Mangoes and Pomegranates on the Market!

Simple Ramadan traditions in the "A: household is what i miss the most.  when i was a kid i always made the lemonade, or did most times, and somehow that task got switched over to my brother, who despite fasting, mastered a perfectly balanced sugar and lemon portion in jar of cold iced water as my mom would be frying last minute iftaar food (piyaju, aluri, beguni, a bit of bangali food sampler for you).  the last ten minutes before the evening prayer call to break the day long fast was always the most climactic.  either your hunger suffering self was watching each second pass by as if it was an eternity sucked into sixty seconds or you were running around like a headless chicken trying to set the table in time.  But no matter what, when it was time, and because we live in America we didnt hear the prayer call, we just itnently looked at our watches for the time to tick to the right second, everyone HAD to be sitting down a the dining table.  You broke fast by holding a juicy date in one hand, saying a little prayer before breaking your fast with sweetness in your mouth, ate the date and had a cool refreshing taste of lemonade.

"A" household sharbat (lemonde) has been replaced in Ramallah by Tamar Hindi.  This is a delicious delicious drink that I can’t get enough of.  Tamar I realized after playing around with the word in my mind,  is the Arabic word for Tamarind, which is this : 

        

which in Bangladesh you eat as a mouth puckering sour chutney, sometimes sprinkled with salt if its eaten raw.  Samosa chutney is also often made with Tamarind.  What we South Asians never did with Tamarind is make a sweet juice out of it flavored with rose water.  And that’s what Tamar Hindi is, here in the Arab world.  And during Ramadan  you see clear plastic bottles filled with Tamar Hindi in every shop almost.  My roommate and I dilute it with water when we drink it because of how concentrated it is.  If you rinse your mouth out after you drink this, the rinse out mouth water is brownish red.  Either this stuff is really really natural or really really not.  My bet is on the former, and if it’s the latter I don’t want to know. 

Last week my roommate and I went grocery shopping. Man did I miss these small vegetable shops.  And lo and behold i saw something that made my heart leap and sommersault and grin with joy : POMEGRANATES!  they’re back! and right next to them were mangoes.  which of course has a special special place in my heart.  Looking at the mangoes I thought about a specific moment last year in Lucknow, India when a friend and I were going home on a rickshaw and saw a long strip of the street that stretched at least a mile or so cluttered with mango booths and vendors selling every size shape and kind of mango.  

The heat wave in Ramallah hit about 112 degrees Fahrenheit.  No humidity.  Just dry blazing skin scorching heat.  My lazy weeks in Ramallah so far, of waking up at 3 am for suhoor, having a disrupted sleep pattern on an already screwed up sleep schedule, results in oversleeping and starting the day absurdly late, sweating and wondering how the rest of the world is fasting as well in this heat.  Not gonna lie, took some days off of fasting, especially when I was realizing that I was getting severely dehydrated at times.  One specific morning, the power had gone out, so the clicks and clatter of the fan in my room stopped, leaving me in the house with pressed simmering heat.  Georgette our landlord, along with the rest of the Middle east, is unpleasantly surprised at this heat wave that is suddenly hitting this region completely unprecedented.  These past several weeks, I’ve become even more fond of Georgette.  If I live to be 82, I want to be like her.  Her mannerisms are something that I wish I could capture and keep secured somewhere.  Every night or afternoon when I come back to my apartment, I hear an obnoxiously loud television booming out of her window, some game show or some soap opera.  Late at night (not that late, maybe 9ish) when my roommate and I go to visit her sometimes, she complains about how stupid the tv shows are and how she doesnt even like them, and she gladly turns it off and chats with us.  She never fails to ask me if I’m fasting, and the couple of days when I wasn’t she replied back with “what kind of Muslim are you??” “uhhh...gotta go Gerogette!” is how I’d seek refuge from that awkward conversation.   One evening we had rung her doorbell to ask if she needed anything.  She opened her giant doors, greeted us with her 4 feet something hunched over self and asked for bananas (slightly green) and a 10 pack case of bottled water.  The next day when we lugged the water back to her doorstep, the first thing she asked us was to read the label on the water.  My roommate and I were confused and we looked at each other and then fumbled to read the label and where the water came from.  She told us she couldn’t accept the water becuase it was Israeli water and she only drank Jordanian water. That’s Georgette for you. lol no filtered screen of hiding any of her thoughts or emotions or raw feelings.  Thank God she liked the bananas.

The close family time, and praying together is also something I miss about the "A" household.  That has been replaced in Ramallah with hearing the neighbors eating their meals outside, sometimes just them, a family of about five or six or their large..large large extended family.  They turn on their Ramadan lights which are draped over the fence that separates our house from theirs, and they sit outside, and the sounds of the evening, sometimes just a harmony of family members talking or a cacophonous sort of shouting, or sometimes a man in the distance singing whose voice sounds like a peaceful Oud, as my roommate and I fix ourselves a relaxing session of argileh, has taken a special place in my heart.

Enjoying cutting open another pomegranate after months and months and thinking about how comforting this was when I had initially gotten here, makes me realize why I’ve been weaving in and out of a tug of war sort of emotional rollercoaster.  I’m back in Palestine after a summer of not being here, and I realize that this is like coming back to Palestine for the second time, it’s a ‘coming back’.  Coming back with fresh eyes perhaps.  Coming back and realizing that my time here will conclude, that I had actually gotten accustomed to thinking of this place as my residence.  When you think of a place as your residence, you don’t think about how long you stayed, every day becomes normal.  If you go vacationing, you remember going in that it’s only a summer long thing or a seasonal outing.  I realize that perhaps I need to redefine my goals and  embrace each day knowing that I will one day look back craving to have what is now my present.