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Jihad Unspun's Literature Awards -- First Prize
A story titled Madrassa-e-Yusufiye, by Biju Abdul QadirHe re-read the paragraphs that he had scribbled down one last time. Arabic had never been his particular strength. At least, not in the way that English was. Sadly, to Max's thinking, this was despite the fact that he had just missed being born in a nation that had Arabic as its mother tongue; despite the fact that he had almost all the happiest memories of his childhood and upbringing in a country that wholly belonged to a culture that is, and a people who still are, out and out Arab; despite the fact that his neighbourhood friends and their families with whom he mingled and lived in those wonderful growing up years were all Arabs or Arab expatriates living in the United Arab Emirates. There were Palestinians, Egyptians, Jordanians and even Somalis, he remembered. All of them Arabs who, with their innate sense of hospitality and brotherhood, made him feel for the land where he grew up as if it were his second home: his home away from home; who made him feel that the faces that sat around him now rocking in the now-violent, now-gentle motion of the train on its rails represented the poorer half of humanity: poorer for all the warmth and hospitality that was, to the Arabs he had known, second nature. Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2005-02-05 |
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