The Bamboo Stalk by Saud Alsanousi Read Free Book Online Page A

walk-in closet and an en suite bathroom. I would wake up every morning togo to a job I had chosen myself, wearing a loose white thobe and a traditional headdress, at ease in my surroundings, instead of looking like an extra playing the role of an Arab in some Hollywood movie. I could look at the people around me and I wouldn’t need to look up to the sky to address them, and they wouldn’t need to look down to the ground to notice I was there among them. I could sit in expensive cafés and restaurants without people grumbling in whispers that people like me shouldn’t be in such fancy places. I could go to young people’s parties in the evening and have lots of Kuwaiti friends, friends like Ghassan and Walid. I could meet them in the
diwaniya
and go boating with them. I could go to the mosque on Fridays and listen to the man standing in the pulpit and understand what he was saying, instead of just raising my hands, imitating the men around me and repeating ‘Amen, amen’ like a parrot.
    Or . . .
    If I had been born to a Filipino father and a Filipina mother, two of a kind, then I would be a Christian, comfortably off, living with my family in Manila, venturing every day into a mass of humanity, exposing my lungs and the pores of my skin to vehicle exhaust fumes. Or I might be a poor Muslim living at peace among my people in Mindanao in the south despite hunger and harassment by the government, or a rich kid living in a fancy house in wealthy Forbes Park in Makati City and going to a school that only the rich can afford, or a Buddhist of Chinese origin, working with my father in a shop in the Chinese quarter of Manila, burning incense in front of a statue of Buddha every morning because it’s good for business. Or if I had been born to Ifugao parents in the north of Luzon island, I would wear nothing but a loincloth all day. I would work in the terraced rice paddies in the mountains and sleep at night in a thatched house on stilts, guarded from evil spirits bystatues of the anito. If I had been born a mestizo, I would have had my physical appearance as a feature to exploit, and I could have become a film star or a model in advertisements or a famous singer.
    Or . . .
    If I’d hatched from the egg of a house fly, I would have zipped around the house and grown old in ten days, then given up the ghost within two weeks at the most.
    If I were something clearly defined, anything. If if if . . .
    What a puzzle it is!
    Did my baptism make me a Christian? Did I really embrace Christianity at that ceremony, which I attended at an age when I couldn’t even remember anything?
    We all have our own private religions. We take from religions the parts we believe in and ignore the parts that our minds can’t grasp. We pretend to believe, we perform rituals we don’t understand for fear of losing something we are trying to believe in.
    Despite all the wrongs I have suffered, I usually forgive people when they do me harm. I turn my left cheek to those who slap me on the right. I once loved Jesus Christ so much that I started seeing him in my dreams. He smiled and patted me on the head with a hand that still showed traces of the nail that went through it on the day he was crucified. So am I a Christian? But what about the times when I discovered myself through meditation? What about my constant desire to commune with the natural world around me? I used to sit under the trees on Grandfather Mendoza’s land, leaning against the tree trunks, until I hardly felt any sensations, which the Buddha says in his teachings are sources of suffering. I loved reading those teachings so much that I became like Ananda, the Buddha’s closest and most beloved disciple. Might I be aBuddhist without knowing it? What about my belief in the existence of one supreme and eternal god, unbegotten and without offspring? Am I a Muslim by default?
    What am I?
    It’s my destiny to spend my life looking for a name, a