p i n a k i

www.pinaki.info

because the best stories are our own

Home: Middle East: Oman: Desert: Empty Quarter:

forgetting the shidet

I understand that in no way is she offering more than this, and in truth I have no desire for more,/ but it’s still enough for me to be taken by a surge, first of warmth then of something like its opposite:/ a memory—a girl I’d mooned for from afar, across the table from me in the library in school now,/ our feet I thought touching, touching even again, and then, with all I craved that touch to mean,/ my having to realize it wasn’t her flesh my flesh for that gleaming time had pressed, but a table leg./ The young woman today removes her arm now, stands, swaying against the lurch of the slowing train,/ and crossing before me brushes my knee and does that thing again, asserts her bodily being again,/ (Gombrowicz again), then quickly moves to the door of the car and descends, not once looking back,/ (to my relief not looking back), and I allow myself the thought that though I must be to her again/ as senseless as that table of my youth, as wooden, as unfeeling, perhaps there was a moment I was not.
C K Williams, On the Metro

Things changed with infrastructure – and the well. This was when Fased became Hashman and the bedouin built the wooden shacks or sandaka that you find abandoned today, in various stages of disarray. Ahmed persuades an old woman to dig into the corners of her soot-blackened kitchen for something real. She comes out with a camel hair bag full of dust, camel saddles and old metal kahwa jugs, with ‘Made in ROK’ embossed on the bottom. But this is all sand down the pipe. The camel bags aren’t woven anymore and the metal jugs have been replaced by the thermos. The cabins themselves have been left behind, when the Bedu swapped them for free houses that look more like villas. As for the saddlebags, what use are they when the animals themselves have been reduced to providers of meat and milk, or the racetrack in Thumrayt. As Ahmed so pointedly points out, “The bedu have forgotten the shidet, the camel seat. Today they drive the Lexus, LandCruisers and abu shenabs.”