When I was a little girl living in Oman, there were certain weekend and holiday rituals. These invariably involved dad driving us out into the desert , sometimes to Dubai or other places or sometimes just into the always intriguing interior regions of Oman. My sister and I would sit in the back seat and invariably at some point during the drive, a fist fight would break out over things that simply had to be resolved just then and which in all probability wouldn't be remembered a couple of hours later .
What does remain in my memory vividly are the trips back home at the end of the weekend. These took place as the sun was setting. In my mind there are a couple of magical moments in any desert.One is that time just before the sun sets completely. Not quite twilight. The sun goes down in one last blazing burst of glorious blood red/orange against a deep blue sky and a dark ochre desert floor and black mountains. A hush settles that can be felt even in the climate-controlled interior of the car gliding along the super-smooth highways.A stillness that seems in strange contrast to the quiet whizzing by of the motorists. I'm quite sure my seven or eight year old self never thought of the antiquity of that land. But my adult self cannot help but wonder at it. The history, the fables, the myths...and mostly the emphatic emptiness...and silence.
And then, the sun disappears completely. In those days large sections of the highway in the interior were yet to be lit up. Imagine then the absolute darkness that enveloped the landscape relieved only by the lights of the cars and other vehicles that intermittently passed by. Brilliant silver dots would start appearing. I'm sure each of those stars had a name and I'm sure now that at some point in the distant past those very stars showed the way to many a traveler. To us they were merely brilliant points of illumination at distances we could scarcely imagine. Then slowly, the unrelieved blackness of the sky would start seeming a deep, deep shade of midnight blue sequined as it were with the silvery stars and sometimes, at the right time of month , a crescent or full moon.
My father, I suspect, always had a romantic streak in him. I remember it was at these times , that he would invariably put on music quite appropriate to the mood. Songs from the film Umrao Jaan were a favourite I remember as were other " ghazals" , for want of a better word. I remember some of them vaguely. Be that as it may, what remains now , in all its vividness in memory are those brilliant landscapes.
Years later when I was working in Oman and I had to commute nearly 40 plus kilometers each way to work, my adult self reveled in those drives . I loved my sunrise/sunset drives and night time drives after a day at the hospital. The highways were better lit. But the desert remained unchanged. I almost always regretted the arrival in the city proper. It was a rude awakening almost.
In some ways I think I imbibed some of that silence and then lost it somewhere along the way. At times like today, I think back to that silence and imagine recapturing it and if I listen carefully enough, I realize it isn't lost at all- just waiting for me to find it...
What does remain in my memory vividly are the trips back home at the end of the weekend. These took place as the sun was setting. In my mind there are a couple of magical moments in any desert.One is that time just before the sun sets completely. Not quite twilight. The sun goes down in one last blazing burst of glorious blood red/orange against a deep blue sky and a dark ochre desert floor and black mountains. A hush settles that can be felt even in the climate-controlled interior of the car gliding along the super-smooth highways.A stillness that seems in strange contrast to the quiet whizzing by of the motorists. I'm quite sure my seven or eight year old self never thought of the antiquity of that land. But my adult self cannot help but wonder at it. The history, the fables, the myths...and mostly the emphatic emptiness...and silence.
And then, the sun disappears completely. In those days large sections of the highway in the interior were yet to be lit up. Imagine then the absolute darkness that enveloped the landscape relieved only by the lights of the cars and other vehicles that intermittently passed by. Brilliant silver dots would start appearing. I'm sure each of those stars had a name and I'm sure now that at some point in the distant past those very stars showed the way to many a traveler. To us they were merely brilliant points of illumination at distances we could scarcely imagine. Then slowly, the unrelieved blackness of the sky would start seeming a deep, deep shade of midnight blue sequined as it were with the silvery stars and sometimes, at the right time of month , a crescent or full moon.
My father, I suspect, always had a romantic streak in him. I remember it was at these times , that he would invariably put on music quite appropriate to the mood. Songs from the film Umrao Jaan were a favourite I remember as were other " ghazals" , for want of a better word. I remember some of them vaguely. Be that as it may, what remains now , in all its vividness in memory are those brilliant landscapes.
Years later when I was working in Oman and I had to commute nearly 40 plus kilometers each way to work, my adult self reveled in those drives . I loved my sunrise/sunset drives and night time drives after a day at the hospital. The highways were better lit. But the desert remained unchanged. I almost always regretted the arrival in the city proper. It was a rude awakening almost.
In some ways I think I imbibed some of that silence and then lost it somewhere along the way. At times like today, I think back to that silence and imagine recapturing it and if I listen carefully enough, I realize it isn't lost at all- just waiting for me to find it...
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