This is Omar

This is Omar's story.

Synchronized Stripes

When I was 6 years old, my cousin Hanif and I would walk our bikes up Hickory Court – the steepest hill in our housing complex – and then we'd race down to the bottom, coasting until Hickory Court meets Garden Grove Drive – the main thoroughfare in our complex – at a T-junction. I lived on Garden Grove Drive just a few houses away from the T-junction, and Hanif lived just off of it in a cul-de-sac. The race was a daily ritual of the summer, but after I got my scar (and no more than a scar thanks to an esoteric telegram sent to a military man who acts on these things) the ritual was forbidden. Allen drove a white Volkswagon Beetle and he worked full-time for the complex doing maintenance. When he was put in charge of our communal gym, I happened to be old enough to enter the gym. When he was put in charge of booking the social hall, my friends happened to start having birthday parties there that I attended, and when he was made lifeguard at our swimming pool, I happened to be ready to take swimming lessons. The neighborhood liked him and he was trusted in our complex, which he had called home since he arrived there six years ago in 1978, the same year that I happened to arrive there to set in motion the synchrony of our lives that would give me my red stripe and give him his. Allen was driving down Garden Grove Drive and because our movements were synchronized, we arrived at the T-junction at exactly the same moment in time. I remember the collision in slow motion: The lower part of his Beetle lifted me up off the ground as I slid into his windshield. Once through his windshield, both me and my blue and red banana-seated bike with white-rimmed wheels that was a hand-me-down from the early 1970’s slammed into Allen’s face with such a well synchronized impact that it gave him his broken nose at the exact moment it gave me my cut that would become my scar – marking us both with red-stripe-for-life. I was then pushed out of the car, greeted one more time by the hood of Allen’s Beetle and was sent on my way to the road after I decorated his white hood with a vertical red stripe that continued onto the dark pavement that perfectly matched the one pouring from his nose to his stomach on his white shirt expanding onto his dark pants. I landed about ten feet from the car in an expanding pool of my own blood, leaking out of what is know the scar on the right side of my face. Allen was in his own pool on the driver’s seat. Red on black and red on white for both of us totally synchronized. Hanif - in shock and in tears - ran home to tell his mother – whom I called Aunty – what happened and my older sister, Nafysa, who was getting ready for her soccer practice – it was a nice sunny day – somehow knew that the loud noise outside was her brother. Nafysa and mom, along with Hanif and Aunty showed up beside my body and I saw everything from above in serenity. I saw a white truck with red stripes on it and out of it came uniformed people that were doing something choreographed, I saw my bent bike on the pavement in front of a red-striped white Beetle missing a windshield, I saw my body lying down on the road dressed in my favorite jeans and red plaid shirt that I hoped could be salvaged despite the rips, surrounded by a red circle with my face in the middle of it while a group of people wearing white house-shirts made a circle around the circle standing equidistant as they covered their mouths at the exact same time, while my mother cried; I saw all of the homes in our complex and I saw the streets and telephone poles and the trees and the sky and I was getting away. But while I was above, somebody up there with me told me to get back down to my body immediately. He said "Go back down now! Don't you even think about leaving! You have a lot to get done before you come here, kid!" So I obeyed and went back down to my sleeping body in the middle of a double circle and dressed in my favorite outfit that I still hoped to wear at school the next day despite the fact that it was blood soaked, torn and cut up with uniformed-people’s scissors. In a coma now, I was driven in the white truck with red stripes on it to the nearest hospital to be operated on. My father was waiting at the hospital and he sat to pray for me in the waiting room as the mission to put me back together started – aside from the gash on my face, I had broken a few bones too, just like Allen who had broken a few ribs. During his prayer, my father received an inner telegram that the surgeon working on his son had forgotten something crucial and that I was in danger. He trusted what he felt and being the military-man that he is – he served in the army for two years – he acted on it. My father burst into the operating room and grabbed the surgeon, who was a nervous wreck, by the back of his lapel and guided him out of the room, telling him that he was not to operate on the kid under any circumstances. The surgeon turned pale although he had red stripes all over his white coat and he said to my dad, "Sir, you are right. I am an intern and I don't know why they staffed me on your kid. I wish they hadn’t done that because I am not qualified for this job and I don’t know what to do." Within minutes, a neuro-surgeon was helicoptered-in (the third white vehicle with at least one white stripe on it that I was involved with that day) to look at me and discovered that the intern had neglected to stitch the nerves back together in my face, before he impatiently stitched the skin. The neuro-surgeon was an elderly man with no hair on his white head – not even a strip; he arrived at 3pm and re-operated on me until midnight. Had my dad not acted on his own intuition – the esoteric telegram – I would have the right side of my face paralyzed today in addition to the stripe on my cheek that I have today. I was out of the hospital in ten days. Allen was in the hospital too for his broken nose and ribs, but we never saw him again after that; he left the neighborhood never to return because our meeting gave him a stripe in his head, and it finished our synchronicity. A decade later, at a restaurant with my parents, I got up to use the washroom. As I stood at the sink and looked in the mirror of the dimly lit room, synchronicity started again because an elderly man without a stripe on his head who stood to my right turned to look at the scar on my face and asked me to tilt my head to the left so that he could get a better look at it. "It healed up pretty good,” he said. “I've forgotten your name, but I'm sure glad the helicopter was ready for me when I got your call. Please stop racing your bike."

© Omar Lalani, 2006