Hammam... Human dirt, Wars

It was a hundred year old Hammam building, in the middle of a nowhere town in eastern turkey. Dirty, rusted, tiled up with old bricks, and like all Hammams had that distinguished smell of decades of dirt coming out of thousands of souls, scrubbed, massaged and cleaned to purity every day.
As per the owner of the hammam, business used to be good in old days but now people seldom come. But today was Baiyram Night (Muslim Eid festival) and alot of people , mostly living in big cities were here to re-cherish their roots and identity. The town itself is called  'Kangal' and as the name suggests have nothing much to brag about. So I came to clean my human dirt  in this rustic place , a foreigner, naked among many friendly Turks in the same Hammam.

Laying on the hot Hammam marble and waiting for the turk cleaner to come, for some reason I was thinking of Syria and Ukraine and Gaza.  Though calm and relaxingly sweating in this ancient building in this nowhere town, I could imagine fighting was happening all around me.

Some 300km down south is the city of Allepo near Syrian turkish border. No one knew this city until a year back, and now noone wants to go there . A mess, made out of inflated egos of monarchs and super powers and tribal affiliations and now  religious topping on top like a rotten cherry on a gone-wrong cake, which nobody wants to eat or own it anymore. A while back I was served tea by a Syrian child of age 10-12 who is forced to find work here, when all he cares about is football and games and petty jokes, and all there is left is that innocent smile of a 10 year old.

Further south few hundred kilometers, is the eternal war going on. As usual both sides blaming each-other and the world powers sending measured responses , measured enough to say they care and they don't care..... Children of god dying.....

And north, just accross the black sea. a proxy cold war has started again...  the MH17 travelers who were watching movies and eating boxed lunches in the comfort of their cozy airplane seats were reduced to ashes , all their desires and ideas of living gone, in an instant. The missile, god knows coming from east or west or may be from the sky this time....

At the Hammam, the turk cleaner man finally asked me to lay down on the floor and with all Turkish hospitality smashed and rubbed and cleaned all the dirt out of me like a dirty rag (all with good and honest intentions) and all I could do was just to swear at him and laugh at my own situation and hoping of no broken bone in this adventure. 

Long after, sitting at the town's Khavenesi(Tea shop) I was thinking, if from unknown a giant cleaner man can come and scrubs and clean us all from head to toe in pure Turkish style, so we all start seeing each other purely as humans again and not as Zionists or Palestinians or liberals or conservatives or western or oriental (and the list goes on). But is this dirt only skin-deep, which can still be scrubbed and cleaned? and has not gone down in our hearts and souls? and has not made its own hate colonies all inside us, to the level that we cannot call ourselves as humans anymore. I would like to believe in the former even if it is not true.... All than is needed is a just good Turkish cleaner...



And just heard now the news of few children and woman killed in my country by angry mob (the so called Namaloom afraad, which we all know) over some Facebook religious status update.... Certainly Strange times and no good humanly news coming from anywhere.

Anyways my rumbling will go on forever. Baiyram and Eid mubarak to all of you from this nowhere town.

Konya Flashbacks....

"But is it really possible to find beauty in the most imperfect of things" asked the novice Sufi to his Sufi Master. 

The Master smiled. In that smile, were images of years and years of memories, of joyful and sad experiences, of lost and re-found love, of hopeful desires and fearful reasons. The Master remembered his own time years back when he was young and asked the grandmaster a similar question on how to find true happiness when all things are so imperfect. He remembered his own disillusions and then the moments of epiphany where he finally realized, it’s not about finding happiness in life but creating it and often with most imperfect of things around. The Master wondered how long and far this new student of his, will travel and how easy or difficult his journey would be to understand and reach this simple conclusion. 

The day was long for me. The long bus ride to Konya from eastern part of turkey was tiring, but the mere thought of walking on the streets where Rumi once walked and talked and smiled and dreamed and got awakened by shams, was worth all that visit to this small city again. There was something thing holy in that city, it always brought an unusual calm to my heart beats.

Dumping my bags in a small cheap Pansyion (turkish hotel) , and coming back to the reception I found her, going through the translated poems of Rumi by Coleman Barks. Japanese, with rough hairs and dirt all over the clothes, but there was this undeniable shine in her eyes (the ones you find in the main characters of Murakami books). Usual formalities, introductions, trust building , taking our guards off, and there we were, sitting like old friends in the Chai Baghche (tea garden) of Konya discussing Sufism and how it relates to the Japanese concept of Wabi-Sabi (wikipedia link)
A bit away from us, were a group of people listening to an old man. I heard the words, beauty, and imperfections and life and was intrigued to hear more....


The Master, instead of answering, asked the young boy to do the same, what his grandmaster asked him to do years ago, asking to find and bring the most beautiful shoe from the shoemaker’s shop. All these years were passing by the master’s mind in those moments like a silent black and white old movie. He thought  if knowledge and enlightenment is also circular and karmic in nature and all that stories about evolution and technology and human progress is just an illusion, and if we humans are just reliving similar lives again and again, just with different colors. The old man continued with the story (We keep the story of the shoe and the shoemaker for a later time).

My thoughts were disrupted again… I found myself listening to the Japanese girl on phone talking to her mother in a strange language. I tried for sometime unsuccessfully, to decipher the emotions beneath these alien words… the stars were all over the sky... the Ramadan moon was about to disappear and  the ghosts of Konya’s past started to appear slowly to start the ‘Sema’ (sufi whirling ceremony). Ordering another chai for us both, I, after a very long time, smiled and kept smiling, for no apparent reason…