For the longest time ever, I have felt I have no kinship with Earth and it felt like a foreign land. Even in my childhood, I would look up at the stars and know in my heart that my true home was out there and I was the proverbial “million miles from home”. As a young child I did not have many friends and tended to always sit on my own when there were breaks at the school I was going to. It was called the Good Shepherd Convent and was, as you could guess, a school for female students only. My parents were of opposing religions and from countries that did not see eye to eye with each other. He was a Tamilian black Indian Hindu and she was a white Tunisian Muslim. They couldn’t have been further apart and their life together was a story in itself but I might talk about that later.
As a teenager, I still had that yearning feeling to go back home but I was able to mask it better and was sociable enough to make friends although I could count them on one hand. The friends I made, I was very loyal to and shared a deep connection with. Later on, as a young woman in a University in Nabeul this was still the case. At University, I tended to embrace what others called lost causes and one of them consisted of a direct clash with a special group of Muslim brotherhood called “Ekhwan Al Jihad” or the brothers of the Jihad (holy war). These people, whose shortened name was “Khwanjia” for all of us Tunisians resisting their backward rules and oppression, had gained a disproportionate level of power and Bourguiba, the President at that time, did not seem able to easily get rid of the hold they had – something that Ben Ali had been able to do after he orchestrated a coup against Bourguiba several years later.
Meanwhile, one of the higher level recruits of this brotherhood who lived on the same campus, had gotten besotted with me and decided I was to become his wife. He was very surprised at my resistance and later on, he joined those who would stop us from going to the University in our western attire and threw the large and heavy lid of a dustbin at me in one of his hate-fuelled acts against me. We were all wearing just jeans and normal sweatshirts or shirts that were buttoned to the top but they could not bear the sight of us, refusing to cover our heads and wear long dresses or skirts instead of what they perceived as “figure-hugging, male-enticing jeans from hell”.
There were other happenings where this madman tried to hurt me but I evaded most of the time his hateful attacks. I then changed University to go to ENSI in Tunis, a University for IT engineers but decided to leave after two years because the level of power and hate-fuelled acts of the Khwanjia had gotten too much to bear. With my very Hindu name of Geetha which related to the Bhagavat Gita, one of the holiest books in Hinduism, I stood a lot to lose if the Khwanjia were to seek me out and do God knows what to me. My path had always been one of peaceful resistance but that did not stop them from beating us, attempting to tear our hair out of our heads or throwing stones and other large objects at us.
I finally left for Geneva rather than Paris because I felt I could not handle Paris after being in such a small place as Tunis. Geneva was a lovely quiet town which I enjoyed living in a lot even though the immigration rules were quite tough in order to get there. Throughout the time in Tunis as a young woman, it had always been about resistance and avoiding getting into trouble with the Khwanjia so I had not thought much about my ultimate goals but as the quiet of Geneva seeped into me, my previous levels of extraneity took over and I started to feel homesick again, wanting to be out there in the stars.
Life took over while I still stayed firmly entrenched in my dreams of going to sleep and waking up in a planet I could call home again. I went through two marriages and had children from my second marriage whom I loved more than myself to the point of concentrating all my energy on them and almost feeling at home on Earth. Things had gone awry with my first husband because the values we lived by were at odds and he had issues he had never disclosed to me before our marriage. Things went awry with my second marriage as well leaving me in a situation where I was taking care of my children almost single-handedly and our expenses as well as the tax situation were making our financial situation stretched and our relationship as tense as it could ever be.
A break came in the form of a posting I was given in Dubai in 2007, where I was told there were no taxes on income and it seemed like a good idea to go there and at least ease the financial burden on us. Initially, my ex-husband was supposed to come and see if this could change things and he did come to visit in September 2007 but he did not want to lose his position as a Partner in the law firm he was working at so he decided not to join us, after which I decided to file for divorce in the fall of 2008.
In Dubai, I gained more financial freedom initially and was able to start reading again, not having to clean up everything and have to always cook like I was doing during my time with my second husband. I had a cook and a maid taking care of everything that needed to be taken care of. It was lovely to be able to keep my mind occupied with more than just my work and the children’s needs and I started even envisaging to write again. Suddenly things got out of hand in 2010 and I then created a blog to report most of what was happening, share literary produce such as poems and short stories I wrote or share my artwork. What happened from that fated date of August 12, 2010 (note that my birthday is August 12) is mostly laid out in my blog so I will not reiterate what I already wrote. This break in my life, though deeply disturbing and painful, brought out the spiritual side of me again and all that I had been thinking about during my teenage years and as a young woman began to take shape again.
After 2010 I became involved in several charitable endeavours and worked towards trying to make the Earth a better place, one person at a time, changing the sides of myself I felt did not sit well with the person I wanted to be. So many things happened, the culmination of which pushed me to the path of healing which I embraced wholeheartedly starting first with the study of Pranic healing after having experienced healing people with just the healing touch – later on, I became a Reiki Master and worked with Bach flowers remedies. The more I healed people, the more I felt myself being drawn into what I perceived as myself roaming the Earth in sleep, healing others in my dreams. At one point in Dubai, while I was doing a distance healing I felt inclined to create an energy pattern that was all around me. This became a daily work and I was given to know that I was building a Merkabah using Indian mudras.
