To Sarajevo

In the city of Sarajevo, the girl fell in love. It is such a cliché, she muses, to anthropomorphize every city, to fall in love with spaces and objects as if the very act was a natural embodiment of the mind and heart.  To punctuate and to make statements of city as if it’s very proclamation makes the emotions stone-hard real. Strawberries, thrifts, sufi mosque and meat burek. In the city, she stood – soaking the flavours, rustiness and soul and all its broken stories and wrecked lives and damaged zones and rich history – and said nothing, and wrote nothing because what could words and speech do to describe the complicity, the paradoxical temporality and reality of the very moments?  She doggedly stared and observed the circular urban and spatial planning; everything leads and spans to nooks and corners of the Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque  - or is it merely her illusions, a trick in a mind that each turn reveals pieces of Gazi Husrey-beg that had never been, as if it was the sun and every turn illuminates a different plane and angle and light of the sun-bathed mosque.

A certain serenity envelopes her -was it God’s plan or her mere folly? -  as she wandered into a Sufi mosque during prayers. It happened fast; there were strings of incomprehensible Bosnian which she could not catch, and fingers pointed by the Muslim man. A group of young Bosnian Muslims kindly and gently wrapped the confused girl in a makeshift hijab and led her into the mosque. There – prayers, spirituality, chants - enclosed.  Should she leave?  Her postures are wrong, her hands a floundering mess; her prayers null. It’s awkward to leave. You will break the silence. No. Stay but what? An outsider/ clearly aware of her Otherness.

Brightly lit eyes with a florid, excited visage spoke animatedly. Where are you from? This is how you pray. Hands fumbling and grasping and willing, the girl imitates another. Their English limited and the girl’s tongue speaks and knows no Bosnian but there is communication; there are attempts and it’s better than nothing. Another of her friends scrutinises, discerns and judges – you can see it in the faint twitch and slight reveal that she is not impressed with the Other - but it’s a holy place and her lips are stitched. The girl tries; the position awkward, the hand gestures unnatural and the Islamic prayers foreign.

Allah, Christ, God/ are they not the same? 

What’s your religion? Christianity? Huh? The language barrier grows. Wait, we wear the Cross. A sudden recognition - a light! (And there is a legacy in the form of a crack, a civil war that scars and impresses. A city recently marred by religious and ideological conflict. The crack grows bigger.) She smiles and it’s the last prayer. It ends, people stand and they leave. The moment is bursting and shattering. The sacredness is diffusing. Her friends pull her away and before she could leave and before everything becomes another moment, another memory lodged at the recess of the mind; she breaks the illusory moment and cements it. “You will make a great Muslim.”

Allah, Christ, God/ are they not immanently the same? 

Are the people not the same?