It happened sometime back. I was walking in the Piazza area with nothing particular in mind when I came across a lady I know arguing with a street vendor. What is the big deal about a lady arguing with a street vendor! Isn’t that something happening in scores of places at any given time! I’ll tell you what the big deal is.
She was that traditional Ethiopian lady in her early seventies. A lady for whom life hasn’t been nice, and one who has lived almost all her life on the breadline. She wasn’t buying a kilo of sugar or a bar of soap. She was buying roses, it was Valentine’s Day. Aha! Now I’m talking! Balancing my emotions between a hearty smile and a confused frown I greeted her and just kept walking.
I mean, she couldn’t have known what really Valentine’s Day was all about! This was the sort of lady who would think just travel a few hundred kilometers from Addis and you would be knocking on the doors of, what w else, in America! But surely she probably meant the roses someone . After all, everyone was buying roses and she just couldn’t let herself be cast aside. She definitely didn’t know some saint’s name was attached to the celebrations. If someone had mentioned the name Saint Valentine to her, the overwhelming instinct would have been to rush for her prayer book. A saint with a name starting with, of all letters in the world, ‘V’! It would be blasphemous of her even to let the name pass through her audio genes. Decades of praying to the right saints would have gone down the drain! A Saint Valentine! She might even have thought Saint Valentine was the guy in whose honor all of us are chased off the streets and the police sirens fill the vas vacuum.
But for her it wasn’t about the good old saint. It wasn’t about remembering some divine figure for God knows whatever. She probably wanted to impress somehow, make some relative or neighbor happy. Or since every lady in her idir seems to be buying roses she just wanted to be part the crowd. Everybody in the village was buying roses and she isn’t going to be cast out on the wayside. She was not going to be left out in the middle of nowhere, not at her age! After all, isn’t it ‘Love Day!’ (Did I get that right?) Or, is it ‘Lover’s day?’
Still, I couldn’t help wondering what could have been going on in her mind as she bought the roses. It wouldn’t be something like, “St Valentine, you see how I love you? I don’t have money enough for my afternoon coffee and I’m buying roses to honor your Day!” I couldn’t have asked “Why are you buying the roses?” Rude, wouldn’t have explained such an inconsiderate action on my part.
Incidentally, St Valentine seems to be adamant not to let us forget his memories, even though most of us around here don’t have any idea who exactly he is or why he deserves an entire day of our lives. Valentine’s Day celebrations are becoming more interesting by the year not because everybody falls in love with the color red but because everybody, well, simply falls! We’re lucky they haven’t yet invented mattresses which could talk! (What an insane idea!) With the technological advances of our times I wouldn’t be surprised if one day I come across some mattress which shouts “Hey you dummies. Couldn’t you just wind down a little! Go prove your muscles and endurance with the Maywether fellow! I’m not made of steel!”
Last Valentine’s Day all the beds in Addis were reserved days before and people traveling on business from the regions had really hard time getting rooms. (Just for the record, the travelers were hunting for ‘rooms’ while Valentine Day revelers were hunting for ‘beds.’ Case closed.) It looked like there was some emergency; you know, something like the world was going to end the next day and somehow everyone thought there wasn’t a better way of saying Goodbye to mother earth. Aha! It seemed that suddenly everyone discovers they have some natural weapons which if abused could have turned into Weapons of Mass Destruction! I wonder if St, Valentine would have said, “Not in my name! Why do you have to do it on this day! Couldn’t you have done it on, say, Thanksgiving day?” There you are! Ethiopians who haven’t travelled further that the vicinity if the US embassy in northern Addis celebrate, hold your breath, Thanksgiving Day. Thanksgiving what! It is like “If we can’t go to Las Vegas, we’d bring Las Vegas here!”
Usually, the young are put on the chopping block for stealing the unique traditional vibe from our holidays. “Look what they are doing to our age old way of celebrating holidays!” Well, after all this is a city that went wild when former President Barak Obama won his first term! Our enthusiasm would have put any American city to shame! Don’t ask me if Obama acknowledged it or delivered whatever people sought he would deliver!
Ok! We are a day away from the Ethiopian New Year. (HAPPY NEW YEAR everyone!) There is going to be a lot of drinking and dancing. Take it from me and saying “Goodbye” to the outgoing year wouldn’t moist anybody’s eyes. It wouldn’t interfere with anyone’s heartbeats. It has been a year where the sense of gloom and doom put so much pressure on us uplifting news and experiences proved to be distant dreams. In fact, the sooner it just melts away the better it would be. Not that anything would change Monday morning; but, at least, a new calendar on the wall brings back a few of the hopes we have so unceremoniously been denied by a thousand and one problems- a thousand of which are manmade.
Look, it would have been a wonderful New Year gift if feuding sides simply buried the hatchet and started talking sense. We’re not short of feuds, justified or not. Maybe we could have used something like ‘Forgiveness Day.’ What an idea it would have been! I’m not speaking about forgiveness for the sake of the TV cameras. I mean real FORGIVENESS. More than any time in history, we’re in times when the forgive-and-forget thing makes sense. So, it’s “Get lost!” to the outgoing year and “Welcome!” to the incoming one. Let the stars of ‘hope’ shine on us! Ha! That’s the ‘preacher’ in me, which even I didn’t know existed!
Happy New Year!
