We stopped at a roadside Inn

halfway between Medina and Mecca

and drank too sweet tea out of teeny glass mugs

with Mcvitie’s biscuits, printed in Arabic

- plus the DDT-resistant flies -

while old men sat on high benches

cross-knee’d at their bubble pipes.

 

The lava, hundreds of miles of it

stretches to the horizons, oozed thickly

over the worn red rocks, like tar - a vomit of wrath.

For hours on end we pass primordial vistas of black boulder and harras

- of volcanic spouts and collapsed crater-cones

like cakes, like hats, splattered ungeometrically

alongside the gracefully improbable tarmac lines

of the space-aged motor-way

where petrol pumps queue lavishly

in the land where water costs more

- and the faceless women are human after all!

 

Our huge car swoops along

- impeccable white lines, cat’s eyes, culverts, road signs, the lot -

and I doze off, maddeningly mesmerized

by the lurch and whir of engine

and the radio’s blaring chant.

The people drive with long-faced care and circumspection here:

no racing or risky rushing along the perfect, law-abiding roads.

I, a supposedly liberated alien deduce that this has nothing to do

with there being no dangerous women drivers about!

 

A truck trundles up

with children, a veiled woman and snotty goats

piled in the back.

Where on earth can they come from?

Out of no-where - in this barren wilderness?

The gullies are bone dry and lifeless;

the hills encrusted with razor-rippled lava

and totally impassable.

 

In all the distance to this Inn, I only saw signs of life thrice:

(not counting a maintenance gang of Pakistani humans

with shiny machines, putting finishing touches

to the highways sleek flank).

1  - a  few goats precariously balanced, tip-toed on the lava

2 - a  scruffy camel under an unlikely thorn tree

3 - a solitary donkey, standing by a Wadi

- out there, in the middle of nothing, by the flyover

…water!..H2O! - just plonked  there, nonchalantly free

on the interface of earth and sky.

 When I was getting to believe that that stuff

only came out of bottles!

 

Further on, towards the oasis

the lava congeals into ragged cliffs

and sparcely Acacia’d plains appear

with the odd splotch of green, twirl of smoke, aerial, dust-track, wind-break

- a wild west scenario indeed.

But there should be cavalcades of lovely Arabian horse

bolting across those wide vales and slopes;

or wild ass, cheetah, mountain goat

poised in the craggy, sculpted hills.

I wouldn’t mind living here

- other things considering -

munching luscious Australian peaches.

Black gold can buy anything from  anywhere, it seems.

Long as it flows.

 

At home, we are poor, no peaches or petrol for sure!

And are bound to the runaway third world steed (called Inflation..)

but we are rich in good humour and warm heartedness;

the inexhaustible assets of patience and tolerance

(the Achiles heel too)

where the kindly people laugh and say, perennial-y

 Marleshe!

 

 

 

 

Jan 1985