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The Twilight Zone Of Dani’s Small Blanket By Raymond N. Shekoury
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The Twilight Zone Of Dani’s Small Blanket By Raymond N. Shekoury
On 11 November 2003, we celebrated Diana’s sixth birthday at our home 36 Holder Way Bloomington Illinois, 61704 USA It was a happy family celebration. The birthday cake was cut. Everybody was singing: “Happy birthday to you. Happy Birthday to Diana.” Everybody hugged and kissed Diana. Diana and her four-year-old brother Dani were very happy. They were opening the birthday presents and were running around all over the house, hopping, dancing, singing and making lot of happy noises. The whole family was in a very happy mood. Dani came to me and said in Arabic “Jeddoo1, would you like me to cover your feet with my small blanket?” I said: “ Yes, please do” again in Arabic. He spread his small blanket very carefully around my feet. My feet became warmer. The warmth crept throughout my whole body and it must have tickled the fancies of my brain. Dani’s tender gesture ignited in me a mental implosion that unfolded into an indescribable mood. My mind began flashing an incoherent sequence of cascade of images of the actual past and present, as well as, images of the unforeseen future. They can be described as a kind of boiling feelings of happiness coupled with sadness of the inevitable happenings that eventually will come. 1
“Jeddoo” is an Arabic word meaning “grandpa.”
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These incompatible feelings had induced me to cry silently and deprived me of sleep for a couple of days. There was nothing wrong except my newly acquired ultra sensitivity of being uprooted from the culture in which I was brought up, and being pulled up from the language that I learned since sucking milk at my mother’s lap. If I were in possession of poetic abilities, I would have composed a poem portraying the fermentation of my innermost feelings. However, I being deprived of such skills, let me try my best, in my own words, depict, as best as I can, the dazzling images that came to my mind. Let me point out parenthetically, to grammar-minded people that in cases similar to what I am experiencing, the grammatical tenses would lose their significance, The present, the past and the future confluence in one single critical moment in time. My mind leaps twenty-four years into the future. It is November 11, 2027. I see Diana is celebrating her thirtieth birthday. She is a young married woman having three kids: eight, five and three years old. Her last name is not a Shekoury anymore. She is living with her family in one of the American States (which have grown up to fifty-five). Her husband is busily helping in preparing the table for the birthday cake. Her three children are running around the house singing, dancing, jumping up and down: Very much, like what she and her brother Dani were doing back in November 11, 2003; Very much like her father Waseem and uncle Nabeel did back in Baghdad, on the anniversaries of their birthday occasions, where there used to be a large gathering of all the members of the Shekoury and Awakeem families at their home on 5/63/635 University Quarters, Al-khadhra, Baghdad, Iraq. Very much like her grandfather Raymond (I.E. me), and her granduncles, Fareed and Sabah did in the old forgotten Akad Al-Nassara (I.E. Christian Quarters in Arabic) of ancient Baghdad: at 32/185 Ammar Street, Baghdad, Iraq. The two families of the Shekourys and the Awakeems are now dispersed all over the globe: In Lebanon, Germany, Austria, Australia, Canada, Brazil, different States in USA and even in our mother country Iraq.
