After the Turkish breakfast on the morning after New Year’s
Eve, Murad, Nicholas and I headed back to Saifi. We all wanted more breakfast.
The cafeteria looked less dirty since the time we left. A cocktail of freshly
brewed coffee, cigarette smoke and floor cleaning detergent filled the air. The
sun pierced through the gaps in the trees. It poured onto the yellow lime rock
and robbed it off its color.
The cafeteria was empty but welcoming. Breakfast was ready.
We all ordered omelets and found a spot in the sun. Nicholas unfolded a pocket
size map of the city and we discussed what to do, where to go, what to eat and
so on. The plans came forth and competed like a pack of hounds chasing a
racecourse rubber bunny. Nicholas who had been in Beirut for some time felt
responsible to weigh in on every decision we took.
We were all fairly loud and in bright night suits. In the
middle of escalating deliberation, and at a time when we least expected, a girl
walked up and said, ‘I think you guys need help.’
The abrupt intrusion was pleasant: maybe because the girl
spoke with a lovely smile or because Murad and I were happy to get our first
real taste of undivided female attention or because she was cute or it could be
all of these things together.
Anyway, before she walked up and engaged us, Murad and I had
never seen so much hair on anybody’s head before. Her curls really did have a
life of their own.
‘Yes, we’re quite aimless,’ I dragged back a chair and asked
her to join us. The cute girl rushed to her table to fetch her bag. She was
brimming with insights and in that moment we were all captives to her esoteric
pointers on Beirut.
‘I heard you guys talk about Achrafieh – you must go see Rue
Monot – it’s a street. During the civil war it had two sides. Bars served
alcohol on one. The other practiced prohibition. The sides were divided by a
string of shrubs.
...even after the war, when the plants were uprooted, the
division lived in the minds of people. For some, it still does.’
‘You’re so much better than lonely planet,’ I said.
Although I could let her talk about Beirut for hours in that
moment I felt the need to provoke her; interrupt the spell she began to cast on
us with her words.
‘There are places I would never go to…’ unaffected by the
prod, she continued on her own tangent and spoke about how seventeen distinct
ethnicities divided Beirut into a number of mini-states.
A discussion on alcohol Murad could listen to. The moment
she switched to socio-political issues, Murad felt like his precious vacation
bubble was going to pop.
Murad had to hijack the conversation,
‘Excuse my ignorance, but are you a guardian angel of some
sort?’
She laughed, stuck her hand out and said, ‘Michele’.
‘I live in Jounieh, but I come from a small town two hours
south of here’.
Murad and I found Michele refreshing and forthcoming. In our
puny world, especially in Pakistan, girls like to play hide and seek, dodge
overtures and sustain interest through elusive behavior. They like to share
everything in bits; prolong the chase; just like a test player paces himself
for a long innings.
Maybe we take more time to thaw as a people; maybe most of
us are unsure of who we really are and don’t want to expose ourselves. Whatever
the case, it’s always fun to meet people who dare to live beyond barriers of
propriety and unnecessary reserve.
Awe struck with Michele’s positive disposition, we could not
foresee the impending disappointment ahead of us.
After Michele’s introduction, the gents at the table
followed suit.
‘Murad, from Pakistan, first time in Beirut’
‘Nicholas. I’ve been here two months. I’m English. And I do
know some things about Beirut’.
‘I’m Khizr’
‘What?’ Michele squinted.
‘Khizr’
‘Hisser?’
‘No, Khizr’
‘Hizzher?’
‘Khi-zer, K, H, I, Z, R, Khey-Zar,’ I enunciated, slowly,
and separately, each letter, with syllable stress,
like a foreign language
teacher.
‘Khaaa, khaaa’
‘Sounds like phlegm. I think I’m going to choke on your
name,’ Michele made her opening joke and cracked herself up.
‘That’s the idea! You should have been dead by now!’ was my
opening rebut and the banter continued for a while.
Michele finally stuck her tongue out and squinted.
‘But if you choose to live, you can call me just K, OK?
