Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt

Here, too, there are tears for misfortune and mortal sorrows touch the heart.

---Virgil.

Time is the great healer.
What if time is the wound?

----Wings of Desire.

Met my old aunt over the weekend, the last living link, perhaps, to a bygone age. Fiercely intelligent and wonderfully, deeply sceptical of the mullahs. At 92 she tells it like it is-but I suspect she's always been like this. She's been old for as long as I've known her.

I remember someone saying to her (in the usual false-piety-sense) that in heaven wives would be reunited forever with their husbands. She put her hands to her ears and stuck out her tongue slightly: May God forgive you for uttering such words! No, son, don't say such things. And when I asked her what she thought of the maulvis a few years back she formed her arms to the shape of a machine gun and said this is what I would do: and she let them have it! In those days I would have said that this itself was an expression of an intensely religious sentiment..but now I don't even think that that matters. The human voice, human gestures, trumps all.
[Incidentally, Faisal asked me what the definition of a modern muslim was and I said: an atheist!].

She tells me the story of her own father, my grandfather, who was always mistaken for a Jew because he was so well dressed. Strangely, it's something that I warm to myself when some of my friends call me this. Apparently, he came up with some secret recipe that would help rectify poor vision. By morning there were huge lines outside his house as word spread of this miraculous potion. He gratefully accepted the 5 and 10 Rs notes since times were hard and business was down. He held the notes to the light. "What are you doing? she asked.

"Forthe life of me, I can't tell if these are five or ten Rs notes". His own eyesight was rapidly failing.

And then there were the stories of how his wife would badger him all day. The onslaught was relentless. But then, suddenly, something strange would happen, and there'd be silence throughout the house.
"What happened?" , she asked. " "Had she grown tender towards him at last?"

"No", he replied. It was only time for prayer. After that normal service was resumed!

She lives alone, her two sons abroad, sorely missed. But even here her pragmatism shines through: they had to go and have better lives all the more for doing so. Even if regret is transcended, it isn't abolished. Would we be truly human if it could be? Only fanatics and engineers think that it is both possible and desirable. One day she had a turn for the worse: she thinks to herself: now my time has come. She struggles to her feet and opens all the doors in the house (at least if I pass away someone will find my body). And then she lies down on her bed, waiting, waiting for the inevitable. An hour passes. And nothing. Then she laughs to herself, I'm so old not even death comes for me.

I imagine her saying -and here I use the Dougal's words, whom she most resembles in spirit-sod this for a lark.