Several months later, the Merkabah was apparently ready and I experienced in my dreams what I later understood were astral travels. I did not remember much of those travels which I relegated to the dream world so as to keep my drive to work and take care of my children during the daytime. As the years passed by, I started having the conviction that I had to build more points of energy in the Merkabah so that it could work for much longer distances. This was achieved in January 2017 and I experienced a great deal of light entering my body after which my astral travels became clearer. After a few days, around end January, however, I realised that the Merkabah had been ruined and I could not get back to weaving it.
The points of energetic alignment using mudras were no longer leading anywhere as if my mind could not make them properly anymore. My Merkabah had truly been broken beyond repair and I could do nothing about it as my correct weaving of mudras had been damaged. The years 2017 to 2019 dragged on until the passing of my mother in summer of 2019. Somehow, her demise triggered something that made my pattern of mudras able to align correctly to create the Merkabah again. I am still weaving slowly but surely and I know the Merkabah should be fully ready at least by 2026, perhaps for my birthday in that year to be a day of fulfilled hope again. I had fallen but I may just be able to go home and bask in blue again.
It had been difficult to get Manas to surrender to the police in Cameroon. Not only because he would not have volunteered himself but also because she did not feel like turning him in. The time before she had taken him to the police was filled with days of laughing and visiting the forests and nights of lovemaking. One night though, she had realized that her team was closing in on them and she had confessed everything to Manas. More important was the fact that she confessed to him that his case would be better off with the local policeman than with the anti-terrorist team who had been asked to either bring him alive to justice or just shoot him if their mission was starting to be difficult. The morning after she had the realization about her team, they hid in a truck which was then driven towards the police station in Douala, Cameroon. The truck had dropped them off at the police station where she had asked to be dispatched to the US Embassy as a US Citizen with diplomatic status. Manas was immediately taken by the police and put in chains. Before being put in separate rooms he had walked towards her, his eyes shining and a smile on his face and told her that they would soon be together again.
She did not hear from him again for several weeks and she had been demoted and posted in Dubai where her anti-terrorist expertise was not used. She dwelt very little on the terrible things that had happened in the first two weeks before she was relocated. Her boss was seething at her initially for not having brought Manas to the drop off point as agreed when she met him or at least put the explosive and plant the trigger so they could bomb the shack where the marriage was taking place. After some thought, she was not fully let go off but was assigned to the trade commissioner’s team and meant to bridge between the UAE nationals’ companies and the US corporate interests in the UAE. While she was in the UAE, she had been contacted several times by someone who wrote to her at the UAE number that she had got from one of her procurement associates that she worked with, out of the sphere of her official job. The writing seemed extremely similar to the words that Manas would use. She started getting used to the daily communication and wrote as if it were Manas himself indeed writing to her. At one point her correspondent suggested meeting at a café in a mall and she went there but did not meet anyone. Just before she had left the café, however, someone with the stature of Manas but with hair had attempted to get inside the café before looking pointedly towards the right and aborting his attempt. She had then seen stroll through three emiratis in their national outfit. It was obvious, however, to her trained eyes that these were secret service agents. It looked like they just did not want the encounter to happen but disturbed neither her nor the man who had fled the mall.
After that potential brief encounter, the job she was doing was no longer sufficient to take her mind of Manas and was not even remotely connected to what she wanted to do so she had resigned. She was now an adviser on security in the private sector and most of her work was around choosing the right security teams for different types of jobs as well as building secure hideouts or camps for different types of individuals or corporates. Initially recruited by a security company in Dubai, she had slowly branched out of the Gulf and then started her own security company in the UK, advising high net worth individuals and corporates on security. She was based in London and had very few friends but was all the much better for it. Friends were a liability that brought you down in hostage situations and she did not want to have that kind of a weight put on her shoulders. It was then that Manas had reached out to her directly first sending a message to her phone and then contacting her over whatsapp. She had watched with longing as his face filled the screen, smiling like he had done when she had first met him. “Hello my angel”, he said and the tears had welled in her eyes. She knew that it was not him but his terrorist gang who had got to her the first two weeks after he had been turned over to the policeman but his face rekindled those dark memories. At the same time, she could not look at his face without feeling such elation.
3 Daqat - Abu Ft. Yousra
Glory of new-found mystery
The rhythm of the feet now changed
Embracing magic once estranged
Bodies melted in ecstasy;
Like long lost pagan symphony
The moon the clouds in night did chase
Fervent dancers in trembling daze
They locked their arms in restless link
Skies defined them in magic ink
Of lucid embrace transient phase
Reading of the poem:
Lonely – Cosmic Balance
Based on challenge by Ronovan Writes using the word “Chase” in line C of the decima.
In brief, for a Décima, there are 10 lines of poetry that rhyme and there must be 8 syllables per line.
There is a Set Rhyming Pattern we must stick to: ABBAACCDDC or ABBA/ACCDDC.
For more information or to view other contributions, please follow the link hereRonovan Writes Décima Poetry Challenge Prompt No. 53: (CHASE) in the C rhyme line. | ronovanwrites
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