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As ripples of heat rise into the air, the raindrop will slowly evaporate. But it won’t disappear. Sooner or later, that tiny, translucent bead of water will ascend back to the blue skies. Once there, it will bide its time, waiting to return to this troubled earth again … and again. Water remembers. It is humans who forget.
Grown-ups are not good at masking their concerns, although they can hide their delight and curiosity surprisingly well. Whereas with children it is the other way round. Children can tactfully mute their anxiety and conceal their sorrow, but will struggle not to express their excitement. That is what growing up means, in some simple way: learning to repress all expressions of pure happiness and joy.
‘That is what happens when you love someone – you carry their face behind your eyelids, and their whispers in your ears, so that even in deep sleep, years later, you can still see and hear them in your dreams.’
‘Well, this world is a school and we are its students. Each of us studies something as we pass through. Some people learn love, kindness. Others, I’m afraid, abuse and brutality. But the best students are those who acquire generosity and compassion from their encounters with hardship and cruelty. The ones who choose not to inflict their suffering on to others. And what you learn is what you take with you to your grave.’
‘Hatred is a poison served in three cups. The first is when people despise those they desire – because they want to have them in their possession. It’s all out of hubris! The second is when people loathe those they do not understand. It’s all out of fear! Then there is the third kind – when people hate those they have hurt.’
Grandma says one should also pay homage to the sun and the moon, which are celestial siblings. Every morning at dawn she goes up to the roof to salute the first light, and when she prays she faces the sun. After dark she sends a prayer to the orb of night. One must always walk the earth with wonder, for it is full of miracles yet to be witnessed. Trees you must think of not only for what they are above ground but also for what remains invisible below. Birds, rocks, tussocks and thickets of gorse, even the tiniest insects are to be treasured. But as a water-dowser, it is the Tigris that the old
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Rivers have personalities. Some calm down with age, winding ponderously across fertile plains and meadows; others become bitter, surging with rage, tumbling through steep gorges; while yet others remain agitated and confused till the end. No two rivers are alike. The Tigris is, and has always been, ‘the mad one’, ‘the swift one’. Not like its twin, the Euphrates, which, having a gentler disposition, courses at a slower pace, taking its time, absorbing its surroundings as it passes by. These two mighty currents – though both spring from the womb of the Taurus Mountains in Turkey and run
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Home is where your absence is felt, the echo of your voice kept alive, no matter how long you have been away or how far you may have strayed, a place that still beats with the pulse of your heart.
So many civilizations and creeds have bloomed, thrived and withered across this region. But they must all have retained the belief that the future, their future, would somehow be better than the past, that tomorrow the sun would glow brighter and the shadows diminish. The Yazidis have a long-established tradition of divination. How does a people survive the painful realization that not only is their history full of oppression, persecution and massacres, but their future may also offer more of the same?
All his life Arthur has made every effort to broaden his experience and expand his knowledge. He never thought there would come a day when he would wonder if it were preferable to live in innocence and die in ignorance instead.
he had stayed in the village longer or if he had returned earlier, might he have been able to do something to avert the calamity? Deep within he knows such thoughts to be as futile as they are arrogant. It is vanity to assume that our mere presence can alter the course of events. Heroes belong in myths, in which time stretches out dreamlike, and mortals blend with gods. He is no hero in anyone’s story.