Confessing my thirty-year love affair!

A high school classmate, "S," suddenly went off the cyberspace, and a few days later explained his absence:

I'm back here again after a small hibernation in Beirut & upcountry Lebanon. Business ....huh..

Lebanon. Beirut. Aah, I have been in love with the country and that city from my early high school years!

As a young teenager, I realized that I had a deep-seated yearning for understanding the world outside the small little part that I had been exposed to.  As I noted earlier, my window to the world was through the radio and the print media--after all, the internet had yet to be invented!

Thus, it was perhaps in my eleventh grade or so, I wrote two letters.

The first one was to the West German embassy in New Delhi.  In the letter, I requested information about possibilities for undergraduate studies in West Germany.  With the characteristic German efficiency, which I would personally experience two decades later, I got a thick envelope from the embassy with a whole lot of information.

Well, it didn't take me long to realize that fluency of the German language was required. And, that was it.

The second letter was to the American University in Beirut.  Yes, the Beirut of the horrendous civil war that was dominating the pages of The Hindu those days.  I couldn't care about the war, and I figured that there wouldn't be any language issue with the American University.

When a thickly padded envelope arrived, dad was flummoxed, and may have said something along the lines of "you want to go to a country that is in the middle of a war?"

I suppose I had a difficult time explaining my fascination for Lebanon--it was all because of Khalil Gibran.

I had borrowed The Prophet from the only library in town, and found Gibran's writings very intriguing.  It appealed a lot to the brooding teenager that I was, like most teens!  Even though, I wasn't able to quite fathom Gibran's philosophical and mystical words.

But, Gibran had me all worked up about Lebanon.  A few other essays I read talked up Lebanon as a Venice, as an exciting place where the West met the East.  I wanted to be there,civil war be damned!

I might have made it there, but for the truckloads of money that was needed.

So, no Beirut.  Instead, I went to Coimbatore, via Nagpur.  Oh well, Beirut, Coimbatore, ... all the same, right? :)

A little over five years after the first time I ever went to Coimbatore, I reached America.  Lebanon and Beirut always managed to pop up in my life at regular intervals.  Towards the end of graduate school, a friend, Praveen, who returned to India after completing his doctoral work, presented me with Gibran's Tears and Laughter.  It kept the Lebanon flame alive.

A few years later, one of the people we met in our work lives after graduate school, and who later became good friends, was a couple from Lebanon.  Samir, who suddenly died of a heart attack way too young, fondly talked about his growing up years in Lebanon, and about the cedars and the figs.  Sam, as he was known, did his part to stoke the fire inside for Gibran's land.

It is now more than thirty years since I fell in love with a place and its peoples I had never met.  The email from "S" reminds me that it is a love affair that was not a mere teenage crush.  Maybe soon I will be in Lebanon.

For now, I will satisfy myself with this one stanza from Gibran's "Leave me, my blamer"

Let me sail in the ocean of
My dreams; Wait until Tomorrow
Comes, for tomorrow is free to
Do with me as he wishes. Your
Laying is naught but shadow
That walks with the spirit to
The tomb of abashment, and shows
Heard the cold, solid earth.

PS: had to re-do the post because Blogger went down for hours, and when it came back up, my last two posts had vaporized :(