This post has been brewing in my mind for days, the desire to write it has gotten strong enough for me to sit here and write something down. I didn't want to give this post a title that attributes it to one topic or even one thought, it just stems from the letter Q as a starting point.

The years have been going by slowly yet surely, the thoughts get overridden by newer memories, other events take place of ones that have passed in fondness or with indifference so today, I gave my mind some time to explore those old gone by days stuck in my head.

This post's origin comes from an Arabic ode to the prophet called Qasida Burda Sharif, I won't go into the lyrics or the meaning behind it, you can find tons of information related to that on the internet. I wanted to talk about how it relates to my life.
The winter I spent fasting in Pakistan, most likely a few years after the photo above, it was the first time I experienced so much culture in a short amount of time. I had already been making myself aware, familiar, and accustomed to the American culture of the 90s. That young internet world, in which the utopia seemed so close in reach, coming from a Pakistani village, it was nothing short of awe-inspiring and mindbogglingly different.
The winter in Pakistan was one where the world's affairs were so uninteresting because the village's world was what mattered. How cold the mornings were that they made you forget about the summer's intense heat, the fast was short and easy, but for a 12 year old, it was still a lot.
There was no entertainment like that of the Californian 1990s, cartoons on every morning, and even more on Saturdays, junk food everywhere and abundant, things looked so modern and future leaning, yet those were long forgotten in the face of a winter in Pakistan. The dry cold, the lack of warm clothing, and hardly any heating infrastructure forces your body to adapt.
The days went by, with not much of a fondness of memories. The nights were something to look forward to, each night brought a whole set of new things. First, at dusk, the smell of fried food coming out of every house, it gave my young taste buds something to salivate over. Then came the coziness of having your family with you, food all ready, everyone eating at the same time, each bite so precious and so filling. The fruits, the pakoras, the dates, everything tasted perfect.
As the meal's time passed, then came the night and there you would have the night time prayers and after you got home from those, you'd get to watch some TV and on it, some well sung odes (aka naats) that would give you some comfort in their voice.

I'll leave it as that for now, in the future maybe I'll go into the night before Eid as a memory to think over.

It will rain for 7 days

There comes a quietness to the long winter night that leaves you shivering but those are not to be outdone by the savaan rains, those monsoon thunderstorms that make your whole room light up and the fear of a god becomes reality. Every late summer is similar, and the one I think of now, it was no different. The prediction was that it would be a week long rain, the ones where the schools are shut down and the kids go missing in the rain.

I couldn't believe that a kid would go missing in a rainstorm, how is that even possible? Can't they just walk home?

At the start of this particular rain, my grandma said that if this rain goes on for over a week, on the 8th day, she would know that the world is ending. For a young kid, this made no sense. How can the whole of the world end because of a rain?

It kept raining, the first day, it came quickly as dark clouds. The mothers were calling their kids back home, the day went from a beautiful afternoon, not too warm either, to a dusk darker than midnight, the clouds were heavy and anxious. I was running back home, I felt the first boom of the thunder within my body as I made it through the big gate at the house. As I ran to cover, a few rain drops hit my body but I had made it back safely. I turned and stood there to see the rain coming down. This much rain would've soaked me all the way through in a minute. This was the beginning.

The might of the clouds was unending, they rained and rained all night. We slept in the veranda that night, the patter continued as I drifted to sleep. The sleep was great. The morning came and I found out we were all not going to school that day. The schools had not announced closures yet, my mom just wanted to be safe in this rain because the dirt roads are extra slippery after the first rain because the hardness formed by the summer heat leaves a slippery dirt path, full of new muddy potholes.

The rain continued, the first day, we just stayed put, nowhere to go and nobody wanted to leave their houses. It would let up every hour or so for a few minutes but there was no hour without rain.

By the third day, my grandma was sitting there, here body rocking back and forth, in a slow sway she would vocalize a prayer, maybe for us kids to hear or to just let her meditative state come out of her body. She would give us warnings of not running too fast in the rain, not to go down to the river because the floods would take us away, and to call someone to visit her.
That day, my cousins came by, they had brought things to make suji halwa, a traditional dish made during rainy days to warm yourself up and to spread some hope of days after the rain.

I used to always thing, what's the big deal with a few days of rain?
Well, it was because everything halted, there was no way to get anything in or out of the village. People were sharing their groceries as things started to run out.

By the fifth day, the rains had started to flood the fields, the lower areas outside our house were a few feet high, I went out there to see how far up the water would go. My legs were all underwater, the dirt colored water was everywhere, you'd just see a lake of water where a few days ago was just remnants of a harvest.

For a young kid, these were scary times, there seemed like no end to it, a week of rain and yet we were still seeing more coming down. What eventually happened was on the 8th day, the sun came out. The sun was so strong it dried our courtyard in a matter of minutes and the heat was most welcome by me, I don't know about others.

No kids went missing that rainy season but some older person came by to lament about their missing goat that might've been stolen before the rain or ran away to the river to get washed away. I don't know if that actually happened or if it was a fiction told to kids.

Feelings not concocted by an AI

There's an end to the internet coming, my little corner of the internet will remain mostly AI free, I think it'll be impossible to avoid things created / generated by AI. I've already posted some things in the past about it. In this post, I wanted to write down things that are wholly my own and are not suggested, corrected, or edited by AI in order to keep that out. The mistakes, misspellings, or run-on sentences are all created by me. There's no rules that are statistical outcomes in this post, just some raw memories I wanted to write about.

In the near future, with a web that will require an average person to discern between what is created by a human and something that is computer generated, we will see less and less of these kinds of posts. While that's not the reality today, I wanted to write down as much as I can. I didn't want to give this post some obvious title because people need to sit down and read, instead of skimming headlines and remembering the summaries.