‘OK…K, OK!’ Michele and I laughed. Murad and Nicholas
didn’t.
‘I have some friends visiting from Spain. We’re going to
Byblos, the oldest inhabited city of the world – one of three actually – you
should come,’ Michele twirled her hair and added new curls to the infinite
perms already buoyant on her head like a frenzy.
‘I’m going to Tripoli today,’ Nicholas sounded hasty.
‘I hate Tripoli. You can’t even drink there. Those people
are different,’ said Michele.
‘That’s why I carry my own booze,’ Nicholas retorted in his
thick British accent.
‘So K, OK, do you have a local number?’ Michele turned to me
and disengaged Nicholas.
‘No. But you can reach me on 00923344416660. Pakistan.
Works.’
‘Are you sure?’ Michele punched the numbers in her phone as
I reiterated slowly. She put my name down as ‘kokkkk’.
‘Yes. Call me. I’m going to shower. See you soon.’
‘Can I get your number?’ Nicholas spoke cautiously with his
phone in his hand.
‘You want my number? What are you implying Nicholas? Acting
all fast with me huh?’ Michele laughed.
Nicholas turned red in the face and changed the subject.
After I showered and returned to the cafeteria, I found
Michele with her Spanish friends and Nicholas was nowhere in sight.
Much to our collective disdain, Michele’s friends – Sergio
and Manuela – were two bright chaps from Madrid – not the beautiful women Murad
and I had envisioned. On our way to Byblos, Murad wore his dark glasses and
observed Lebanese life from the bus window. I sold the Northern Areas of
Pakistan to the Spaniards.
Michele had met Manuela in Madrid on a vacation and that’s
where they hooked up. Sergio was the hanger that accompanied Manuela and avidly
followed him as he cultivated his love interest. Murad and I were just odd
Pakistanis – a race our new friends knew nothing about.
As we approached Byblos, a steady down pour began. It was a
blessed spanner of sorts. Had we continued on public transport we would have
been drenched by the time we reached Byblos. So Michele called her friend
Lilian who lived in Byblos and asked her to collect us from a major shopping
mall right off the main highway.
Lilian parked her mini Pajero and took her mini self out of
it. Her light brown hair was rolled up and stitched with pins at the back of
her head. Tweed jacket on jeans. Her skin was like golden brown olive oil. She
had a delicate frame, soft features, everything quite slender and two
incredible eyes with tones of both green and grey.
In short, Lillian was a woman of remarkable looks but
unremarkable remarks. While we waited for her at the shopping mall, we shared
foul language in Spanish, Arabic and Urdu. It was a tri-national ‘circle of
trust’. In Spanish, Bosta meant a
pile of rotten shit with flies hovering over it. Bhen-chod meant sister fucker in Urdu. Michele taught us an abuse
in Arabic but we were advised against using it in our little tri-national
togetherness anthem and the word soon evaporated.
When Lilian arrived, we fetched snacks and umbrellas from
the shopping mall and left for Byblos. We all sang the absurd tri-national
togetherness anthem without Lilian who didn’t utter much beyond politenesses every now and then. At one
point when the singing got loud and obnoxious, she managed a strained smile.
She looked into the rearview mirror from time to time, but every time it was
just a glimpse and it was impossible to catch her eye.
En route to Byblos we were stuck in traffic on a down slope
at one point. Behind us, at close distance was a massive snow clad peak and
ahead of us, again at close distance, was light blue water, palm trees and
mustard sand. To have such diverse vistas at opposite ends of the same
peninsula felt surreal. Later in the trip I read on the Beirut Timeout Website,
‘5 reasons to go to Beirut’.
It said, ‘one of two cities in the world where you can swim
and ski the same day’ and it added that March was the best time of the year to
do this.
When we drove into the oldest inhabited city of the world it
really was the stuff of dreams. The lime rock lighthouse, the vast open wooden
bay, the erosive powers of nature on display, cutting through rock and wood
alike, building character through snail pace time. Everything was just so damn
charming; it was impossible not to fall in love with the place and its
overwhelming antique emotion.
