by thehindubusinessline.com –DEEPA BHASTHI-The Lebanese capital isn’t a place that one ‘gets’ in a few days. The only way to live the city is by taking home its abundant stories Bey — Beyrouth — Beirut. A city with three familiar names and a hundred uncomfortable identities, demarcations and allegiances. Which side do I begin with then? Some places, even people, are like this: words about them tumble one over the other, like in a congeries, and you operate in angst when you have to even think about them. Thus, in angst, I think of Beirut. I left a piece of my soul there. Perhaps it is because it is not Europe, or the Americas, or any other place that you know endless people that have left, lived and come back from. It still feels like the present tense, the city and the overly elusiveness of it all. Being in Beirut is to be abundant in stories. In one of the oldest regions in the world to be continuously inhabited — the Levant — it is one of the oldest cities in the world, founded, they say, in 3000 BCE. It ought hardly be a surprise then, this abundance. There is a measure of overwhelm that sets in even before the plane fully lands. My first sight are of its edges. It is awash with orange-yellow lights from tall buildings — brighter at first, near the coast, then tapering away as the land stretches into the surrounding hills, whereupon the number and the brightness reduce. There it is, the first note on how demarcations work, just like elsewhere, in this oldest of cities where the wealthier breathe the sea in more than those that make do with the mountain air and the militia. Beirut overwhelms because you realise the moment you step outside the airport into the balmy late-evening air that this city will have so many things that you will want to write home about. At its heels comes an understanding that you are inadequate, too, to do so in the space you are allowed on the postcard, that the language you have borrowed does not have all the words. I do not go to too many places or do many things. I am trying to cram in as much as possible instead, in the few days there, enough to construct a surficial larger picture. Something that would mean that I went there, that I saw the city and that I got back.
‘Paris of the Middle East’ is what it was apparently called. Progressive, modern and cosmopolitan. It is an age that the ones who lived then speak and write of with indulgent yearning; those too young to remember see it predictably to have been a version of utopia. The Lebanese Civil War changed everything. Fought between 1975 and 1990, it is still a speck in the rear-view mirror, too recent to be distant enough to try and move on from. The war is everywhere. I don’t get out of the city to sightsee — time is too short, and it doesn’t seem wholly safe yet to be a non-local and be sauntering about. I am repeatedly told that Lebanon is so very beautiful outside of the city, that the mountain air is purity itself and that I must come back when things are quieter at the various fronts. I promise to. The war defines everything. It is still in the souls of people. I read that children are not taught about the Civil War because it was so recent. The relative peace that holds is still fragile and complicated to be included safely in textbooks. The Downtown is sharp and shiny, the result of a post-war frenzy of building. But the by-lanes and older parts of town still flaunt the sniper marks on the walls. As do the old cars operating as taxis — called ‘service’ — and the dents on men who drive them. It was only a year ago that Beit Beirut, the first publicly funded museum and memorial for the war, was opened. The building, still sporting the scars, was called Yellow House or Barakat Building. It sits bang on the Green Line that separated the Muslim sections on the west and the Christian sections of the city during the war. Owing to this strategic location, it was used as a forward control post and sniper base. The opening of this museum and research centre is a much-required step forward in acknowledging the amnesia around the war, of beginning to think of ways to heal. The not-healing parts of people masquerade as road rage and wild partying, someone tells me. The former, I see among taxi drivers, their driving veering too suddenly from a crawl into recklessness. It doesn’t help that most speak only Arabic, so communication is at best through single words, wild gestures and guesswork. The wild partying is what a lot of people from Europe and neighbouring countries come for. Typically, a party would start after midnight and spill into the morning. Signs of obvious denial in the all-out joie de vivre is both laudable, and a bit sad. ****
