Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Falling Apart

HELP!!!! The folks at IBM called to say that all the damage to my computer was MY FAULT (!) and that they will not pay the $895 required to fix it. I am devastated. Will I be able to retrieve the songs and pictures and poetry (and school stuff, too) from my hard drive? And what shall I do in the interim? My blog is, as you well know, pallid and peaked of late, and my procrastinative urges are building up intolerably. I could barely even write my papers, were I inclined to do so. And when I get a new computer (the only silver lining here...truthfully, I had abused my laptop to no end), which one should it be?

Alas, too, for the news is getting ahead of us all. Aside from the shit going down in Haiti, Dick's hunting accident and Saddam's hunger strike, all of which, inshallah, I will get to this evening, I have a rather more poignant story.

I spent the weekend in New York, and though the mammoth snowstorm delayed my return to Cambridge, I was determined to make it back in time for my 4:30 class on Monday. (Grading is discretionary in classes of fewer than 40 people, as I discovered recently and in a most unfortunate manner.) I flagged down a cab from Back Bay station. Most cab drivers in Boston are immigrants, so I guess it makes sense that most of them ask me where I'm from. I answered as usual ("Iowa, but my parents came from India") and asked my driver, Salah, where he was from.

"Hahahaha!!!" he said with a nervous little laugh. "I'm from the land of the Arabian Nights!"

"Like, from where? Which country?"

"Ahem. The Arabian peninsula."

Salah's hedging made me suspect he was from Iraq. He was, as it turns out. He came to the States after the Iran-Iraq war-- in which he fought-- and just before the start of the first Iraqi invasion. I told him that I was so, so sorry for what the United States has done to his country and then I lost my words. I couldn't find words-- and still can't-- to express the mix of anger and grief and sorryness and shame that I felt. I asked if he still had family there. "Everyone," Salah said. "But I don't know who remains, because it is too hard to talk with them."

By then I was at school. Salah said, "God be with you" and held his hands as if in prayer. He tried to refuse to take my fare.

At the risk of belaboring the story, let me point out two things that break my heart: First, Salah's reluctance to tell me where he was from. Such shame and fear from a former soldier! Second, his reaction to my totally inadequate and bumbling expression of condolences.

God be with you, Salah.


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