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The old intimate family links are almost forgotten. Nevertheless, some of the links can still be found via “THE SHEKOURY FAMILY TREE”, which I had constructed back in 2002, and which I had kept updating until it was neglected when I “faded away” and eventually forgotten except possibly on some discs of the now obsolete computers. Diana’s parents, Waseem and Luma traveled all the way from Illinois to Diana’s place in order to have a family reunion by celebrating her thirtieth birthday. So did Uncle Nabeel with his small family. Everybody was expecting Dani to appear at any moment. My mind jumps back to the present day on November 11, 2003 The two kids, Diana and her brother Dani have nothing to worry about, they are enjoying the bliss of their ignorance and living as free as the birds in the skies with no responsibility, no concern or worry; everything they need is taken care of by their loving parents and grandparents. On the other hand, their parents and grandparents are worried about numerous many things. Nowadays they are especially worried about their many relatives and friends in their militarily occupied mother country, Iraq, where security, electricity, and water supply are all lacking and where terrorists are blowing this building and that building, suicide bombing, kidnapping and beheading people. The two kids are not aware of what is going on. They are enjoying their ignorance! Let us have a peep into the future on November 11, 2027 to see Diana’s situation when she is thirty years old. The thirty-year-old Diana has lot of personal problems to worry about, concerning her job and her husband’s job. She is also so much concerned about the school of one of her kids that she has forgotten all about an appointment she had with the doctor last week and has now difficulty in rescheduling another appointment. Today she is celebrating her thirtieth birthday. The sixty-year old grandpa Waseem is sitting on one of the couches chatting with his sixty-two-year-old brother Nabeel, sister-in law, and his twenty-two year old niece. Waseem’s hair is completely gray. Grandma Luma, who has gained some weight, is helping with the table. However, Dani did not show up yet. Diana is very much hurt that her dear brother had
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forgotten all about her birthday and the family reunion She tries to hide her inner feelings so that not to perturb the happy atmosphere of the occasion. My mind switches back to an earlier year November 11, 1981 Diana’s grandparents Nouria and Raymond are at the University of Southern Illinois at Carbondale. They are on a sabbatical leave from the University of Baghdad, where they used to teach mathematics. Because of the Iraq-Iran war, the grandparents are very much concerned about the unknown fate of their two teenager sons (that is Diana’s uncle Nabeel and Diana’s father Waseem) if they decide to return home. In fact that they were preoccupied with “To stay or not to stay in US, that is the problem.” The chair of the Department Professor Baartman was doing his best to encourage them to stay. However, they finally decided, to return to Baghdad in 1982, and to leave the seventeen-year-old Nabeel in the States to study at the University in Carbondale, Illinois. They took the fifteen-year-old Waseem (who was too young to be left alone in the United States) with them to Baghdad. This decision will turn out to be one of the most critical decisions in their lives that eventually led them to immigrate later to the United States. I am so dizzy. My mind is swirling. I find myself even at the embryonic stage of my life namely on November 11, 1931. Diana’s great-grandparents Nejeeb and Warena are expecting their first-born baby. The trilingual (Arabic, English and French) Najeeb was reading the three volume history of France written by Raymond Poincare`2, the French Premier and who was the President of France during the First World War. In fact, the baby was born after eight days from that date. He was named Raymond, after Raymond Poincare`. That baby, after seventy-two years, will be writing these words. He will turn out to be Diana’s grandfather. What a wonderful small world! I find myself making a huge mental leap forward in time. It is November 11, 2027. The thirty-year-old Diana remembers only few words of the Arabic language she had been exposed to and which her late grandfather had so 2
He is a cousin of the famous mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincare`.
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painstakingly taught her. However, she still manages to write down her name and her brother’s name in Arabic. The images she retains of her grandparents are vague and fuzzy. She remembers them in their old age, weak and weary taking lot of pills and had difficulty in walking. Diana cherishes the remembrance of those moments when playing the “hide and seek” games with her brother and Beebee Nouria, while Jeddoo was sitting aloof working with his computers. Dani consistently looks up to Jeddoo trying to imitate him in many respects. Those happy moments are gone. They have gone with the wind. My eyes are filled with tears. As I clear my eyes from tears, I have the image of a Swedish hospital on November 11, 1997. The nurses are racing the pregnant Luma, on a stretcher; they are taking her to the surgery hall for a caesarian operation. Waseem is running with all his speed to catch up with the running nurses. A girl was delivered. On that very moment, the phone rings at our apartment in Amman (at the third circuit in Jabal3 Amman). I picked up the telephone. Waseem was on the other end of the line. He said in a hurried voice: “Luma has just given birth to a baby girl”. Then he added, AS IF to apologize for the newborn baby being a girl, “Didn’t Beebee Warena wished to have a girl? Well, here is a girl!” “Beebee” is used in Arabic to call their grandmothers. Beebee Warena had three sons: Fareed, and Sabah, and me. She always longed to have a daughter. Upon the news of the newborn baby, Nouria and I are extremely happy. Finally, we have an aura of grandparents. Mainly due to Nouria’s great multitude of efforts, Luma was able to overcome the very difficult early months of her pregnancy in Amman. So much so that her physician, Doctor Isam Al-Sakit thought Nouria was
