POSTS
My name is Bahrain
By hisham
_The following vignette is fiction, including the quotation.
_
I looked out the window on this cool spring day, thinking of how mother used to enjoy days like this. I remembered Fridays at our villa. Mother would take the opportunity of unusually good weather to walk in the garden. “Our villa’s garden,” she would say, “go out there and enjoy it people, go enjoy the garden that’s right there waiting for you.”
Her words fell on deaf ears, for each one of her four sons dabbled in his own world. Ahmed, the eldest, would be tinkering in the garage with his old Mustang that he insisted was a good buy. Mish’al would be on the phone, conversing about life in Bahrain with one of his friends. Salman, the youngest, would be browsing the web, programming or simply playing an online game. I, of all things I could possibly do, would be toiling in my father’s library, hoping to find one more elusive book that had been shying away from me in the dusty old bookcase of our study.
And I would find such a book at times. A thin volume hidden between Tolstoy and Avicenna. Or lodged deep within the rummage behind the bookcase. I found pleasure in reading a book that had long since been forgotten and buried by a gathering of dust. A pleasure in turning the cover and seeing the de rigueur signature and date of ownership.
One such book was _My Name is Bahrain*_. Written and published anonymously, the cover had no name, not even a pseudonym. Ali Abdulla, 12 October 1975 was scribbled on the inside flap. Father acquired the book one week before my birth.
The yellowed acid paper, fragile and crisp to the touch, smelled of old fiber. The soft and uneven text, recalling the thoughts of its writer, had an equanimity that instilled itself in the beholder.
Lying dormant for so many years, the gathered dust particles swirled upwards from the pages declaring once more the tome’s resurrection. The work journeys anew into the hands of a new reader, into my hands. I turn to the first page:
â€1954 was not an ordinary year. It was a year of the people, for the people. The effort of our decades old struggle would finally payoff… It was with such anticipation and excitement that I took on the cause of our nation… We were spirited young men. People of the land, the soil and the toil. We would run through the streets, banners in hand, declaring our freedom in the face of adversity. No one could stop us. We were without fear confronting the enemy… I have no name. If I did, then it would be Bahrain. This is my story.
And so began that book of one fifty or so pages. Little did I know at the time that it would take center stage in my life.
*Doesn’t exist. I made it up.