Fresh

Ahmed walked the streets on his way back. The wind was fresh. The skies were cloudy. The rain from yesterday had cleaned up the atmosphere. His fingers tingled with the cool fresh air. It was nice walking up these hills. It was good for the health. He had studied in some of the big cities in the world. And they had no hills. No places to walk. They were too busy to live. Too busy to breathe. It was self induced busy-ness. They didn’t need to be. Yet they were.

He looked all around. Trees growing everywhere. Not yet cut down. They would be. When the first people, civilized as they would think of themselves, implying that the others were not. When the first people other than the locals came in. They would try to impose their will. They would try to cut down the trees. To make this world in their image. It was splattered all across the history books. In lieu of the blood shed across the ages for this responsibility, the invaders chose to burden themselves with. To tame the ‘savages’. There was a certain hypocrisy in their thoughts. On the one hand, they still wanted to ‘civilize’. On the other, they realized that all their technology and modernity was suffocating the earth. He looked around. The trees gently swaying in the breeze. The pebbles underneath his feet, a massage of sorts. The sounds of birds chirping as they flapped their wings from one place to another. He hoped this place were never tamed. He did not want it to turn into places like the ones he had visited on his brief sojourn to the outside.

His son had just started school. He was good at math and bad at religious studies. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. On the one hand, Ahmed wanted his boy to be a professor or a mathematician at a big company. On the other, he realized the importance of religion in one's life. He would slowly nudge his child towards religion, and praise him for his math skills. They would see. It was in the hands of Allah. He wondered why they said that. Allah didn’t have hands. Or at least, they didn’t know. Assuming hands on the Almighty would be assuming you knew what he was like. And that was blasphemy according to them, wasn’t it? They would say it was an expression of speech. But that would be an excuse. The more they said in the hands of Allah or used ‘expressions of speech’ that assumed identity, the more they would begin to believe it psychologically. And would that not be tantamount to blasphemy in their eyes? He shook his head, in an attempt to shake away the thoughts. He glanced bright eyed, curiosity overflowing at the world around him. That was what he needed to inculcate in his son. Curiosity and thoughtfulness. For the world around him. The people around him. To be a good human being.