A Chat With Maria
It is soopa hot and steamy in Dar today as I type this blog at my dining table. There is sporadic relief from the intensity in the form of an occasional breeze from the Indian Ocean not too far away. It pushes the stagnant, muggy air from one window and out from the other, cooling the beads of sweat from my sweaty torso. The wind also helps sweep away the nauseating odor of commercial quantities of fried onions, garlic, and hing from the restaurants around my apartment.
A few hundred meters away, an Anglican telemarketing company with dubious permissions to blast deafening music and advertising material has the speakers at full blast. The music is loud enough for me to feel the pulsating tempo from giant speakers, giving my heart palpitations. The music combines inspirational Gospel and contemporary music, interrupted by a frenzied couple giddy on steroids (narcotics perhaps?) touting their Godly product. This ruckus has been going on for about five hours, and I feel I’ll need to take another round of high blood pressure medication pretty soon, or else I’ll burst a vein. I hope and pray the people responsible for the hungaama of juloos every year during the month of Muharram are listening and feeling this pain. It, perhaps, will give them a feel of what non-Shia Muslims go through every year when the organizers decide to torment the general populace.
But I regress. I want to talk about Maria, the Afghan girl I encounter on my flight from Arusha to Dar es Salaam last month. I’m the lucky first to board the Flightlink Airline jet and secure a premium seat on the free-seating flight that will stop in Zanzibar before hopping over to Dar. Just as I’m getting comfortable in my seat, here comes Mariam, preceded by an aroma of musky scent.
Is this seat occupied? she asks, pointing an immaculate finger with nails polished in scarlet red to the empty seat beside me. Before I can catch my breath at her startling beauty or say anything, she has sat next to me, peering outside the window.
I want to catch the Kibo snow peak as we fly past Kilimanjaro; she breathes spearmint fumes towards me.
I look at the skies and scratch my head uncertainly; I think she will be disappointed. There was a lot of rain earlier, and grey, sullen, pregnant clouds cling around where the mountain is and extend above Arusha city as far as I can see. We’ll see. Sure enough, the jet skirts the mighty mountain after takeoff, and Maria’s face folds into dejection. She is mighty disappointed, and her face registers sadness, so I talk to her about other stuff to divert her mind.
I am flabbergasted when she mentions she is from Afghanistan, a country I have visited several dozen times. Her parents, a Pushtun father and a Tajik mother, escaped to Quetta, Pakistan, during the first Taliban takeover; Maria was born in Peshawar. Soon after, Sweden gave them political asylum, where Maria currently lives with her family. She speaks Swedish, English, Dari, Pushtun, and Urdu fluently. She has just completed her medical doctor’s program and is in Tanzania for some R&R before starting her job in Sweden. Looking at her, I wonder what the Taliban Mullahs must think if they met her today.
We have so much to talk about after I tell her about my close relationship with her ancestral country, CAI’s work, and all the wonders we have achieved. She is full of questions and can’t believe CAI has constructed 24 schools in the remote places I mention. But she is even more astonished to learn about the six medical clinics CAI runs in Afghanistan. Medicine is her forte, so she has many questions about the clinics and how we can get doctors and medicine to these remote areas of Afghanistan.
I always thought I had a varied, unique life background, but I have found a match in Maria. She grew up in Sweden but kept in touch with her origins, learning the languages of her ancestors. She even visited Afghanistan, but with a lot of dread, and did not leave her relatives’ house in Kabul the whole time she was there. Her parents are medical doctors, and her siblings are also considering the same career line.
Maria considered a career in movies before switching to medicine. She was the lead actress in the 2017 movie What Will People Say. It’s in Swedish with English subtitles and did reasonably well in the theaters. It is available on YouTube. She promises to read my memoir and I assure her I’ll watch her movie.
The 90 minutes of flying to Zanzibar fly faster than the jet, and Maria disembarks to enjoy Zanzibar with a group of her friends from Sweden, leaving me in a pensive mood. What would have happened to Maria and her family had they not fled to Pakistan and Sweden? No more compelling proof exists that education, especially for girls, will lift any society. In Maria’s case, she won, and the Taliban lost.
There is no day I do not fret about our circa fifty-girl orphans in Kabul. What about them? I wish I could have a genie that’ll transform all of them into Maria.
In Passing
Shereen Habeeb Jaffer, or Shereen SS as she was famously known, my ex-mother-in-law, passed away a few days ago; ELWER. She was a family patriarch, even if she was of the fairer sex. She was a superb hostess (she loved entertaining guests with her excellent cooking), gut-aching funny with her quips and easy banter, and attired regally every time I met her. The only reason I pen her demise is because of the odd relationship I had with the lady. Yes, she was my ex-MIL, but that seemed not to be an issue to her or me. I visited her whenever I was in Toronto, and she welcomed me as a son to her home, made sure I was (over)sated even though I was not hungry, and made me forget any worries by making me laugh in agony.
For this reason, and the fact she mummy-sat my children through her daughter in their formative ages makes her a unique individual in my books who will constantly remain in my prayers.
Rest in peace, Mom.