CRITICA

Three weeks, three continents, three faiths, and the trinity of birth, life, and death. Woven into them is a journey into the afterlife to complete the circle. The human link binding them is three bodies, wrapped in white — one silent for centuries, a mummy of a nineteen-year-old pharaoh wrapped in white linen. The second, dervish men spinning in white robes. And the third, a two-week-old baby in a white onesie, his eyelids collapsing under their own weight as he peeled open his eyes to see the world he had entered.

To the first I whispered, to the second I surrendered, and to the precious third I needed no words to open my heart. 

~ Egypt ~

“I bet this was not your idea of the afterlife,” I whispered over Tutankhamun’s mummy in his tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Luxor.

Eyes brown, green, blue, and black — all of us peering over his linen-wrapped body, caged inside a temperature-controlled glass case: some feeling awe, some feeling repulsion at the inevitable decay of a body, and for others, perhaps envy at his eternal glory, and a few feeling indifferent, preoccupied with the heat and the desert dust. He went to extraordinary lengths to create an afterlife, and yet here he was lying in this tiny tomb, while his treasures sat hundreds of kilometers away in glass reliquaries in the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) in Cairo. The tomb tells his life in extraordinary detail. In contrast, there is no story, no hieroglyphs of the possibly thousands of craftsmen who built it. They remain erased.

Tutankhamun’s untouched tomb was discovered by Hussein Abd el-Rassul, a water boy, who stumbled onto the first step while chasing his donkey. Hussein’s discovery was then swiftly claimed by the British archaeologist Howard Carter, who became a legend. The colonial reflex, so automatic it needed no thought. 

The next day, at the GEM in Cairo, standing in front of his photograph, I could not help but mourn all the unsung — one black and white photograph of Hussein in a museum built on his discovery, displaying the treasures of his ancestors. Minutes later I entered a treasure room surrounded by black curtains, an ominous staging. Two tiny mummies — two fetuses, the pharaoh’s daughters — lay in one undecorated wooden box, containing two tiny gilded coffins. They had remained nameless in his tomb, yet were meant to bear good luck for the pharaoh’s journey into the afterlife. I turned away, unable to bear the grief beneath the pharaonic glory.

In contrast, the treasures surrounding Tutankhamun numbered more than five thousand artifacts: coffins ranging from gilded wood to solid gold, a golden throne, chariots, shabti figurines — one for each day of the year — every comfort and certainty of a life that ended at nineteen. The golden mask stands as a testament to the glory of ancient Egyptian civilization.

Egypt was an immersion in the pharaohs, the echoes of human suffering if one managed to stand still long enough to feel them, the vibrant tombs, the gods, the journey to afterlife — now encased in a glass box, on display for the entire world to see.

~ Turkey ~

A week later I was immersed in the semazen, the whirling dervish in Istanbul. The semazen of the Mevlevi order is rooted in the 13th-century teachings of Rumi. I grew up on the music of qawwali, poetry, shers and shayaris that carry the soulful rhythms, lyrics, and beats of Sufism. 

To enter the Sema is to rehearse your own death.

In a dimly lit room, the ceremony came to life as music and singing filled the space. The dervish men dressed in the sikke — a tall conical hat representing the tombstone; the hirka, the coat for the tomb; and the tennure, a white whirling skirt, the shroud — each piece symbolic. So was every deliberate movement: the steps, the slow folding and unfolding of the body, the humble bows — the rhythm, the meditative steps, the mesmerizing whirling, one big prayer of mankind. They whirled with their right hands open upward to receive from the divine and their left turned downward to give to the earth — we keep nothing to ourselves. 

The dervishes whirled through four salutes as Rumi’s verses framed the walls. The first, birth into truth through feeling and mind — full acceptance of the human condition. The second, rapture at the splendor of creation before the divine’s greatness and omnipotence. The third, that rapture transformed into love — complete submission, the annihilation of self, what Islam calls fana fillah, Buddhism calls nirvana, and Hinduism calls moksha. The fourth, the return: the dervish back to love and service all of creation, without discrimination of belief, race, class, or nation.¹ 

Not all were present. A living prayer for one is an exotic spectacle for another — some minds were already in faraway digital land, cellphones out, clicking, recording, and scrolling.

The ceremony ended in silence as the dervish men humbly bowed and the musicians and singers took a meditative walk off the stage to the back rooms. What remained was wordless, perhaps best expressed as Rumi puts it — carried across many faiths: the point was never to escape the world, but to return to it transformed — emptied of self, full of love, ready to serve.

The next day I stood wrapped in a warm sweater, and a vibrant scarf bought on the streets of Istanbul, craning my neck to see the sixteen-foot mosaic of the Virgin Mary holding the infant Jesus in her lap on the ceiling of Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom) — an image still inside a mosque. She survived five centuries belonging to both faiths. In Islam, she is the mother of the Prophet Isa. Hagia Sophia went from church to mosque to museum and back to mosque. The building — its walls, windows, ceilings, altar, and pews — has witnessed the intertwining of Islam and Christianity, and held the prayers rising into its ceilings for centuries — many mothers holding their infants under the Virgin Mary, weddings, funerals, festivals — all aspects of being human.

