Over dinner…

20Nov08

Sitting in Chaat, a Bangladeshi eatery in Shoreditch, down a difficult-to-find Red Chapel Street, I am the only customer – they are booked for the night, all 16 seats of their 25’-square restaurant – but the coffee-colored skin lady welcomes me at 6:00 when she realizes it’s just me.  Her first party is at 7:45, and I assure her I’ll be long gone before then.  I am fresh from the British Museum – where I learned more about King Nebuchadnezzar, saw the first known map of the ancient world, a painting of Daniel in the lions’ den that was sublime, and the Rosetta Stone – listening to vintage Bowie – Jean Jeannie – to be followed by Marvin Gaye and Lynyrd Skynyrd, quite the eclectic mix, and reading about San Francisco’s Lesbian Avengers group in The Sun magazine.  The writer expresses her frustration over her erstwhile lover’s decision to “transition” to become a man, wondering aloud to the reader, “why would anyone consciously choose a role that throughout history had encouraged insensitivity and aggression?”

 

Then I thought about Jesus.

 

Didn’t he – the King of all kings, the one who had created maps and song and art and men and women – take on a role where he assumed, and absorbed, the ultimate form of aggression by people who were insensitive to him, and then laid down his life for those very aggressors along with us?

 

I ate my samosas, mutton with peppers, basmati rice and hot alloo, with raita, and listened to this forlorn woman in the Bay Area, who – though she says she later hugged her lover with his “broad, flat chest with satisfaction” – nevertheless, “walked home alone.”

 

 

photo:  machinedance

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