Turkish Dynamite!

One perfect, balmy night in a small Turkish town, I met Hulya Celek.

Back home, I find myself thinking of her at odd moments. I am glad I met her. Her spirit inspires me. Her confidence uplifts me. Her kindness, warmth, hospitality and above all, her laughter as as she constantly battles the custodians of tradition make her unforgettable.

It was Rubik’s 16th birthday and we were in Selcuk in Turkey. We spent the morning lazing and walking around the town centre, then went to the Pamucak Beach (about 7 kms West of Selcuk) to swim all afternoon in the special Agean blue in Rubik’s honour.

In the evening, after a revitalizing swim in the heated hotel pool, we walked back to the town centre for dinner. On the way, we saw a bakery and bought a birthday cake for Rubik. Cake in hand, we stopped often to admire the colourful shops full of exquisite carpets, kilims, clothes, ceramics and silver displayed in the shop windows. As we crossed a shop, we heard a clear, loud voice calling from behind us,

“So whose birthday is it?”
Rubik turned shyly and made an automatic reply: “mine.”

A diminutive woman with dark hair and expressive eyes walked up to him and gave his hand an enthusiastic shake. “Happy Birthday.” We exchanged polite pleasantries for a while and went our way.

On our last evening in Selcuk, we went shopping. Rubik wanted to visit the shop of the woman who had wished him so warmly on his birthday, and so we went. The children went into the shop to browse for gifts for their friends while we stood outside on the sidewalk. We could see the lady talk to them animatedly and we heard shouts of intermittent laughter wafting out of the shop. After what seemed to be a long time, I went in to get my children out and found that they had really bonded with the tiny Turkish woman.

They must have spent close to an hour in that shop and Hulya had only about 4 YTL in sales to show for it. But selling didn’t seem to be her primary goal. She was just enjoying the children. “Allah hasn’t given me any of my own, so you must let me enjoy yours for a little bit” she said.

Hulya and I hit it off immediately. While we were inside the shop chatting, her husband was talking to my husband on the sidewalk. As she gave the children their change, Hulya suddenly asked me if I would join her for a cup of chai. I said yes and we found ourselves sitting with our spouses on a table and 4 chairs on the sidewalk, poring over Turkey maps and chatting about Sufism and life in Turkey over many, many cups of apple tea.

Hulya talked to us about her difficulties as a woman entrepreneur in a society where owning and running a retail business was still very much a male bastion. She was constantly bad-mouthed by her neighbours and small, niggling troubles kept being sent her way by other shop-keepers and the keepers of tradition around her.

She talked about the gender prejudices just under the skin of “modern” Turkey. She was candidly scathing about the “new” Turkish women of the big cities (“I know it is so wrong of me but forgive me, Allah, for talking badly of other people!”) and the contempt most men still held for women like her who wanted to live and work like men (“because you see, our hair is long so our brains are much smaller”). The contempt, she said, extended unfortunately to her husband, who was seen as less than a man because he chose to play a supporting role in what was essentially her business.

We were joined somewhere along the evening by Margaret, an Irish woman who was on an extended trip to Turkey and the conversation turned to the seamier side of the tourist boom, which was luring little girls and boys to all the wrong things (“easy money, gambling, little dresses, pubs, discos, drugs--they don’t want to work anymore!”); the thriving “granny tourism” in the Ephesus-Kusadasi area (where older western women were “entertained” by young Turkish men in exchange for gifts and good times) and the general failure of the system vis-à-vis the common citizen.

As we talked about her life, her world, our world and the world in general, cups of apple tea kept materializing and when we reluctantly got up to go back to the hotel, we realized that it was almost 1am!

We walked back to the hotel hand in hand, thinking of the children, hoping they were fast asleep. When we sent them back to the hotel from Hulya’s shop, it was only about 7.30 pm and we had told them we’d join them in half an hour or so.

Rubik was waiting for us in the lobby pacing anxiously and looking like an irate dad.

“Don’t you guys have any sense of responsibility? Is this your half an hour? I was just about to go looking for you!”

