The Cats of Istanbul

Two weeks ago, I was in Istanbul. On my first day, while stepping out of the hotel in old-fashioned and hilly Sultanahmet, a colorful and friendly cat greeted me. Not too long after my brief encounter with this cat, I saw a swarm of them including kittens, gravitating next to dried up leftover fish nearby. An older pensive gentleman with a gray beard wearing a gray jacket was frying fish in a large pan outside a store with two men slowly sipping hot tea or çay next to him. 


I have never considered myself a cat person. I always found them to be a bit recluse and perhaps a bit sly whereas dogs always seemed warm and friendly. While visiting the historic Hagia Sophia, an impressive structure steeped with history, where two religions found their home, a place that's been ravaged, rebuilt, and adored, and a site that no tourist would miss, a beige cat found her way near me. She slowly started to claw at my bag with her paws. She was friendly and comfortable in her surroundings posing with tourists and strutting around the archaic floors as if she owned the majestic place whose floors have endured hundreds of years of footsteps. Little did I know that she is one of the few cats who call the Hagia Sophia their home. Cats sitting next to mosques as if they were guarding them, cats watching earnestly from graveyards, cats following people, cats eating scraps, purring cats, sleeping cats, lazy cats, and small kittens bravely meandering around cars; they were everywhere.


My last day in Istanbul was a bit sad and surreal because of thoughts of leaving the city the next morning. While walking by an old bookstore outside Istanbul University, I saw a few cats sleeping while others were gently scratching the books and other items placed on a bench. Among them was a cute naughty little kitten that kept on jumping to catch a pair of socks but kept falling each time. 

We stopped by an old mosque or camii near the historic aqueduct walls. I saw an old man performing wudhu inside the verdant courtyard. Outside the courtyard, next to an eerie graveyard, was a sleepy and lazy fat cat. He was by himself and there he lay as if he owned the camii. He peeked gently with one eye, stretched, yawned, and went back to sleep smug and comfortable as if he owned the city.

Instagram

Many of you already know that I am an instagram addict. I love photography, art, and technology. They also introduced Instagram websites. Here is a link to mine:
http://instagram.com/nmathari

My grandmother's smile

I rushed into the room while my luggage was still in the car. “Your grandmother is waiting for you”, my aunt said.  It was last December, and I had just arrived from the airport after having traveled more than 8000 miles from New York City to this coastal city of Calicut in northern Kerala in India to see her. She was sick and bedridden for some time. Seeing me entering the room, she gave a big wide smile and kept looking at me. I hadn’t seen her for more than four years.  There was a glow around her and that wide smile was almost angelic; it is now etched into my mind forever. “We haven’t seen this smile for months”, my aunt added.  Apparently she had not smiled for days and weeks.

A few days after my arrival, on a pleasant tropical Christmas day, we were in the car taking her back to the ancestral home.  An Indian Santa Claus in a ridiculous costume was crossing the street in the furious traffic and he was drunk. I started laughing when I saw him and my grandmother also basked in the humor along with me, even though she was very weak.  Others in the car also joined us mostly because of the joy in seeing my grandmother laugh.

Last week, on Wednesday around noon, I was in downtown New York City near Battery Park working on my laptop when I had a sudden feeling of uneasiness.  Something felt not right and I immediately called my mom who lives in Michigan.  “What made you to call me from work, do you have ESP or something?”, she asked. She said she had been feeling uneasy that whole day since grandmother was not well and was trying to decide when to go to India to see her again. “Should I go in September?”, she asked me. I felt a rush of energy and emotion and I blurted out, “No, you better go now”.  “You mean I should book tickets for this week?”. “Yes, immediately and as soon as you can. Go on Friday if you can.”, I said. 

This Wednesday closer to midnight I was in bed getting ready to sleep and randomly browsing the internet on my iPad when my dad called me.  My grandmother had passed away peacefully while my mom was by her bed side.  I don’t know what force or energy had forced me to convince my mom to go to India, but she was able to spend almost three days with her mother and take care of her in the hospital with her siblings. 

My grandmother Safiya was born to a Muslim business family in the late 1930’s and married off to my grandfather around the age of 15 (my grandfather was about 19).  She gave birth to 10 children and by the time she was 30 years old, she already had a large family and enormous responsibilities.  I remember visiting her on vacation when I was a child and she would be the first one to wake up to make sure that breakfast was warm and ready and hot chai was on its way.  Food was the focal point for social interactions in her household with chicken biryani prepared on special occasions. The aroma of the spices would fill the air and my mouth would water and as a child who didn’t grow up there, I would try to make use of my minimal vacation time by eating and playing at the house as much as I could. I enjoyed the role of being the first girl grandchild of the family for a long time.    

    

 My dad’s mother also has a similar story.  I was a teenager when I last saw her and I still remember my last words to her that hot April afternoon, “see you again”.  She was a strong and determined woman who also gave whatever she could to the world, whether it was passing out “foreign” candy we brought with us to the neighborhood children or giving a little more extra to someone in need.  Both of my grandmothers were only teenagers when they were pushed into responsibilities.  Their lives were charted out for them instead of being able to plan their own futures.

They didn’t have time to think about what their passions in life were.  They didn’t think about what to wear to the next event or what new restaurant to try.  They didn’t think about makeup or shows or books or travel or shoes, for that matter.  I can’t even compare my life living in New York City to that of my grandmothers since they both put me to shame in how much they had compromised, accomplished, and sacrificed for their families. 

Thoughts on humility

A sideways glance, a sigh, no eye contact – yes, I have seen that before. It’s the yuppie who has just entered the cosmopolitan world of money and power – a world that is new and enticing, where he thinks he can conquer the world and conquer it all.

Humility is seen as a virtue by many peoples and cultures and placed in high regard, especially by Asian cultures.  Recently, I was in a few situations where I started thinking about humility and how people practice it.  In New York City, where everything is dense, people, streets, emotions, drama and life, I have found that certain individuals trade humility for pretentiousness.  In a city where the first questions someone asks are what you do and where you live, the pressure to conform has taken away the humility from many individuals. 

Success in America is also not always associated with humble people. If you are humble, you may not be able to toot your own horn. That in turn can result in less interviews for a job seeker, or less publicity for a new author.  However, there is a balance that people can learn, and that is the fine line between confidence and arrogance.

If you talk to very successful people, you may notice that the most successful people are not the most arrogant.  I have always wondered why the middle managers of success are the ones who are the most arrogant. Is it the fact that the very successful have nothing to prove since everyone knows they are already successful?

In the path to success, we all encounter many people who help us along the way, from our parents to our teachers, from the person who gives us our morning coffee to the person who operates the subway train, to the person who keeps the office clean.  They all share our path to success. It is up to us to make sure that when we get there, we acknowledge that every one of them played a role in our success.  It is up to us to avoid falling into the pit of arrogance.