The beach invited us to talk and walk through history. We
saw a two thousand year old restaurant called Pepe Abid. Many modern day
celebrities occupied wall space inside the restaurant. Pepe Abid served only
fish – the best you can find in Lebanon. We didn’t get a chance to eat there;
we only nibbled on Michele’s stories of the restaurant and our real appetite
was abandoned because the entourage was not hungry yet.
By the time we finished our walk on the beach, Lilian had
shared her entire professional and personal life story with me. She had
experience in designing and advertising and was practicing freelance. She knew
about Sammy Moujaes. I told her I could help her reach him and she acquiesced to
the idea but didn’t look keen. Then she explained how she finds working for
brands restrictive because of all the guidelines, rules, standardized
communications and so on.
While we walked out of Byblos towards a modern town of
Lebanon in search of a good restaurant, Murad perpetually smiled at me. I felt
like I stood under a bright yellow spot light. Murad thought Lillian and I were
falling in love. We walked side by side for the longest time, just like a pair
of domesticated pigeons. But unremarkable remarks hardly ever do anything to
anyone and Lilian to me was just as lifeless as a cardboard mannequin.
I felt like my stomach – empty. But Murad didn’t see that.
Our group equation was a mix of lone and not so lone
pigeons. Manuela walked with Michele. Sergio had his camera. And Murad carried
in his head a cloud of wishful optimism until Mariella, the half Arab, half
Lebanese bombshell walked into the scene and destroyed Murad’s ability to walk
in a straight line.
Mariella was another friend of Michele’s who joined us for
lunch. Mariella ordered a salad, especially designed for picture perfect
Lebanese ladies.
Mariella too had remarkable looks – high cheek bones, tall,
shiny thick black locks, pouty lips, a perfectly symmetrical nose, single tone
skin, a mole strategically placed at the tip of her left cheek, designer goods
head to tow, lip gloss, mascara, perfectly manicured nails, glistening teeth,
an hour glass figure accentuated through clothes, strategically draped over her
curves and a static smile that guarded changing emotion.
The first thing Murad half thought, half muttered when he
saw her was, ‘she’s not real’. And then he touched his own face to see if he
was numb or stuck in an ephemeral dream.
Mariella moved with effortless grace, wove her words in a
web of conventional truths and generalizations and enjoyed the company of
equally good-looking people. Since we were short, chubby, and unfashionable and
we made little effort to enhance our aesthetic appeal, we enjoyed Mariella’s
stunning looks from a ‘safe’ distance. The tribulations associated with natural
selection and evolution had never been so evident on the trip thus far.
Sadly, Michele turned out to be an anomaly. Until we met
others, to us Michele was the definition of a Lebanese woman. And even though
people were generally friendly, nobody else was half as forthcoming. Another
generalization went out of the window.
And worse, Murad’s dreams to see Lilian’s babies with me
shattered when Lilian’s husband, David, appeared out of nowhere to join us for
lunch. David talked about his boring job as a banker and told us he wants to
move with his wife to Canada because the quality of life in Beirut was not good
and things were far too unpredictable. I could hear another fantasy bubble
going ‘pop’ in Murad’s head.
By the end of their meal, Lilian and David were having a
strained conversation about the right time to move to Canada and the difference
of opinion made their faces look longer.
This was yet another opportunity for me to sell the magic of
the northern areas of Pakistan and I did exactly that!
‘The second highest plateau in the world – Deosai – happens
to be in the northern areas of Pakistan! The word Deosai means ‘landing zone of
the giants’ – that’s because flat land at 14,000 feet is no good to anybody
else. At the end of June, the entire plane is awash with multicolored flowers.
I’ve never seen anything quite like it. You guys have to come’.
‘…Sure, David and I will make a plan and visit you sometime
next year and then we can all go to the Northern Areas’.
Lilian and David looked at each other. Lilian didn’t mean a word of what she said.