Sometimes the outside view of Dimension XY … is just plain creepy.
A while ago, my husband and I had to buy a going-away present for someone and like most of our shopping programs, he came to pick me up straight from work and we headed off to the mall. Midway, someone from work gave him a call and wanted him back at the office and so we decided that since the mall was near where the office was, he’d drop me off, take care of the problem and come back.
Now originally, I consider myself a strong, confident, independent woman who won’t think twice at the idea of walking alone in a shopping mall. It is absolutely no problem. I’d done it scores of times back in Pakistan and it wasn’t a problem in Dubai and sure as hell it shouldn’t have been a problem in Yemen. But something about the fact that Yemeni men are surrounded by black-hooded-burqa-clad women all the time and a woman in a pantsuit or a shalwar qameez whose face was open to the world to see – just made me uncomfortable. Just a little bit.
But I wasn’t about to give in to the whiny loser inside of me – so I got dropped off at the STC and asked B to give me a call when he got back.
The mall was deserted because apparently it opened well after 5 and it was only 4.15 yet. 45 minutes to kill in a small shopping mall with a coffee shop in the corner and Baskin and Robbins on the other side.
Two scoops of Very Berry with nuts later, I was walking completely aimlessly around the mall, bought a 1500YR worth of raspberry purple nail polish from Red Earth which I absolutely did not need, tried to find a gift store that was open and unsuccessfully attempted to communicate with the Red Earth saleswoman about the opening timings of the shops.
And thus two trips to the first floor later, I noticed a humming. I’d been ignoring it for the past couple of minutes. But it was getting a bit much to ignore since the voice was getting louder and more and more out of tune.
I wished instantly at that moment – that I had actually, seriously attended those Arabic classes in that madrassah M and I had attended for a year in Pak instead of bunking them and gossiping near the cooler with M. Therefore, the extent of my Arabic began and ended at random words like “This is a cow” and “This is a flower” and that whenever you add ‘hee’ to the end of the word, it refers to the female gender. And a lot of other useless stuff I knew I could never put to practical use.
The Arabic ballad grew louder and louder. I walked in this lane and that but the human radio wouldn’t quit. I climbed the escalator and the music followed. I turned right and his tune got more and more offkey. I turned left and the singer only got louder.
I turned around slightly to note that it was a sweeper who had at least seven teeth missing from what could’ve been a winner smile (and you can tell I’m being charitable) and wore bright yellow pants and a plasticky coat to match. I caught his eye and his grin widened and he continued to sing.
I stared. For about a minute.
And then the clouds parted, the heavens listened to the silent prayers I had been uttering and my phone rang. B was at the door of the mall and I almost ran (if I could run in pink sandals) to meet him.
The Yemeni Enrique Iglesias, faithful to his mission, followed and stopped dead in his tracks (and so did the singing, thank God) when he saw me hug a six-foot-two man with longish hair and a grim smile (he has that sometimes when he’s been called at work for no reason).
Iglesias disappeared and I was happily hungry for more ice cream again.
I wish I knew what went on in his head when he decided to mall-stalk me for 45 minutes. He was over 40 years old, completely out of my league (Yemeni Enriques are just way too hot – and sarcasm is not a lost art) and I’m sure he didn’t expect me to say, “Oh sire, your offkey singing has won me over – let me forget life as I know it and run away to the Bahamas with you!”
I’m sure I’m not alone in Dimension X (X) when I say that I don’t understand stalkers. There is this one guy who randomly added me on MSN about … I don’t know ten years ago. And then hacked my account. And then stole my display picture at Orkut and used it as his own. And then sent me birthday cards for two years (I don’t know how he got the address to my home – creepy!). And then keeps sending me birthday emails every year. And then reads this blog too. I know because I keep an eye on blog-referrals and it’s honestly disturbing to see the level of consistency of being creepy here. Seriously, dude, what’s wrong with you? Have you really not thought of a life outside a distant, married, uninterested woman who won’t give a shit?
