Oochoorma Guleshi

I remember Nat King Cole singing “Stardust” in the background.

A sunset upon the bluest sea, relentless and old. Pumpkin seeds, termos, and orange Fanta. The termos (lupin seeds) was my favorite covered with sea salt. A simple pleasure of squeezing the skin of the seed, ejecting the yellow split-seed into the mouth, and mixing the sweet with the salty.

Yet of that evening, I remember most her cotton dress and the sea breeze playing with it. It was in the form of a shirwal, the hybrid dress style mixing a traditional dress with the shapes of baggy pants. White and black, light and teasing.  A dress I could see the sunset through. The salt from the pumpkin seeds and the termos had dried our lips and made them puffy. The orange Fanta was warm and the carbonation more pronounced.

… I used to make kites when I was pre-pubescent. Wax paper, bamboo carefully split into three four-foot pieces, string, glue and pride.  I used to tie the bamboo sticks into a hexagon, glue the wax paper over it, make a six foot tail of string and shredded paper, write my name in Armenian and Arabic on the paper, attach the 100 feet long string and get ready for the kite fight. My kites looked like flying Sea Ray.

It was a primordial urge to fly the kite seventy, hundred feet into the breeze, and hold on to it, guide it, and come close to the competitor’s kite. Then, high in the air, an aerial flight would start each competitor trying to poke a hole into the other’s kite with the edge of one of the hexagon tips. Once the paper was torn, the kite would not catch the wind anymore, and in an unpredictable farandole, come down. The winner got the tail of the downed kite. Like the matador gets the ears of the bull. A primordial act.

My grandfather had a Turkish description of the ritual—it was an “Oochoorma Guleshi” or the wrestling of kites. He watched us from a distance and asked us to learn how to perfect our kites, not to rejoice from downing the competitor’s kite. “Learn to fly,” he told us, “fly high and proud.”

… That evening, on the shore of the bluest sea, I was a young man, with a new set of primordial needs. But for a minute, that cotton dress became a kite, attached to the rays of the sunset, and held by the sea. She was the most beautiful kite any boy or young man could fly. She then became the sunset in my memories.

That evening, I remember Nat King Cole singing “Stardust” in the background on a Phillips transistor radio powered by mercury batteries. We did not know English, yet we understood the song. It was all about the sea, the sunset, termos, Fanta and a kite I wanted to fly.

.. Last summer, on Robben Island, South Africa, I saw that cotton shirwal dress again. It was not the Mediterranean, it was not during sunset, nor was she spitting termos and pumpkin seeds. I was not a young man, and my lips were not puffy of the salty seeds. Yet, for a moment, I closed my eyes and saw a pre-pubescent boy fly a kite where his name was written on the wax paper. In Armenian and in Arabic.

Then I opened my eyes, looked through the ground glass of my 1949 Rolleiflex camera, and depressed the shutter release.

August 24, 2013

© Vahé Kazandjian, 2013

This picture is the one I took on Robben Island, a few hundred meters away from the prison where Nelson Mandela spend almost two decades in a small cell.