The World Shrinks in a Sitting Room in Fes

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The world is vast and unexplored, but it is also small. And no matter how many times I’ve heard the phrase repeated and overused, I still always shake my head in amazement when life proves to me that it truly is a small world.

Like the time I was walking across a bridge into the ruins of Angkor Wat with my mom and I saw the girl who was once my best friend from camp. I hadn’t seen her in over five years and there she was, walking across the same bridge in Cambodia with her family, the other only Western tourists we would see that day in what was still a relatively quiet tourist destination.

Or the night last week when MC and my mom and I sat down at a restaurant in Casablanca next to a table of young English-speaking girls (rare in a country where most tourists are French, Spanish or German). We struck up a conversation and when we found out that one of the girls was from California we asked where. She rolled her eyes as if to say “people ask me this all the time and the answer means nothing to them” or “no, I’m not from San Francisco or LA.” Instead she said “Sacramento.” We discovered that her farther worked with my mother, and mom made the world a bit smaller by getting out her blackberry and emailing Jaquelyn’s father to report that his daughter—who was taking a year after college to teach English in France—was doing well on holiday in Morocco. A week later we ran into Jaquelyn and her Scottish friends (also teaching English in France) in the souks of Marrakech. “Ah,” we all said, shaking our heads and laughing. “It’s a small world, isn’t it.”

Or tonight, when french fries and hometowns acted as catalysts to a global reunion of sorts, testifying to the ever-shrinking nature of the world we live in.

Anna, the British-born American woman who is engaged to Mohammed (they met at the restaurant here in Fez where he used to work and are in the process of getting him an American visa and green card), was at McDonald’s with Mohammed, Mohammed’s uncle Khalid who lives in Germany, Khalid’s wife, and the gaggle of American and German children that belong to these various parents.

A woman walks up to Anna, who is wearing a bright pink djellabah. The woman is from Pakistan but lives in England; she is on holiday in Morocco with her husband (who works in Switzerland) and wants to know where she can buy a djellabah while she is here. Anna and the woman start talking and discover that the woman lives in Manchester, which is where Anna was born and raised.

The conversation continues and the Pakistani couple is invited back to the house for tea. Siham comes up and knocks on our door to tell MC and I that it is time for dinner. We come downstairs, where Tahara is wearing a full head scarf and everyone is seated in the formal sitting room—two signs that we have company. At first we both assume that they are part of the endless flow of unnamable family that passes through the house—sometimes just to stay for tea, sometimes to stay for a few weeks. The conversation is very comfortable and informal, but soon Amina explains to us that they are near strangers whom they met in a McDonald’s.

The international seating arrangement goes something like this:
Anna is sitting next to the Pakistani-English woman, and they are speaking in English about how they would both like to learn more Arabic (inshallah). Amina, who is sitting on the other side of the Pakistani-English woman, occasionally chimes in in a combination of Arabic and English. She is tri-lingual, having been born into a Moroccan family in Germany and having somehow also managed to pick up English. Next to Amina is MC, who is in Morocco learning classical Arabic (not Moroccan Arabic, which is what most of the family speaks). On top of and under and climbing all over MC are Tazire and Elias. Tazire, Amina and Khalid’s oldest daughter speaks German and Moroccan Arabic, but has also picked up some English words in the month that she has spent in this multi-lingual household. Elias, almost two years old, doesn’t speak much of anything. His three most-used words are “hot” (not always used to describe things that are hot), “khoot” (which means “fish” in Moroccan Arabic but which Elias uses at random, mostly when there is no fish to speak of), and “didi” (a word that Elias can claim from his own language and the name that he has given to his pacifier).

I am sitting next to MC and Tahara is on my left. We are usually the quiet ones in the house, since my only relevant language skills are English, minimal French, and enough Moroccan Arabic to say “just a little,” “enough,” “thank you” and “goodnight.” Tahara speaks Berber, Moroccan Arabic, and enough French to ask us whether or not we’ve eaten. So for the most part we just smile at each other a lot and communicate through the various classical Arabic, Moroccan Arabic, French and English translators of the household.

The Pakistani-Swiss husband is sitting next to Khalid (they are both engineers and had been discussing the overlap in their jobs in English) and both are surprised when I throw Hindi-Urdu into our lingual cacophony. Soon the conversations around the table come to a stop as people turn in amusement to see me speaking another language. The Pakistani-English wife chimes in, proclaiming her excitement to have someone to speak Urdu with. “Khan se Hindi sikh li?” I explain that I learned Hindi while I lived in the state of UP, which it turns out is where her family had lived before partition.

After partition her family moved to Pakistan, where she was born. Then she moved to England, many years later leaving for a holiday with her husband in Morocco, where in an American fast-food restaurant in the traditional city of Fez she met a British-American woman who was engaged to a Moroccan man. And in the spirit of Moroccan hospitality she was brought back to a home where she was ushered through a courtyard to a formal sitting room, where a Berber woman served her sweets and she met two American sisters (with vagabonding tendencies of their own). They drank tea and discussed the merits of qawali music while American and German children crawled under the table, sailed in ships made of stools, threw cookies and proved themselves commonly entertaining to people of various generations, nationalities, and languages.




P.S. We have gone to Spain for ten days. It might be quiet on the blog front...

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