Boyz don't cry.....but Men sometimes do
Scene 1
She must have been no older than 12, at most. It was a little after five on a cold damp wintry afternoon and she was lost in the maze which is a street market,on a public holiday. Not far from the commotion was a dark alley leading up to the city's red light quarter. "Mama, where are you? I want my Mama now," she sobbed besechingly, the more certain she became of being separated from her mum, of her hunger, and of the prying eyes of pimps meandering through the market; scrounging for any possible sign of female vulnerability.
Scene 2
He was a lanky 20 something Man Friday. You could tell he was not used to being told off much less hollered at. It was his word against theirs'. They were in their element - cornering him, snubbing him, mentally raping him even. Finding himself the lone foreigner in a sea of locals; he clearly was in the wrong place at the wrong time, you could say he truly was the weakest link. The crime was fresh and emotion was running high in this downtown Kuwait mall on a Sunday night. Ms.Holier-than thou had taken it upon herself to creating a ruckus over whom it was that had dared to wolf whistle at a local woman, that also happened to be her own not-so-modestly dressed younger sister, Rania(presumably of a bourgeois lineage). Spotting the crow in a gathering of peacocks, all eyes, almost instinctively, went for the CROW.
He was done for....done for something he was quite incapable of doing - here, there or anywhere. But who would believe him?
Maybe it was his fault after all: he was born a crow, and by that metric not good enough to grace a gathering of mostly, peahens and the odd peacock.
Scene 3 :
She knew it was the last she would see of her baby daughter, Saadia.
The monies were given them by the broker that morning, and Saadia was to fly out the country that night with her septuagenarian suitor; a half blind sheik from Jidda who had paid a handsome price for his child bride.Petrified through it all, she kept telling herself this was the only way she and her riffraf significant-other could manage to feed their other five children, even if that meant sponging off their only daughter who would become the sacrificial goat that help put the bacon on the table for them.
Scene 4:
It had been a long wait....fifteen years to be exact. Time flies they say, but this is not quite how Madame Antoine saw it. Thoroughly disgusted with his heir; Henri's taking of a Sri Lankan secretary for a wife, Mr. Antun had disowned him - shunting him out of their Beirut business for good.Now fifteen years on, Henri had done well for himself and was finally, coming home, at his mother's behest to visit her at the hospital; the wife and children in tow. All was being forgiven.
Just as the elevator knocked on the twentieth for Henri and his family to step out, bang came the noise of a crash trolley being wheeled into the ITU.
Someone had needed to be intubated.
1 Comments:
That's quite a load of emotional baggage you've off-loaded there.
Is there more to come?
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