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Birth in Beirut
We leave the glazed concrete Mediterranean speeding rapidly towards the cavernous ghost of Kantari. I pass Sami Trad's maternity home peppered with bullet holes and may be a baby or two inside and I think 'She nearly went there'.
Ali of the Murabitoon who doubles as our driver swings the battered Buick past clutches of battle-weary Fateh boys. Abu Hassan Chief of Intelligence (now dead alas, splattered on a Beirut pavement) stop us to say 'Snipers active on the unfinished Tower'. But Government of India rules have swamped more than snipers we say and drive on, while tired guerillas give covering fire to briefly silence the silent killers near the Phoenicia hulk-hotel.
We rush up, we only have two hours to drag countless reams of purple or precise prose penned by Counsellors of yore into baby pink and powder blue bath tubs, where we turn them to ashes.
And then my mind wanders to the antiseptic fortress of the American
hospital where floor upon floor is littered with the wounded, and where I left her.
Entranced I watch scores of monthly charcoal reports slowly smoulder and die.
And then the tanks in front of the Holiday Inn explode with a roar, and I wonder will I ever see the slow stirrings of life coming to us again.
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