A five-minute walk away stands the Blue Mosque with its six grand minarets, a deliberate act of architectural and religious rivalry with Hagia Sophia. Inside, twenty thousand Iznik tiles cascade from wall to ceiling in blues and whites, the grand circular glass chandeliers hanging low over the crowd, their warm amber glow against the blue of the tiles — a dreamlike contrast. The divine transformed into pattern — no words can do it justice.

Istanbul, a different ancient city, a different argument between the living and the dead. Unlike the treasures of ancient Egyptian civilization, some living rivalries cannot be encased in a glass box — they stand tall, contested, and open to the sky.

~ Silicon Valley ~

End of the third week, back home, I was waiting at a stoplight. The signal turned green; as I reached for the gas pedal, I saw a teenage boy cutting across in a hurry, ignoring the moving cars. I braked instantly — he could be crushed, I worried. But mid-thought, my car jerked forward with unstoppable force. Just as the boy cleared the lane, I was slammed into the space he had occupied. I had been rear-ended.

My immediate reaction was one of relief — a dented car over a young life, any day. I pulled into the Safeway parking lot in a dissociated state and sat there, as the car that hit me followed. I got out and stared at the front of a monstrous white truck, its front bumper bent out of shape. A petite woman climbed out of the driver’s seat and stood next to me, looking even smaller in front of the truck.

We were both frozen, her face stoic, betraying no emotion, as she pulled out her phone. We stared at each other in silence. Then my eyes fixed on her long red nails as she began tapping on her phone. 

“Check the damage, driver’s license, insurance card” — a voice instructed, one I could not recognize as my own. “Insurance?” I uttered the word. She looked dazed. “I don’t have any. I mean I have it, but I can’t find it. I dunno. I may not have it.” Her hands — red nails shaking — and then I heard myself ask, “Are you okay?” “I am shaken. This is scary,” she said, pointing to the intersection and miming the boy running across. More silence. Eventually, we exchanged information and left. 

Saturday morning, I was in the pharmacy line at the Safeway in the same parking lot. At the checkout counter, I asked the clerk, “Have we met?” She said no. She took my driver’s license and began entering the details. “We were in an accident,” I said. She looked up — “Yeah, your name was ringing a bell. <pause>  I haven’t slept in three days. <longer pause> I lost my father, mother, and brother in a car accident,” she said quietly. I stared at the red nails on the keyboard this time. We both just stood there, shaken, eyes filled with tears.

As I turned to leave, she said, “I was just hoping you weren’t a Karen.” 

Two brown women, watching in horror as a Black teenager cut across the intersection — and a silent, shared relief that the only white thing in the fender bender was the truck. What a strange world we live in, where fear wraps itself in color before we ever reach the person beneath the skin.

White is a wedding gown in one, a funeral shroud in another, a symbol of purity for some — and the symbol of the space between birth and death. White in America is many things: a privilege you don’t have to name, a color that gets to not be a color, a picket fence, a blank check, a hospital wall, a wedding and a ghost, a flag and a blindfold, the color of surrender and power — sometimes in the same hands on the same day.

The cradle of life has always held all of this — privilege and destitution, pharaohs and peasants, the celebrated and the unsung, the cruel and the kind. The ancient wish for immortality. The sacred wish to be one with the divine. The curious wonder as life begins and the fragility of how it ends. So deeply intertwined you cannot pull one thread without unraveling another. The cycle continues.

~ Baby Adi ~

That Sunday, the bright California sun entered the living room of an apartment— high ceilings, floor-to-ceiling glass — and found me sitting behind a father cradling a two-week-old newborn. White in this home was the mother’s milk.

Baby Adi’s eyes were closed as he vigorously sucked on a milk bottle, his father coaxing it gently into his mouth. He suckled three or four times, then stopped — his chest rising and falling as he fed. Strong and fragile at the same time. After a few seconds of rest, he started all over again — suckling, ribs rising and falling, resting, heavy breathing, suckling again. The fragrance of South Indian cooking surrounded us, the humming of the kitchen exhaust fan as background score, a grandmother moving quietly in the background, a mother resting in the next room — each person holding their place in the circle. The father then burped Adi, placing him on his lap, patting his back, moving his body in rhythmic circles, placing him on his chest, and then back on his lap to feed. A meditative cycle. A father learning the rhythm of his son’s body — not measuring in units, but in the silent language between them.

After forty minutes, the father looked at me — “When he drops his head and it becomes heavy, I know he is done.”

¹ Sema Ceremony. Official ceremony booklet, Mevlevi Order, Istanbul, 2025