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“Jabal” is the Arabic word for mountain
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Luma’s real mother. Thus, Nouria feels and always felt, that she had endowed life to this newborn creature, After few minutes, without even knocking at the door, there darted Aida Ovanessian from Irbid in Jordan and plunged into our apartment, She, upon learning about the new arrival, was the first to congratulate us. I note that Aida Ovanessian was a former PhD. student whom I supervised (among more than forty graduate students) back in Baghdad University in nineteen ninety-six. She had written a PhD. thesis titled “Singularwise Iterated Function System Theory and its impact on the Fractalization on GrayScaled Images.” In spite of her being my student I learned from her computer programming, which is a field not known by most Iraqi University professors of my age. She had since become a very close family friend. Tomorrow (that is, November 12 1997), I will be distributing some cigars and chocolates to the members of the Department of Mathematics at the Hashemite University at Zarqa in Jordan. I was of that habit. I had previously distributed cigars to my colleagues in the Mathematics Department of the College of Science in the University of Baghdad, back on the twenty-eighth of March in 1965 and on the fifteenth of October in 1967, that is on Nabeel’s and Waseem’s birthdays respectively. The catastrophic tragic death of the British Princess Diana some three months ago was still making headlines in the news media. Thus, that newborn girl baby was named Diana. I am hearing a strange ringing sound coming not only from a faraway place but also from far away future. It sounds like a phone. Let us head to “there” and “ then”!!! The date is again November 11, 2027. We reach in time. It is about midnight at Diana’s place. The phone is ringing. The speaker on the other line was none other than her brother Dani (who was happily dancing and singing together with his sister back on November 11, 2003). He belatedly remembers his sister’s birthday. He is trying to find excuses for his negligence. Now, he lives in a far away city. He has not seen his sister or his parents for a while. He, of
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course, seems to have his own troubles, worries and problems created possibly by his girlfriend. Flashback: November 11, 1995 Waseem and Luma are busy preparing for their wedding, which will take place within less than a week. They are searching for the most appropriate hall for the wedding party, and are preparing a list of the people to be invited. They are looking for a design of the invitation card, which must be unique in its pattern and has to have some sort of originality that will leave an imperishable impact on the people invited. Waseem and Luma are ready to spend any amount of money to obtain such a card. They are successful in their pursuit. The card design is indeed unique. It is so beautiful that Dr. Adil Mahmood (who was a former student of mine and later my colleague at the University of Baghdad) took my permission to send a sample of the card to Egypt in order to make a similar design for a wedding party of one of his relatives, taking place in Cairo. Nevertheless, the required impact of the card on the invited people did not seem to have lasted long. It will turn out that only a few of the invited people kept the card as a souvenir. Those few that did keep the card cannot be considered guests; they are very close family relation to the bride or the groom. However, certainly there must exists a copy of that card among the papers of the late Jeddoo Raymond. Yes! There it is.
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The card essentially says: Dr. Raymond Najeeb Shekoury and his wife And Mr. Khudher Alyas Matloob and his wife Are honored to invite you to the wedding of Waseem Shekoury To Luma Matloob In the Church of The Virgin Mary in Outer Karrada. At 6:00 PM
on 18/11/1995.
Celebration will be held in the Hall of Ekal Hotel. Your presence would complete our joy.
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As the “late Jeddoo” is wiping his tears, he opens his eyes to find himself again in the former noisy birthday party on November 11, 2027. The birthday cake is cut. Everybody is singing: “Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to Mom. Happy birthday to Diana”. Everyone hugs and kisses Diana. Luma makes a wish; in an almost perfect American English, that Diana will live a long happy and prosperous life of a hundred and more years. So, do Waseem, Nabeel, his wife, daughter and everybody else. The music starts playing again. The three kids of the thirty-year old Diana begin to dance hop around and run after each other making loud noises. They start acting a play they had learned at school. The youngest of the three kids, as if by an inner impulse, suddenly approaches his grandfather Waseem and says in English language: “ Grandpa, will I cover your feet with my small blanket?” Will that childish question, ring something in Waseem’s mind? I do not really know. Waseem himself has to answer the query. This document, IF preserved, might be of help to him to remember. Planet Earth, not waiting for Waseem’s answer, has completed its twenty-fourth rotation round the sun, since an analogous childish question was asked at 36 Holder Way, Bloomington, Illinois, back on November 11, 2003 in a language which that four-year-old child has forgotten by now, namely, the Arabic language of his ancestors.