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Quote by Gift Gugu Mona

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Dear Son: An Imaginary Letter from a Loving Dad

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Gift Gugu Mona

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“A slick BMW 5-Series pulls right by the traffic light. As the car comes to a halt, a bunch of kids, street kids, go to work. One of them, a young boy no more than eight years old kisses the BMW emblem on the hood. The driver, drenched in apathy, doesn’t even look up. Another kid comes by the side, begging the beamer’s owner for some cash. Everybody in Tehran knows that to pay these kids is bringing Slumdog Millionaire’s silver screen to the silver smog city.”

TehranPoverty InequalityTajrishSlumdog MillionaireHomeless Youth
Book:Tajrish
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“For Marin, the city had an almost medieval look. The effect was belied by the swarms of hopjets, and Taxi-Airs, and other aircraft, large and small. But his training had sharpened his ability to shut out extraneous material and to see essentials; and so, he saw a city pattern that had a formal, oldfashioned beauty. The squares were too rigid, but their widely varying sizes provided some of the randomness so necessary to achieve what was timeless in true art. The numerous parks, perpetually green and rich with orderly growth, gave an overall air of graceful elegance. The city of the Great Judge looked prosperous and long-enduring. Ahead, the scene changed, darkened, became alien. The machine glided forward over a vast, low-built, rambling gray mass of suburb that steamed and smoked, and here and there hid itself in its own rancorous mists. Pripp City! Actually, the word was Pripps: Preliminary Restriction Indicated Pending Permanent Segregation. It was one of those alphabetical designations, and an emotional nightmare to have all other identification removed and to find yourself handed a card which advised officials that you were under the care of the Pripps organization. The crisis had been long ago now, more than a quarter of a century, but there was a line in fine print at the bottom of each card. A line that still made the identification a potent thing, a line that stated: Bearer of this card is subject to the death penalty if found outside restricted area. In the beginning it had seemed necessary. There had been a disease, virulent and deadly, perhaps too readily and too directly attributed to radiation. The psychological effects of the desperate terror of thousands of people seemed not to have been considered as a cause. The disease swept over an apathetic world and produced merciless reaction: permanent segregation, death to transgressors, and what seemed final evidence of the rightness of what had been done: people who survived the disease . . . changed.”

PandemicsMarginalizationGhettoesApharteid
Book:The Mind Cage
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“She couldn't see the homemade colored sprinkles, the tender yellow cake, or the pale pink frosting made with strawberry syrup enhanced with a little rosewater. Although our local strawberries weren't in season yet, I had conjured the aroma and taste of juicy berries warmed by the sun. I hoped this flavor would help the two old people return once more to their youth and the carefree feeling of a summer day.”

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Book:The Cake Therapist
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“A cookie, Avis told her children, is a soul. She held up the wafer, its edges shimmering with ruby-dark sugar. "You think it looks like a tiny thing, right? Just a little nothing. But then you take a bite." Four-year-old Felice lifted her face. Avis fanned her daughter's eyes closed with her fingertips and placed it in Felice's mouth. Felice opened her sheer eyes. Lamb slid his orange length against her ankles. Avis handed a cookie to eight-year-old Stanley, who held it up to his nose. "Does that taste good?" she asked. Felice nodded and opened her mouth again. "It smells like flowers," Stanley said. "Yes." Avis paused, a cookie balanced on her spatula. "That's the rosewater. Good palate, darling." "Mermaids eat roses," Felice said. "Then they melt.”

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Book:Birds of Paradise
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“After showering I like one of the oldest concoctions in the world—rosewater and glycerin. I once asked a lovely lady in her eighties how she kept the skin of a baby, and that was what she used. I carry around little tubes of rosewater and glycerin to use on my hands EVERY TIME I WASH THEM, and I always work it up my arms and into my elbows. Women hardly ever look at their own elbows, but other people do! I pay attention to my knees and ankles, too. All the joints seem to dry out faster than the fleshy parts of the body.”

SkincareBeauty SecretRosewaterMoisturizing
Book:My Way of Life
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“I arrive back at my lodgings to a battered-tin dish of dried apricots in syrup. Small and plump, round rather than oval, and freckled with rust. I dip a spoon into the syrup, a pretty spoon battered and bent from years of service, and sip the heavily chilled, sweet liquor. Lighter than that used to soak gulab jamun, the heavy, sticky balls of dough I have consumed with nothing short of gluttony on this trip, but thinner and less cloying and with the faintest breath of rosewater. I sit in peace on the cool veranda with my tin dish of apricots like dumpy cherubs and with the dry citrus dust of ground ginger still in my hair.”

IndiaGingerSyrupIndian FoodApricotsRosewaterGulab Jamun
Book:A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts
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“The fruits scorch in the fierce heat. The smell of plum jam fills the kitchen. Flesh bubbles, edges blacken, plum juices burst from their skins and mingle with the honey and lemon. Twenty minutes later they emerge, collapsed in a pool of deepest purple-red. I twist the lid from a bottle of rosewater, hand-made, no label, and shake drops over the scorched fruit. A scent of rose, sweet fruit and honey. We let the fruit rest for ten minutes. The roasted plums are served on an old tin dish, a mound of salted labneh at their side, the juices seeping into the soft, thick yoghurt like lipstick into a pantomime dame's pancake make-up. I rain a pinch of dried rose petals over the surface and offer them up. We spoon the soft fruit and labneh into our mouths, then lift the dishes to our lips to drink the last drop of rose-perfumed juice.”

HoneyLebanonPlumsRosewaterBakedYoghurt
Book:A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts
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