I last wrote about my cousin Abdul Raman four years ago.
Tuesday, October 26,
2021
Thinking of Abdul
Raman (AKA Raymond Mandirola), my cousin from Medina who visited us here some
years ago.
“You’ve already lost,”
he said to me during a meal.
“How so?”
“Demography is king,
and we, in this one respect, are out-producing you. The replacement birthrate, demographers tell
us, is two and a half children per family. Italy falls well below the mark,
other European nations as well. Some years ago, the Pope encouraged Italians to
have more children. He was roundly derided in the press -- how un-modern! In
the United States, family production is going the way of the birthrate. That is
not true in Islamic countries.”
The current fertility
rate for Italy in 2021 is 1.310 births per woman, a 0.46% decline from 2020. In
the United States, the fertility rate has dropped from a post-World War II high
of 3.8 births per woman at the peak of the baby boom to 1.8, where it has
remained unchanged for nearly a decade.
Abdul himself had two
wives and many more than a handful of children.
Though we hadn’t
communicated in years, I liked him very much. Thoroughly acculturated, he had
been living in Medina for at least three decades, during which he was providing
access to Americans and others to Medina during the Haj, as well as providing
water to American soldiers during the first Persian Gulf War.
“If you go to Medina
and ask for ‘the American’, you will be taken to me."
Abdul was always
honest, on good terms, I would say, with the truth. We formed a familial
friendship as young boys whenever he visited Windsor Locks, our fruitful Eden,
and in this respect I found him unchanged.
He hadn’t been in
Saudi Arabia long before he was arrested, on what charges he was not told.
Transported from one prison to another, he finally asked his jailers, most
courteously, whether he needed a lawyer.
No, he was told. That
will not be necessary – “because tomorrow you will be executed.”
That did not happen,
all praise to Allah.
As a graduate of Fordham
University, he was a primal Democrat, a bit rebellious, and the rich were very
much on his cultural radar. I asked him what was wrong with those in Saudi
Arabia who were running the country.
Oil had spoiled them,
he said, and the great wealth of the country, deposited in few hands, had
ruined it.
I did not ask him what
first had brought him to Saudi Arabia. I suspect it might have been a
combination of things: the Vietnam War was progressing fitfully at the time;
Islam and its doctrine of unquestioned obedience to a holy text, the Quran,
were alluring, as was, I suspect, a young girl very much present in Saudi
Arabia and his heart.
On his first visit to
us, he wanted to see the family residence on 1 Suffield Street in Windsor Locks
that he had visited frequently as a young boy. So, I took him there. The empty
house was in the process of being sold. The furniture, and any indications that
the Pescis had lived there were gone. We wandered through the wilderness of
empty rooms. Then he asked to visit my parents' graves. Once there, he bowed
before the cross that marked their enduring presence on his character and said
a silent prayer; I with him, and Andree too.
Memory —fleet footed
memory – passed through us, making us brothers in heart and mind. And I
understood that for him the visit was a pilgrimage to a once revered site. He
wanted to touch, in memory that now had taken on flesh, the delights of his
youth.
Some emails passed
between us after his second visit. I joined him in the construction of a poem,
I recall. Then… time and space intervened and we “lost touch.” Losing touch is
a terrible doom. It places an abyss between those who once loved each other.
But love, we hope, is an athlete that leaps over such distances and sustains us
until we die. Even then, both Abdul and I believe, love in some form continues,
even though life itself has become an empty room.
Well now, I received yesterday a short message from his
daughter Medina Mandirola announcing her father’s death: “To Allah we belong
and to Him we shall return. Oh whom I miss, may Allah have mercy on you as much
as the pain of longing for you has saddened me, father, may Allah forgive you
and have mercy on you, forgive your sins and unite us with you in his paradise.
I love you so much Daddy Inshallah Allah you are with the great people of
Paradise.” Medina had chosen her last name, Mandirola, as a patronymic. It was
my mother’s maiden name and her father’s birth name as well. Unlike some forward-looking
Western girls, she had always honored her father.
The fifth commandment among Jews and Christians is the first
one of the Ten with a promise attached, and the only one of the Decalogue to
include a direct promise. The promise that honoring parents will assure that
“your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you” (Exodus 20:12, NKJV) implies earthly
blessings and well-being, conditional upon the respectful treatment of one’s
parents.
When Abdul paused to pray over the bones of my mother and
father sweetening the earth in the small cemetery in Windsor Locks, he was
speaking directly to both who, because they were kind and good, had attained
felicity in eternal life, the land that “the lord your God is giving you.”
You receive, both in Christianity and Islam, the honor you
give. It is a coin given out that is returned to you tenfold.
Somewhere in his voluminous writings, G.K. Chesterton tells
us that the atheist and practical atheist is a man who, invited to a sumptuous
feast where the tables are sagging with the choicest meats, vegetables and
fruits, contents himself by sitting in a dark corner catching and eating flies.
My cousin, Abdul Raman, no atheist, was a man of large
vision and faith. I replied to Medina’s announcement:
“I’m sorry for you, Medina. Your father lived a noble and
honorable life. I rejoice that we renewed our friendship some years ago, and
you had a part in that. I know the sting of death because my twin sister Donna
died a few weeks past. At her funeral, I mentioned a saying of Soren
Kierkegaard’s to this effect: ‘To remember one who has died is a prayer.’ I
have been praying (remembering) a lot lately, and I have never forgotten to
remember your father with great affection and love. You will be praying as well
in coming days. God (Allah), who hears the whispers of the suffering soul, will
bless you for your prayers. I will pray for your father, as he had prayed when
he paused beside the tomb of my mother and father in the cemetery in Windsor
Locks when he visited us.
“With love,
“Don, Andree and Dublin (Andree’s guide dog).”
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