Iraq

The comment by Pi at the previous post, and then a visit to this page at Wikipedia, made me want to write this post.

I think I have said earlier, even before the last post, that I have lived in Iraq. I generally do not say it very explicitly because I am very conscious of the fact that this was a very different experience from what most of my peers would have had. I have friends from families rich enough to have had vacations in Europe and the US and all that. But having lived for a substantial time in Iraq is not something too many Indians in my generation would have done, or would get a chance to for the next few years at least, irrespective of how much money they have. The thing is I don't want to make it apparent how much I enjoy the fact that I am one of the few people I know who has been there. A similar feeling is what I get when people talk about Pakistan. I really enjoy all the questions people ask about these two places.

One of my friends has worked in Cyprus, and I envy him for that, and I imagine, even if it doesn't actually happen, that people in some way envy me for my experiences in these two amazing countries.

I have a strong feeling of deja vu writing about my experiences in Iraq, a feeling that I have already written about it some time, but I don't have the patience to check my archives from all the blogs I have written at. So, here goes.

The wiki page has a section at the bottom called 'Cement Plant'. It's a very accurate description of the place, and unless I wrote it in a drunk condition and forgot all about it, it must have been written by one of my schoolmates at Al-Qaim. I don't think anyone outside the colony would have known so much detail.

I lived in a place called Al-Qaim, very close to the Syrian border, from early 1988 to mid-1990. We came back when the 1st Gulf War was imminent.

My father went there about 2 months before us (my mother, my sister and yours truly). I remember the last night I spent with him before he left. I wasn't as aware as I am now, but I did know that there was a war on. The war with Iran. My mom's father had been particularly worried when he heard of my dad's transfer because my mom's eldest brother was posted in Batticaloa at that time, and then another person in the family going to a disturbed area wasn't an exciting thought. I remember I started paying more attention to the images of the Iraq-Iran war once I heard of the transfer. I was scared the night he left.

I was scared till I ran to meet him at the Baghdad airport two months later. This was a little after the overnight flight in Iraqi Airways, where I managed to get locked up in the bathroom. My dad had bought loads of chocolates for me. I actually remember the mint-flavored chocolate he had bought for me. I bought the same thing returning from Dubai last year and gave it to him. We reached Baghdad early in the morning and after spending a short while in ACC's guesthouse (where I saw a bombed building for the first time and realized how close the war was - a building just stone's throw from the guest-house had been bombed the previous night), we left for Kubaisa, where ACC had one of its plants.

We spent a night or so in Kubaisa, where I experienced the terrible desert weather for the first time. I was not allowed to go out during the day and every single place indoors was air-conditioned.

I can't recall whether it was before Kubaisa or after it, but we stopped on the way at Ramadi, one of Iraq's bigger towns, to freshen up. I saw the Euphrates there. Several times after that, I was in a car that drove by Tigris and Euphrates, but I realized much later the historical significance of these rivers. Baghdad has both these rivers flowing through it, and Euphrates also used to flow by very close to where my home was.

We reached Al-Qaim pretty soon after that. We were one of the first families to get there and more kept coming in the next few weeks. I think we had around 30 families there in the colony. These were the families of people at the management level in the plant, and many married men stayed alone for the entire duration of their posting there. Which would account for all the chocolates I used to get from many of these 'bachelors' who were probably missing their children back in India.

My school started off in the homes of the teachers. Wives of employees, who had specialisation in any subject, began teaching it. Till we got a permanent place for a school, we used to move from one home to another for each subject. I had 5 other people in my class. There were classes that had just one student. My mom was our Science teacher. So, on days my first class was Science, I would get up in the morning, get ready and then go and sit in our living room waiting for the other classmates to arrive. This didn't last too long as we got a place for school, which would double up as the club in the evening, where I used to go to play carrom and table tennis.

We didn't have any proper games or sports goods there. I don't know why it was so difficult to find anything in the shops. So we started devising our own games. Collecting matchboxes, cigarette boxes, milk cartons, every damn thing and making toys with them. Inventing crazy games. Going off to places we were forbidden to go to.

There were all these Romanian people also in their own section of the colony (I am assuming you have read the Wiki article). This was the first time I was in such proximity to Whites. We somehow got into our heads that these guys were maneaters. Don't ask! So we would have bets on how close we could go to their houses without being caught (and well, barbequeued). Though I soon realized that they were pretty harmless and spoke to a few of them. But there were no Romanian kids there.

There were some Iraqi families though. We befriended some Iraqi kids, but we generally looked at them in disdain because we felt they were very dirty and didn't understand even a bit of English.

One more new thing was seeing women in swimsuits. Some Romanian women had a swimming pool for themselves, and they would cavort in broad daylight in costumes that were too scandalous for us kids. And we would try not to stare while passing by. Or at least appear not to. I wonder how they got away with it in a Middle East country.

The Chemical Fertilizer Complex that the Wiki article talks about was visible from our colony. They actually released some chemical a few times that made all us kids playing outside cough madly.

There are far too many things, far too many, which I remember almost like they happened a couple of years back. Watching all those Hindi movie video cassettes, trips to Baghdad and Habbaniyah, the three-day state holiday when the Iraq-Iran war got over and when I got burnt on our way to Baghdad in a train, getting the highest rank among all Indian Central Schools for two consecutive years, playing in the first (and only) snowfall of my life, seeing almost every adult cry when the colony's sweeper sang Chitthi Aayi Hai at a function, far too many.

But the thing I still remember most vividly is leaving our cosy home that night in early September in 1990, walking alone in the house for the last time, hoping that I would be back some day to take back all my self-made toys I was leaving behind, leaving like thieves in a bus that was not allowed to switch on the headlights, leaving Iraq like refugees, leaving my dad back, with the very strong fear that I might not get to see him again.

My dad did come back safely, though after the war began. We were staying in Navi Mumbai with my aunt and the morning my dad returned I saw my mom run out in her nightgown into the street and hug my dad. I still remember that day. That image came to me every time there was a tiff between my parents. It reminded me what they mean to each other.

I didn't go back to my home in Al-Qaim. Very soon after our return, one night in the news I saw the colony being bombed to rubble by US aircrafts.