We slinked quietly, guiltily, to our room.

Sania Mirza's Mehndi and My Memories

It must’ve been the sight of Sania Mirza’s extreme mehndi that did it: I really have no better explanation for the sudden onset of my recent henna / hina / camphire / mehndi-centred thoughts.

Maybe it’s the early swelter of summer heat this year. I swear I can smell the mehndi plant in our garden. The hotter it became, the more the plant disbursed its distinctive fragrance into the dry, furnace-blasting air.

I’ve been beset with visions of my Biji returning from her daily barefoot journey to the Gariahat Market in the summer months. Biji had given up footwear and colour in her Satyagraha days and insisted on wearing plain white “dhotis” and loose white blouses for the rest of her happily married life. Her tiny, milk-white, tender feet were blister-red by the time she came home from the bazaar and as she came home, her feet were soaked in cold rose-water solution.

In the summer months, this did little to relieve her and I remember Lakkhi making a thick mehndi paste out of fresh leaves from our garden and applying it to the undersides of Biji’s feet. Biji would finally relax and lie back, her feet on a low stool, soothed by the mehndi’s “coolth” seeping into her burning soles.

I think of mehndi in a different context and without too much effort I can feel the raw excitement of my pre-pubescent heart beating to the visceral rhythms of the dholki as we danced during my masi’s mehndi ceremony.

Rummaging through my memory-banks now and I do definitely know that the Lawsonia Enermis plays a significant role in the cosmetic as well as health rituals of several cultures ranging from the Ancient Eqyptians to the Persians to the Southern Chinese between 7000 and 2000 BC. Many religions and regions use a paste made from the leaves and branches of this plant (first dried, then made into a powder, then mixed with water) as a natural dye in their rituals and ceremonies. Hindu, Muslim and Sikh marriages and other celebrations are incomplete without it.

I’ve been reading articles that talk about mehndi’s spiritual properties (many tribal and traditional societies imbue naturally occurring “red” substances such as blood, ochre and henna with properties such as energy-generating, empowerment, protection, love etc.) Some societies think henna patterns help ward off the evil eye and grant protection from malevolent djinns. In some places, mehndi / hina is used for its celebratory cosmetic properties in intricate patterns on different areas of the body, especially the palms and the feet. The unmistakable fragrance, the colour of the natural dye, the cooling effect of the paste also has its allure, I’m sure. Added to these must be the medicinal benefits of the paste when applied to skin or hair. It conditions and cleans and cools the scalp and the palms and the soles and thus soothes and calms the mind.

Ultimately, though, I think that the mehndi stands for all that is feminine (read: all those characteristics desired from the feminine in any patriarchal society.) It is one more way of emphasizing the time-worn feminine ideals:

Beauty, Grace and Gentility are embodied in the curves of the inter-linked vine like patterns of leaves and petals moistly climbing the palm and the inside of the forearm

Energy, as in the colour of the rising and setting sun: this red energy is vested in the very nature of the essential feminine. The shakti of Parvati to lure and rouse Shiva from his meditation; the blood-cycle that makes birth possible, the life-force that is necessary for fertility are all manifested in the colour-patterns of the henna.

Patience and Nurturing are evident in the intricate patterns as fundamental requirements from both the pattern-maker and the pattern-wearer. The slightest carelessness and lack of concentration on either’s part will lead to destruction. The pattern maker must keep her hand steady and her interest stable for the entirety of the time it takes to complete her task. The pattern-wearer must be able to keep her patience through the extra hours necessary to nurture the finished design with oil and sugar and lemon and keep it dampened for as long as possible if the dye is to deepen to the desired colour.

From Africa to India, across religions and regions, through centuries of use, the essential significance of mehndi / henna / hina –whatever spiritual names and characteristics we may choose to give it—is another one of those male constructs designed specifically to tell the female what she should (and therefore should not) be.

As I grow older, the feminist in me recognizes and respects the feminine in me, male construct or not. I like mehndi. I just don’t have the patience to keep it on for the required length of time.

