Grenfell

The bottle neck is jammed up, and the breath in my throat is choked. When the deaths of innocent people around us are happening somewhere every day. The bile in one's throat is foaming, as tears incessantly flow. The screams and painful groans up on the highest floor; The man who was blindly running over limp bodies past every floor; the mother who was fawning over her four year old she had to from the tenth floor window throw; the father who strapped his lil babe to his back and was pulled away from his bedsheets knotted up together as the only means of escape via this measly makeshift rope; the 24 year old beautiful son who managed to save his mother, carrying her over his back, but his father who had to be left injured behind, and must with the reality of his most-likely death their broken family must now respond to and solemly react; the Syrian refugee brother who made it out safe and had to listen to his younger brother cry until he his last breath had taked; the family of five with two toddlers who made it, but their 6 month old baby sibling remained with daddy and mommy too missing, the snap chat video that had us all shocked as the lady prepared to die and calmly kept chanting to her Maker and said her goodbyes; the hundreds whose stories remain untold, the hundreds whose bodies lie blackened with lungs torn; some 42 people of all ages and genders were found in one room of one flat all dead; the ruthless barbarians and governments around the world, called ISIS Assad Trump or just the token mentally unstable demonic, perhaps just KKK; the selfish and spineless murderers who use guns and bats and vans and parking lots, who bomb mosques and set fire to places of worship or of shopping or where you take kids to buy icecreams; the suicide committing fools who believe in their Devilish Misshapen rules and taint 'Allahu Akbar'; the high on power drone controlling taker of lives in uniform; those who kill about to graduate young ones, and who kill people at concerts, and they kill and rape innocent souls, and some in videos behead, and others get picked up from their homes and at airports before a holiday they were about to go on and instead find themselves incarcerated tortured and bound up in Guantanamo, and hate and anger and bigotry continues to be spewed and Hitler gets reborn and the world isn't even shocked that he is being hailed again, and the Mays Modis Sharifs and the terrorist making machines from the extremists born out of religions of Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Zionism, put on their masks and shake hands with each other and get pictures taken, and stand with glee shining out of their eyes in front of mysterious globes of tainted light, while innocent people in countries get told they are being barricaded in, and some have to give up their lands and their blood and kin, where countries lose their name, where UN is an acronym that should hang its head in shame, where charities are collected to save people from famine and drought, where malnourished are being born to die, where children are breathing white phosphorus and are questioned about their cries being lies, where fish are dying and eating salmon in becoming unsafe, where Earth's glaciers are drifting and melting while Mars is being eyed and scaled with plans to be cultivated, poachers of lives and the living we are surrounded by, and our only hope lies in beginning to open our own eyes and hearts and start loving and listening and sharing and giving. The bottle neck is jammed up, and the breath in my throat is choked. 

Allahu Musta'an. We ask God for help. 


Inna lillahi wainna ilaihi rajioon.

#11ElevenLive

Today is the 11th day, of the 11th month, of the year 2011. Little did I know of how this day was being celebrated all around the world, with various events being held on the very same day - all in their own ways and forms - until I was pleasantly surprised to hear of the 11Eleven Project via a TED member, Danielle Lauren. I was elated to be a part of her global venture, thus, I set out with my dad to a mosque near our house where he would pray, and I would take some pictures from the car.

The car clock tells the time, as we set out.

 

                              

   

                          

Friday, is considered a Holy day for Muslims all around the world...

It is a day when Muslim men can be seen visiting their local mosque in hoards; Muslims of different cultures, all rushing out to their friendly neighbourhood mosque to bow down in prostration to their One Lord, early in the afternoon. 

Little kids in their daddy's arms, or holding each others hands...

People who sit on a chair whilst praying, often bring their own...

Old people who walk to the mosque with the help of a cane...

People in their thawbs, their shimagh/keffiyah, their jeans and shirts, their kurta shalwars/pajamas, their lungis, their variations of topis...

All myriads of steps being walked towards the same call to prayer, to bow down together, shoulder to shoulder in prayer...

The end of their ritual brings them back, out of the mosque, off to attend to their worldly needs again. Some start right at the mosque's doorstep with the buying of vegetables, perhaps for their late lunch or early supper...

Vegetable vendors looking for customers, whilst men meet and greet in the background.

What I found most interesting was how I seemed to remember specific people on their way out, from what I had taken in of them when they were walking towards the mosque; the man whose hair could be used in a shampoo commercial, the man with a bling bling dollar sign on his topi, the man with three kids all of the same size, the man with a cane, the man with a chair, the man who ran in, the man who had waved salaam to another, the man in a lungi, the shiny bald guy with the designeresque sunglasses... you get the drift? Sadly, I couldn't get a picture of all those whom I speak of. Nevertheless, I was intrigued at how the mind chooses to hold on to specific things, whilst entirely forgetting the rest. 


And while I silently mused over this thought, we got back home...

It was time for me myself to pray, and before I got around to it, I took some more pictures of my youngest sibling while she performed her Wudu...

And then stood up to pray in the privacy of her room...

The women in our house, in Saudi Arabia, mostly stay at home to pray by themselves - albeit this is not a norm, simply a matter of preference.

I decided to take pictures of how the Holy day of the week is spent in the life of an Indian Muslim in Riyadh - Saudi Arabia, as luckily Friday happened to fall on 11/11/11!