The same level of consistency is found in the many crank callers I didn’t know existed outside Pakistan and cheesy drunk-high-school movies. These bastards can tell by the first ‘hello’ that you don’t speak Arabic. And they continue to jabber in Arabic for a good twenty seconds (insert a girlish giggle and a guffaw from them) before you hang up on them after yelling, “I’M SORRY YOU HAVE THE WRONG NUMBER” at least ten times. At ungodly hours, repeatedly, these people have no lives.
I’ve been watching Sex and the City lately and if there’s one thing that show aims to teach the masses, it’s that men and women are all desperate for sex. We all want it, this way or that, through one-night stands, masochistic relationships, pretending, conforming – whatever gets us that booty.
Of course, that’s New York and the issues of/about sex in a culturally evolved society has a different set of problems than being ’sung’ to or being stalked online for ten years.
When it comes to Muslims or societies that aren’t as open to the topic of sex as the Europeans or Americans are – our men and women choose to find their highs in more discreet and less obvious ways. Games of society become games of courtship and dating doesn’t come as easily to our time tables as we’d obviously like to. The invention of the internet has certainly created more avenues for the young and the restless to channelize their libidos … but it makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Just how desperate – overall – human beings are for sex? Or how they get so wired when it comes to the opposite sex? Regardless of how out-of-reach-impossible the situation is, regardless of how the end to the whole tirade is pointless – human beings (men and women alike) will go to unimaginable lengths after their libido has caught hold of them.
Freud had a point.
And with Valentine’s Day around the corner, you know you’ll see that surge of hormones all around you proving the same point all over again. Even disbelievers of the day such as yours truly find myself wishing for a secret surprise of some kind on the morning of the 14th of February.
Okay so maybe that’s a bit much – but you get my point.
You have to wonder – what God was thinking when He decided to give Man (and Woman) this desire to love and procreate and go forth and multiply. You have to wonder what kind of machinery did He have in mind that would run on testosterone and progesterone and what end-result did He expect when he gave Man the ability to think from his pants and allowed Woman to deal with everything in respect of her monthly moodswings.
You just have to question what the world would look without the color red and the shape of hearts and if Homer would ever get around to writing the Odyssey and the Iliad if people were unknown to the concept of love.
You have to put forth the idea if we even know what in the holy fuck it really is.
The thing we’ve been writing about since ages, the idea that sells Bollywood movies and makes pubescent boys act like Shah Rukh Khan. The concept Keats couldn’t get enough of it (even if it killed him) and the storyline that made all of Shakespeare’s dramas box office hits.
After all these years of boy-meets-girl (or in the case of us Muslims, boy’s-parents-meet-girl’s-parents) and the merry go round that makes us dream and buy red roses on February 14th … do we have any idea what it is about?
Does it go beyond the libido? Does it mean anything more than a fleeting flight of fancy or does it still stick even when the one you ‘love’ is not riding that stallion that Hans Christian Andersen promised or isn’t singing a ballad on top of a Himalaya mountain with his cardigan classily draped over his shoulders?
My own idea of love has been limited. I think human beings are biologically programmed and their thoughts are responses to their biological calling. And in this midst we make life all the more interesting with movies, music and poetry. Maturity and being in love means, to me, understanding the needs and basis of the other partner to compromise and share a life that won’t be smooth always – but will be worth the trouble because the person you’re doing it for isn’t a complete jackass and even if you have to ask him to not watch football on weekends and not be cranky if Rooney doesn’t manage to score, and even if he tells you that the latest Gul Ahmed shirt that you’ve worn with so much gusto makes you look like Laal Shahbaz Qalandar (thanks to the latest A-line shirt fads) … it’s actually much more real than the idea that has been sold to us over all these years.
So, to the fools in love and to the ones foolish enough to want to … Have a great Valentine’s Day.
Go nuts.
Buy flowers.
And chocolates.
And big heart-shaped balloons.
This craziness is here to stay.



























The Recently Spoken