Five days in Mumbai, and my emotional health improves

After just 5 days in Mumbai, I am feeling like a different person altogether! No longer am I worried about how the long days will pass - there is so much to do and so many things to look after that there is barely any time to write in this blog, let alone do all the online stuff that I used to do when I was in Saudi Arabia.

On Sunday evening, my family and I visited a new eating place called The Village - at the World Trade Center in Cuffe Parade. We ate good food, served in a buffet, but we also enjoyed playing Dandiya, dancing inside a horse costume, and observed a couple of young children break the Dahi Handi ... will post photos soon. It was a thoroughly enjoyable evening, I must say.

The very next day, Hannah hurt her left knee in a fall while driving home on the scooter. I took her to the ortho surgeon the next morning, and we were told there was a blood collection in her knee joint, and a possible ligament injury which should be ruled out by doing a MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). Ligaments are fibrous cord-like structures that connect bones to other bones, muscles or other tissues in the body, including skin and deeper structures. 

We went for the MRI the next morning, and the results indicate that the orthopedic surgeon was basically right. Hannah will need to rest for a month before the knee structures return to their previous state! When she spoke to her boss, the latter took it quite good-naturedly ... an attitude I would have found hard to emulate. 

I went for a walk yesterday evening to the Mazgaon Garden. It was something I used to do quite regularly some years ago, but have given up in the past few years even when I am in Mumbai on a vacation. Having said that, I found it enjoyable. Met some friends and renewed contact with them. I was unable to go today, the day I am writing this ... however, I do feel it should be part of a daily routine so as to keep myself fit. Nishrin and Inas do it almost every day.

I went to the passport seva kendra today to start the process of renewing my passport. This is a place located within the Kamala Mills compound on Senapati Bapat Marg ahead of High Street Phoenix. The internal offices are quite spacious, and one has to go through four queues before being issued with a receipt of your successful application. A task that took over 2 hours. After the job was over, I stopped at the nearby "Smash" gaming shamiana, took a look at the different adventure sports like stuff that one can play, then went out to their canteen, where I had a snack and tea. All in all, a nice experience. 

What else? I plan to get myself an international driving license in the coming days; I plan to cook some interesting food for my family; I wish to complete the job hunt for myself and take up a job wherever destiny takes me; I plan to stitch some new clothes for myself; I want to meet my old school friends and GS friends ... if I can; I have other social obligations too. Let us see what things I can, and what I cannot, do. 

Thank you for reading my entry.

Hannah's misaaq

To all those readers who are not able to understand that word in the title, a misaaq is an initiation of a person into the fold of adulthood; it is similar to the "janoi"or the thread ceremony of Brahmins; something similar to this exists in some form or the other in almost all faiths. I am reminded of my own misaaq which was performed when I was but 15 years old. A misaaq is performed by a priest upon a teenager who is ready to take on his/her own responsibilities and duties as a Muslim. Before the misaaq, the person is a child, and his/her caretakers are responsible for him/her and his/her deed (s). Once the person has been misaaq-i-fied,the responsibilities are his/her alone. He/she pays for his/her own sins and earns grace for his/her kind acts before the Almighty.

During the ceremony, which takes about 45-60 minutes, the priest goes over the history of Islam, explaining to the candidate the various events that shaped the religion and the various dates that defined it. He talks about the pillars of Islam, explains the meaning of the "kaleima" (There is but One God and His name is Allah and Mohammed is His Prophet). He goes on to tell about how our own sect of the Shias separated from the Sunnis, how Bohraism came to be, and finally informs the candidate about the Syedna - our Head of Religion. He asks the candidate to swear allegiance upon Islam and its rites and responsibilities, upon the Syedna and asks him/her to perform all the religious duties regularly.In a way, this ceremony is quite rigid, because no one who has undergone the misaaq can remain completely pure and only religious. The World has its own way of intruding into the privacy and purity of one's religious obligations and of twisting morals of an individual completely.

This, in fact, is something that the priest himself must surely be aware of, since they charge a not-so-insignificant sum of almost 4000 INR to do the job.

After the misaaq, my daughter Hannah (now renamed Habibah) went to school and attended it for the half day that remained to be completed. I plan to attach some pictures of the event later.

Time for a month to end ...

Nothing new in that, you might say, and you may well be right. At the same time, anything that ends signals the start of something new; in this case, it would be, naturally, the month of June, named after Junos. The month was a very hot one, indeed. A few highlights of this month include a chain of birthdays in my family ... including those of Hannah, my daughter. The others, whose birthdays also fell in this month, were those of my dad, of my nephew Shabbir, and the arrival of a new member - Shabbir's sister Umme-Salma. She came into this world on the 8th of May, a day after her brother's birthday, a mere 6 days before Hannah and about 12 days before Dad. The slew of birthdays meant lots of cakes to cut/eat/sing songs to; it meant giving away gifts and good wishes to so many; in Umme-Salma's case, it also meant my being appointed as the honorary free Pediatrician at the time of her delivery! In addition to all this birthday running-around, I also had to spend on Inas, what with filling her forms for entry into the professional years in college;finally, towards the end of the month, I had to deposit part-payment fees at a hotel management school, which she will be joining if she does not join medicine.

At the same time, I gave Hannah an i-pod shuffle as her birthday gift along with some books. I also allowed her to participate in a "Be A Rock Star" singing contest organised by the Disney Channel in Mumbai. She passed the first round with flying colours, and when she sang at Nirmal Life Style mall (at Mulund, a distant suburb of Mumbai) on the 25th of May, she did very well indeed. Now, she awaits her call for further rounds.