Thursday, September 22, 2016

The View from Madinah

Featured image courtesy Wikimedia

FATHIMA CADER on 09/21/2016

Editor’s note: A version of this article first appeared on Hazlitt, and can be accessed here

Around the debris of triumphantly post-war Sri Lanka, new research is churned out, state grant money proffered and secured, and security expert careers built around jihadi headlines, veil puns, and paradoxically hyper(de)racinated definitions of terrorism. We are forever post-911. Polite liberals plead proportionality in the surveillenace of Muslims – not too much, but just enough. History falls to the wayside as lucractive theories reign about the many Muslims who visit Saudi Arabia for work and worship. Tamil-speaking, yet reciting prayers in Arabic, theirs is such a messy conflagration of disloyalties.

In early spring, with snow still clotted thick on the ground, my grandmother dies in my parents’ home. We wash her naked body the next day in the basement morgue of the local Scarborough mosque, my hands closer to her skin than they’d ever been in life. There is a gaping hole in her throat where the cancer had eaten through to open air. I can’t remember who cleaned around the wound’s curling black edges. I can’t remember much of how her body felt that morning, except that it was very stiff; mine felt barely less so. We recite my favourite dua, the Muslim funeral prayer: allahumaghfir li haiyyaini wa maiyyatina—God, grant us your forgiveness / for the living and for the dead…

We bury her in a graveyard in Pickering, an hour east of Toronto, wrapped in a white shroud her daughters and grand-daughters twined around her. In the orthodox way, we don’t put up a gravestone, no plaque and no flowers. I send myself an email to remember her plot number. We visit often, commencing a new, far different relationship from the one we’d had through the ravages of her long, croaking dying.

My mother begins a slow, thorny grieving. Time wrinkles around her periodically heaving body. In May, she decides we will make umrah, pilgrimage, in my grandmother’s memory. My immediate family doesn’t do field trips. I can’t remember the last time that we, all seven strong, went anywhere together—we are always too busy or too dispersed.

By month’s end, we are flying to Saudi Arabia for the first time in fifteen years.

Twenty-four years ago, when our family first arrived in Saudi Arabia (I was born in Sri Lanka), the country was at war with Iraq. I was young then, repeating kindergarten to compensate for the ocean-wide migration. We landed in Yanbu, a highly industrialized expat-heavy petrochemical centre, then moved to Jeddah, the country’s grittier seaport commercial capital.

My parents eschewed compounds, those securely gated, miraculously green alternate realities occupied largely by wealthy white Westerners and served mostly by South Asian labourers. Instead, we grew up on hospital premises, so that my doctor mother could walk to work. Bussed between our low-rise apartment building of other doctor families from the global south and my state-run international all-girls school, the war seemed far away.