Raïhanyat,

Moroccan Writer Mohamed Saïd Raïhani’s Website

THE SEASON OF MIGRATION TO ANYWHERE

(A Collection of Short Stories)

OLD AGE

At the hairdresser’s:

-Please, make it a little bit shorter!
-No, that’s enough. Otherwise, you will look less beautiful as you have lost so much hair on top of your head and on both sides of your temples...
-Have you got any explanation for hair loss?
-The only idea that comes to mind right now is that you have grown a little bit old!
-And how can you, as a barber, distinguish the young from the old?
-It is automatically done through the detection of this gray hair invading your scalp and these long hairs peeping out of your ears!

At the Vidéoclub:

-Please, Can you find me any "Shashi Kapoor" in DVD format?
-Here it is! Have a look at the film to make sure of the quality of recording!
-What’s that? Has "Shashi Kapoor" shifted to playing roles of grandfathers?!
-Here you should know that you have grown older with your stars?
-But how do you know my age while we are met for the first time?
-Well, it is not a question of identity nor of any kind of knowledge of the other, dear customer. The simple fact that you are fascinated by actors who have shifted from roles of youth to roles of old age proves that you have grown old with them!

Club officials:

-This requires availability and willingness and I cannot afford that, unluckily.
-Ah yes! Especially when you have grown old!
-How do you know that I have?
-With that paunch that you have dangling over your trouser leather belt!...

On the main street:

-There you are my friend, at last!...
-Have you forgotten my name? I was the closest of all your friends in university years!...
-Be patient, please! Your name, I have it on the tip of my tongue!...
-Yes, dear friend, time has passed quickly and you have grown old!
-Does the fact of forgetting someone's name automatically refers to old age?!
-The little watch that you wear on your wrist, dear friend, counts such small time units as seconds, minutes and hours that flow through the small hands within your watch during the day. However, the bigger time clock has bigger hands which do not care about small calculations by small watches on the small wrists of small people but takes care of erasing memories, images and names. Accondingly, the older man grows, the emptier his memory becomes under the silent erasure of the bigger time hands.

Dialogue with u stranger to our local community:

-Why do people here insist on my old age?
-Because they have all grown old.
-But they are obsessed so much by old age?!
-Because they encounter no youth all around.
-Haven’t they got children, boys and girls?
-Yes, they have but all the young here when they come to the threshold of majority, they engage their countdown to reach their second adulthood, which is modelled on that of migration.
-Where do they migrate to?
-There, where youth is everlasting.