Us Versus Them. And We All Fall Down

Us versus them--that is the essence of the civilized, industrialized, fractured world.

It is the absolute antithesis of the pantheistic nature of spirituality and the spiritual aspiration. The pantheistic sees everything natural as “us,” indistinguishable from “us” and therefore an integral part of the Universal whole and the param-atman--The Supreme Atman—the Source, the Primordial Energy from whence we came and will, ultimately, merge into.

Sustainable development is only possible when we realise the inter-dependence of every atom that participates in the expanding and contracting of the Universes.

Sustainable development comes from the spirituality of the recognition of the one-ness of the Universe; of the knowledge that the same string ties the entirety of creation together and that a tug here is bound to create a pull someplace else.

This knowledge is instinctive in animals and seemed to be visceral in all ancient and tribal societies. This knowledge was elaborately articulated by our ancestors and became part of our organised religion and of our traditional spiritual learning process.

The blame game of who destroyed the world and who is destroying nature’s pristine quality needs to be replaced by a loving concern for the biodiversity of the ecosystems.

We need to ask ourselves if we should be able to denude the world of its natural foliage. Can we strip it of all its natural resources just to ensure higher levels of self-gratification?

Can we bereave the world all the flora and fauna assuming that the world was created just to make humankind happy?

Did the problem originate with organized religions which assume that the Homo sapien is God’s preferred creature and that the world’s resources were all created for the pleasure and development of this favoured animal made by God “in his own image.”

Believing this, we destroy the natural habitat of other creatures as if their existence is only situational. God’s “lesser” creatures are lost and exploited and driven to extinction.

The same intolerance grows within the species as it were, and we begin discriminating against the poorer ones, the darker ones, the shorter ones, the ones with names unlike ours, the ones with facial features that look different…

The class divide, caste divide, religious divide, racial divide, political divide, international divide between the East and the West, the North and the South are all manifestations of a complex that the privileged are happy and they have everything to lose in allowing the less privileged to share their happiness or wealth.

Us versus Them is the mantra of success. Us versus Them is how we claw to the top of the food chain. Only, we're not satisfied just getting to the top. We must have it all. All of it. Every bit.

So much for Sustainable Development.
And we all fall down.

Religion and Spirituality

I've been getting questions on religion and spirituality or religion vs. spirituality. Or the relationship between religion and spirituality.

Let me, from the very outset, say that I don't really subscribe to oppositions. I don't really believe things must be paired either. And I certainly don't think things must be associated with each other.

In my considered opinion, therefore, religion and spirituality are not mutually exclusive. They are not opposed to each other. They cannot be paired together and they may or may not be associated. One may be caught in the process of becoming the other or it may not be.

I make no pronouncements and would not like to either credit or discredit anybody's personal beliefs and experiences. I think what I do and I feel what I do and would encourage you to do the same.

Talking about myself, I do see a distinction in my mind between “organized religion” and “spirituality.” A religion teaches a creed, inculcates a dogma and propagates certain fixed ideas about God. It is a human institution and thus, like all human institutions, it must fail at times.

Religions are born of other individuals’ experiences with that god-head and their individual experiments; their own discovery of the mystic bond.

Religions are born of those individuals’ desires to share their adhyatma-vidya (the mystic knowledge) with others and make others’ journeys easier by manipulating the economic and socio-political environments and provide the character-strength necessary to recognize and answer to the “long cable tow of God.”

Therefore, religions are the expressions of the spiritual man’s organized aspirations; his desire to look beyond his own individual self and into the commonality of the human condition; and his need to propagate the recognition of the “long cable tow of God” from “heart to heart” in his community of human beings.


Spirituality, as far as I'm concerned, is the individual realization of what has been called the "mystic bond;" the visceral, umbilical tug of whatever it is in the wild that calls to all the wild things; the individual process of aparallel evolution, of "becoming other," whatever the religious path followed—or not followed.

Deep in us is something that understands what brains cannot think; something which knows what our minds cannot comprehend. This is the "mystic bond" that, according to St. Augustine, “I know until you ask me—when you ask me, I do not know”