Baghdad --- The Jinx Was Here

I seemed to have counted my chickens way too early in my previous post. A fellow commuter, barely catching his breath and checking his trousers for traces of dust, said he survived a bombing by a miracle. Whoever said I jinx the places I visit must be right, the IED tore through the very same childhood neighbourhood of mine. What confused me about this young commuter was the fact that he was smiling as he was running at full speed to catch the bus and his funny comment “it’s good it wasn’t a car bomb!” Aren’t we lucky!

Hiba, my college chum, is furious; I could not be impressed by the huge pot of stuffed leaves and onion she spent an entire day to cook because I couldn’t reach her house on time, neither could she sympathize with me because I wasn’t actually bogged down by traffic as she expected, rather I was hanging out with another friend. Oh dear, oh dear, I was in big trouble!

The situation on the ground did not turn out to be the same as the supposedly normal one she droned on during our online conversations. Only when I reached her area it hit me that Hiba is still wearing the very same rosy spectacles; I have ceased to look at bright sides in Iraq and given up hope on positive changes, but she hasn’t. She was so eager to show me life through her eyes, just anything that could give me a false sense of peace and co-existence. She failed. She was right about shops opening after 5:00 p.m., but they close down at 7:00, I couldn’t see any progress there. But mosques are still protected by barbed wires, a proof of ongoing mistrust. I heard commuters exchange sectarian insults with each other, not a good sign either and it was her own mother who told me about a private school for girls next door that received threats by militias to expel the qualified senior male teachers or else they blow up the whole school premise.

I had loads of fun with my friend’s family. Last time I saw her daughter she was barely 20 days old, now she’s talking and called me Tita, just like my nephew and niece and actually instructed me to hold her, a privilege given to family members only.


It’s good that my uncle lives across the street from Hiba’s house. He turned 72 this year and sounded preoccupied with the idea of death and so concerned for the chicken feed his divorced daughter will earn thanks to the screwed up pension law. He couldn’t be disappointed by this government because he has seen it all and “lived long enough under the rule of the monarchs, the communists, baathists, militias, and now the-new-Iraqists,” which look so alike that he often confuses their names. My uncle was once a young Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, whose career screeched to a halt in the early 1970s by a plane crash. His eyes beamed as he was showing off old photographs of his “handsome” self.

His last words of advice for me were not to pin too much hope on progress in this country, “read our blood-soaked history and you’ll see for yourself that this land is doomed!”