can wait for another bus to take me where it goes.

Too much drinking is too much

In trying to look into what it is to a drunkard; I mean an all time drunk drunkard, to lose friends, or to technically have no friends after those presumed friends with whom the subject of this comedy spends a night drinking and smoking until their eyes bleed have prowled about his possessions.

Why do drunkards drink in the first place? Is it because they are addicts? Or is it that they derive pleasure, if any, from drinking? You can not tell for sure. It has to be, if anything, both of the possibilities.

I happened to have a neighbor who shows some symptoms if not all symptoms of a typical drunkard. He lives in the same apartment as I do. Despite the fact that he is a really nice person, he is to some extent a trouble maker. He never stays out of trouble. Trouble is him. After I observed his lifestyle for a week, some questions started to want to pull themselves in gravity towards their question marks.

I wonder why he drinks in the company of the same guys who stole from him last night and would still do the same thing to him any night they get around the liquor table. In trying to figure out why this is happening to him, I started to go about psychological theories to understand the subconscious of a drunkard like himself.

Well, I came to the conclusion that within the psychical apparatus of a drunkard, mainly during the climax of the drinking journey, the psychological iceberg which under normal conditions, is usually positioned this way: the tip of the iceberg which is the representative of the consciousness is over the surface of water, while the giant mass of ice which is in turn the representative of sub-consciousness is submerged into water. Guess what! This image of the iceberg I just came to draw goes upside down. So, the subconscious after coming to power, the top position of the psychic apparatus, starts issuing conflicting commands to the whole system. All the concepts that this person has been building since childhood come into ruins. Images get mixed up with one another. He puts wrong names to wrong faces. That is why he picks up the phone while getting excessively drunk and calls any number at random and invites by chance the guy or the guys who stole from him last night without being aware of what he is up to. Therefore, the invited person or persons think him stupid and lay their hands on anything that makes sense to them. Considering that their mental state allows them to draw any sorts of comparisons; everything, anything and nothing can make any sense to them or no sense at all.

 It is a total anarchy. The scale of chaos and anarchy that goes on inside the body of the drunk is equal to the amount of noise and destruction if not damage he causes to his environment. This is true and supported by the saying we usually find, or I once found in the literature: the universe is just a mirror reflection of our souls <<L’univers est le reflet de nos âmes>>. I can tell with almost a good degree of certainty that whenever you have more than two drunks in the same building disaster is not far ahead.

Another evidence to support this view is what happened between my neighbor Aragy and his liquor guests. The other day, I came home late and as tired as I was; I just dropped dead to bed. But it was not long after I woke up at the shrieks of females. That was at 4:00 A.M. The thing was that they brought prostitutes and started to beat them up instead of... One of them said to her batterer “I hate you” as if she was in love with him. I stood up, opened the door to my room as quietly as quietly is, collected all my pairs of shoes that were by the wall outside the room for fear that she will leave the place and get away with my shoes in attempt to take her anger out on the shoes thinking they are theirs and went back to bed.

 In the afternoon, I met Aragy in the kitchen. He apologized for the noise they made the night before. We had a little chat about the whole thing. What I realized is that between being drunk and sober lies language hemorrhage. That is to say; the drunkard says anything that comes to his mind, including the existentialist question: Where I am I? The drunken person no longer knows where he is! It is a bad thing to have problems with forming questions using the verb to be.  

Crazy Thursday Morning

I was chasing sleep that night. It was unattainable. I spent the first couple of hours of the morning watching a movie on 2M which started at mid-night and lasted for 2 hours. Next thing I did was reading a Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities, of which I quickly got tired but sleep was still far, far from coming home to me. An hour had passed by then. I turned the TV set back on, and there it was; I came across an interesting program. Too bad, I can not clearly remember what it was about. That took quite not too long. I stole a look at my watch and it was almost 4:30 A.M. I thought to myself “isn’t dawn coming soon”, “why don’t I just stay up until it is time to catch my bus to the faculty”. It sounded to be a good idea and I went for it.

I went to the kitchen to wet some tea and get my breakfast ready and in the meanwhile kill the time that was left until 6:30. I sat on a stool by the stove waiting for the tea to boil. I watched it patiently until it was ready. It was very quite around the neighborhood except for the barking of some homeless dogs. Dogs were homeless all the time in that place. It was and is still a common practice. They never get tired of barking. I took my breakfast by 5.

The reason why I wanted not to go to bed at all after five is that I would oversleep and miss my exam that I was supposed to set for at 8 A.M That meant flanking the test and consequently failing the semester which I do not want to happen neither to me nor to any student.

I got back to my room, sat on the edge of my bed, turned on the computer and played some music. I did not know why on god’s green earth I had lain back; maybe I went under the effect of music or perhaps it was breakfast that was taking its toll on me. Whatever it was, I slept like a dead man.

I woke up after sun rays flooded my room that morning. Light dazzled my sight. I sprang to my feet and glanced at my watch. It was 8:45. I new it was going to happen. I new I was going to wake up late as I always do when I get insomniac the night before the day of the exam.

I put my clothes on like a crazy. Then, I rushed to the sink and splashed a handful of water on my face, slipped my feet into a pair of shoes, grabbed my wallet and a blue pen and run to the door. I fastened my belt while descending the stairs.

I got to the bus stop by 8:55. After five minutes, my bus was coming into sight. I got onto it exactly at 9 o’clock. The bus drove slowly through the streets of Casablanca, making stops at any place the driver wished. He drove slower than other drivers usually do. At some point, I really thought he was slow-driving the bus on purpose. More than that, I could tell he was enjoying my being in the agony of missing a composition final exam.

I sat in my place in contemplation; considering what the next step would be. How would I get myself out of that jam? What choices I still had! I looked around to see which street I was in. I was just half-way far from university. Right at that moment, steam started to get out of my skull through my ears. Adrenalin was pumping. It was like volcanoes imploding inside my head. The watch was ticking slowly and so was the bus driving while images and ideas were crossing my head at the speed of light.

Finally the university was coming into sight. I dropped off the bus at 9:45, then directly went to the classroom where I was supposed to be at 8 that morning. The plan I had in mind was to talk and explain to Mrs. Drissi who was my professor what happened to me. Much to my chagrin, I did not find her there. I looked into the classroom; everybody was continuously and busily writing on their exam sheet. Some of those guys who were waiting for the last minute chance to import answers from others –not to say cheat- were given a golden opportunity and they made good use of it while I was busying up the teacher who was in charge of keeping an open eye on things so that cheating would not take place asking him about a possible building where Mrs. Drissi could be. I swear they loved it when I showed up. The supervisor informed me that Mrs. Drissi was in room 24.

I went running through the concrete jungle of my university while praying for a miracle to happen. Thankfully, she was still there giving an oral exam to students from another class. I knocked on the door. She opened and I told her about what happened to me from grin to chuckle. She looked at me for a moment and said: “I know you are a good student, serious and hard working” then she asked me to take a seat until the supervisor brought the exam sheets of my classmates.

She really saved the day for me. I can not thank her enough. I took the same exam as my classmates and passed it. That is how kind Mrs. Drissi is. Doesn’t it feel great when people trust you?