What delivered me to the dinner table of Saliha Sardar is the sort of thing that vilifies the timeless cliché that ‘things happen for a reason’. And God has a keen sense of poetic irony and justice, crafting the whole story and not necessarily catering to your liking. So, the Grand Narrator would deem that Saliha’s husband, Zia, would have no small role to play in our world’s colliding. Curiously, it was actually thanks to cancer that I would be dining with Saliha on this particular evening – the prostate cancer plaguing Zia at the time – and it would be cancer, yet of a different kind, that would be to blame for my not being able to dine again with her, at least on this plane, in the near future. I was at a bit of a crossroads in my own life; and to progress certain other events needed to take place. So, when you find yourself with time to kill, why not relax and have a quick bite or a nice cup of tea.
I am in a home. Taking that much needed break à la the British institution of the Four O’Clock Tea. The steam of my own piping hot cup fogs the images in front of me. The images are mostly dismal. Suburban London on an average day. Glum is a word. Rainy is another. I have to admit I love it. Heaven is a rainy day with a pile of books and good coffee. My fascination is set upon the rapidly setting sun, which I haven’t seen for days, but the gradual dimming of lightness gives way to the assumption that the sun must be going somewhere. I am not surprised. I have a surface level understanding of the Earth’s rotation axis and seasonal change. ‘Daytime’ from place to place will not necessarily be the same. But to experience the sun setting at four in the afternoon is a bit jarring when you are not used to it. Sitting in the Sardar living room, surrounded by the artifacts and objets of lives lived – of a living family – I could just as easily have arrived from Mars, let alone the opposite side of the Atlantic. I was certainly a stranger in a strange land. Although that trope is evaporating in our contemporary age. One could easily seek out strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilisations, to boldly go where no man had gone before by simply taking a walk down the street, much less charting a voyage to the far side of the globe or solar system.
But for an American, the United Kingdom is another category. Dishearteningly familiar, yet strictly foreign. An old friend put it well by saying its ‘Bizarro World’. What’s up is down and what’s right is left. The language itself has a certain madness, at times one side holds all the logic, to only lose it in the next moment. Z is not ‘zee’ it is ‘zed’. Full stop, not a period, but a period is a period and so the women who hear me talk about grammar begin blushing for some strange reason. Even the roads and thus the mobility of society are inversed. Right of way is rights of way and the direction does not carry on so intuitively. Honestly, I could not afford to be surprised if it was asked to put hats on my feet and shoes on my hands.
The rest of this article is only available to subscribers.
Access our entire archive of 350+ articles from the world's leading writers on Islam.
Only £3.30/month, cancel anytime.
Already subscribed? Log in here.
Not convinced? Read this: why should I subscribe to Critical Muslim?