Yaqeen

Faces.

The Chokidars’ wife brings their little girl over to show off the new outfits I bought her. She is barely seven months old – head shaved, eyes black as kohl, dark marks smudged underneath with charcoal. She wears twelve colors that all clash into rainbows. Symbols to ward off the evil eye.

Outside the Costa Coffee, in the dead of night, a little boy sits alone in a plastic lawn chair. He is exhausted from the full day’s work. You can tell. No doubt he worked the streets in the Seaside district for twelve to fourteen hours, diligent with his eight year old shoeless feet. Most would never see him – curled up, asleep in his chair, with a bundle of roses in his dirty fist.

Afghan boys run alongside our car as we drive into the Sunday bazaar. They are all ready to carry loads three times their size. They plead in Pashto and Hazari. “Please, me, me, memsahib. Me”. They work all day for several hundred rupees to take back to their families. Four dollars at best. They have camaraderie, like Fagin’s boys in Oliver Twist. I imagine them singing up and down the rows of vegetables…
And Yet. There is something missing. I cannot put my finger on their brokenness. I cannot understand the lengths they will go to sell themselves for money. The price we pay to care for our families. I cannot simply pick one boy to carry my purchases today. I cannot save them, and I cannot give them a home.

She stands right in front of me, by the water-walla, at my feet. I didn’t SEE her, with her beautiful curls and dirty face. She must have been whispering. Bright green eyes and bare feet… lost and alone. I turned to go and she touched me. Not as beggars do, with groping hands around your arms and shoulders. Instead, she placed her tiny hand at the hem of my kameez and pulled gently. Tugging like a child. I turned back and finally saw her baby form – no more than three or four. She was by herself, presumably, though it’s hard to tell. I wish I knew what she needed. I wish I could have picked her up and healed her wounds, touched her heart, healed her soul. All I could do was buy her clean water.

One gentleman. Old enough to remember the Raj. He walks up and down the market holding a wicker basket over his shoulder – longing to be chosen, like the Afghan boys, to carry bags for money. His bright eyes are piercing, but his body is from the grave. He is the Thin Man… tall beyond most from this country, but tiny enough not to have eaten a meal for months. Where is his family? What has befallen that he is here, begging, rather than at home with his grandchildren and great grandchildren? How can he support himself alone? For, after all, who will choose him when his wilted shoulders should hardly support a kilogram of apples?


I do not know how to reach my people anymore. I look at the simple woman in the mirror and wonder where the time has gone. I am alone in this city…. Alone amid my beautiful people, and my soul is broken for them. Yet I have forgotten.

But perhaps, somewhere deep, the girl with dreams of Asia lives within. I still know the wonder of the color brown, and how many shades of it my Father has made. I am still aware of the heart beat of the city, the cries of the people, and the ache of the sound of the call to Namaz. I still lay awake in the dark of night, wondering what miracle it will take to work in this place. I see the bright blues, greens, and oranges, hidden beneath the veil that covers these faces… rainbows in the sand and the dirt. I still see the chokidar’s face burst into smile from behind the gate when he sees us coming.

Perhaps I have not forgotten after all.
The sound of the train as it clacks past the window through the night. The wind blowing in from the Arabian Sea. The smell on the air – of sea and skin and spice, of foreign vegetation and burning trash – of 16 million people.
Most people would notice the darkness, the dirt, the poverty, the filth and the squalor. I look at the faces of these people and I am blind to all but hope. I still believe. I know that my Father has set His face toward the city and its people, and I trust Him.
Yaqeen.