Zaatar Days, Henna Nights: Adventures, Dreams, and Destinations Across the Middle East

300 Pages·2007·2.44 MB·English

by  Maliha Masood

Zaatar Days,
Henna Nights
Adventures, Dreams, and Destinations
Across the Middle East
Zaatar Days, Henna Nights
Adventures, Dreams, and Destinations Across the Middle East
Copyright 2006 by Maliha Masood
Published by
Seal Press
An Imprint of Avalon Publishing Group, Incorporated
1400 65th Street, Suite 250
Emeryville, CA 94608
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may
quote brief excerpts in connection with a review.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Masood, Maliha.
Zaatar days, henna nights : adventures, dreams, and destinations
across the Middle East / Maliha Masood.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-58005-192-7 (alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-58005-192-8 (alk. paper)
1. Masood, Maliha. 2. Middle East—Description and travel. I. Title.
DS49.7.M377 2007
915.604'54--dc22
2006030700
Cover design by Claudia Smelser
Interior design by Domini Dragoone
Printed in the United States of America by Malloy
Distributed by Publishers Group West
Author’s note: This work is based on my travels in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey
from October 2000 to August 2001. It conveys my impressions of people and places as I experienced
them during that time. No composites have been used. All cultural, religious, historical, and politi
cal references are my own conclusions. In the case of inadvertent factual inaccuracies, the fault is
entirely mine.
To my parents for nurturing my wings of flight,
and to my husband for allowing me to soar.
You cannot cross the sea
merely by staring at the water.
Rabindranth Tagore
Contents
7 A Leap in the Dark
15 Mother Ship
Egypt
85 Treading Water
Jordan
123 Playtime
Syria (Damascus)
169 In My Own Skin
Syria (Aleppo)
241 Bends in the River
Turkey
281 Epilogue
287 Glossary

A Leap in the Dark
Listen, are you breathing just a little,
and calling it a life?
Mary Oliver
It was by no means an ordinary drive to the airport. Everything looked
the same as ever. Interstate 405 an unruly parking lot, the Seattle sky
threatening to explode with moisture, Lake Washington a gray sheet
of glass, but the mood inside the sky-blue Toyota Camry was anything
but casual. We were whizzing along in the HOV lane. Nusrat Fateh Ali
Khan belted out Sufi songs on the car stereo, my mother sat in the pas
senger seat murmuring verses from the Quran, my father sat behind the
wheel expounding on the psychology of drivers who changed lanes with
out signaling, and there I was in the back seat, fiddling with the straps of
my REI pack, trying to remember why I was running away from home.
I guess I thought it was the right thing to do and the right time to do
it. If I had chickened out and waited any longer, I might have given my
parents fewer headaches, definitely fewer worries, but I probably wouldn’t
have forgiven myself for failing to disengage from a rusty vessel of thwarted
hopes before it foundered and sank. At least that was how I saw my life six
years ago. I was twenty-eight and miserable. Time kept marching like an
arrogant parade, taunting me with the stench of a stale existence.
-7-
No more should haves or could haves, or my personal favorite, what if.
I was tired of going through motions that had lost their meaning. Each
day had been the same as the last. I would wake up to the screams of my
alarm clock and have a little war with the snooze button before dragging
myself into the shower. Dressed in earth-toned suits and brown leather
pumps, with a whole-grain bagel tucked inside my purse, I would head
to the office to play phone tag, answer emails, and multitask, only to
come home, eat dinner, watch sitcoms, and fall asleep, ready to repeat
the cycle the next day, the next, and the next.
It all started out as a string of lackluster jobs after college. I
worked in the tech sector, hashing out competitive analyses and
returns on investment reports, for five soulless years that gave me no
sense of accomplishment, no indication of what I was truly capable of
beyond number-crunching on Excel spreadsheets and mapping out
pie charts.
What I really wanted was to escape from routine and find new
rhythms in a world that would reawaken my senses. I wanted to
know the meaning of wonder and freshness, to regain the wide-eyed
openness of a child. I wanted to come to terms with a truer me, a
more essential self that couldn’t entirely be placed amid the bullet
points of my resume. So I did what had to be done. I handed in my
resignation letter, cashed in all my savings, and headed to Council
Travel. It was having a sale on Europe. Paris sounded nice. I booked
a one-way ticket.
Then I made a little announcement to friends and family.
“I am going abroad for a while. I don’t know how long I will be gone
for or exactly where I will be traveling to. But I promise to stay in touch
with emails and let you know my whereabouts.”
They were kindhearted folks who cared for me and wanted me to
be happy. So I wasn’t taken to the nearest psychiatric ward. I was simply
wished well and told to send plenty of postcards.
-8-
“Don’t forget to say your dua!”
My mother’s words of farewell at the British Airways departure gate
urged me to remember Allah in prayers. I patted my money belt for my
passport and my favorite rosary. It calmed me to roll my fingers over
the smooth wooden beads and mumble Alhamdulillah (thanks be to God),
Subhanallah (praise be to God), Allahu Akbar (God is great) thirty-three
times each. I had learned this ritual as a child growing up in Karachi,
Pakistan, where I used to follow my mother around our house, clutching
the accordion pleats of her sari like a safety blanket. But the comfort of
Ammi’s saris was no match for the allure of my first transatlantic flight
to the United States. One day, my eight-year-old fingers let go of the silky
fabric in exchange for a laminated boarding pass and a chance to visit my
cousins and maybe Disneyland. I had made the trip on my own, chap
eroned on three different legs of the flight by friendly stewardesses who
plied me with chocolates and lollipops. My mother was surprised that a
daughter so attached to her side would have readily let go to fly across an
ocean to a country more than ten thousand miles away. That was all the
proof she needed to say that travel was in my blood.
I hadn’t tested this conviction as much as I would have liked to.
Throughout my adolescence and into my twenties, I had buried my crav
ings for the things I loved and become a slave to practicality. I hadn’t
really taken any risks, and I never felt that I had achieved any goals that
I could be proud of. For all my travel-worthiness, I hadn’t even moved
out of my parents’ home and was living a complacent if dull existence
in their suburban basement. I had my own car, my own phone line, and
cable TV. So it wasn’t all that bad, but as the years wore on, I fell into a
rut and was desperate to get out.
Paris was a bumpy landing. I arrived on Easter Sunday and spent
the next four days repacking my bloated bags and standing in line at
-9-