Lovers From Two Different Continents

By Faisal Karim

A Western traveler, a photojournalist, meets a lost, trembling yet rebellious guy in an encounter on an Eastern street. She then inspires him to follow the energy, become unique, and pin to the world his stories both hidden and seen.

A mountain boy who once dwelled in the streets of city met a woman in Eastern dress with a Western accent on her tongue, and she changed him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Faisal Karim
• Release date: Mar 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215109120

Book preview

Lovers from Two Different Continents

by Faisal Karim

A Western traveler, a photojournalist, meets a lost, trembling yet rebellious guy in an encounter on an Eastern street. She then inspires him to follow the energy, become unique, and pin to the world his stories both hidden and seen.

A mountain boy who came down to dwell in the streets of the city met a woman in Eastern dress with a Western accent on her tongue, and she changed: his life forever.  A story of openness to love most of all openness to life. Her way of touching souls is universal as if the forces of nature are coherent with her actions justifying her moments with the mountain boy in his country. 

Copyrights © Faisal Karim 

All rights reserved. This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise–without prior written permission of the publisher. 

This is a work of fiction based on the real-life events of the author. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to an actual person living, dead or alive, business, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. 

Both English and Portuguese copies of this book had been registered in the public domain at Biblioteca Nacional Sao Paulo Brazil 2017.

Publisher contact 

www.meditativewriters.com

[e-mail]

Table Of Contents

Chapter 1 – The Night of Celebration

Chapter 2 – The Magic of Movement and Attraction.

Chapter 3 – Descendant of Mountains.

Chapter 4 – Abdullah the Rickshaw Driver.

Chapter 5 – The Artist of the Red-Light District.

Chapter 6 – The Streets of Love and History.

Chapter 7 – Bullah the Mystic.

Chapter 8 – Preparing for the Day.

Chapter 9 – Night with Mystics.

Chapter 10 – The Old Man of Mountains.

Chapter 11 – Marriage.

Chapter 12 – The Death Wish of a Brahman

Chapter 13 – Departure.

Chapter 14 – The Letter

Chapter 15 – Being One with One (The Power of One).

Chapter 1 –

The Night of Celebration

A

nna and Zeb kissed each other, in the mirror to the place of submission and salvation, on 31st December 2012. The place of perfection is peeking in on their love scene, a place where the devil is knotted and hammered with the voices of prayers—no man of belief would bring profanity on his soul in such disguise as Zeb inflicted upon his. His religion would speak the words into his ear just as it spoke once into the ears of those drifters who committed to loving the world, bringing profanity to their lips. And he, he is doing more than harm: he is lending his lips to the one he met a few days ago, his lips in this place which were bonded to let out the words of praise to the lords of lords.

His brain vibrated like a herd of horses running through the wild. On one side he thought straight into the matters of religion; on the other, she was swinging just in front of reality, the thoughts stretching out about her journeys and her adventures of love. How could one be so sure and so calm to perform such art? His thoughts took a train to nowhere, and he created a cascading story of his own about her. 

For her, maybe it was a common practice. But for him: his country is still plagued with extremism, coiling religion around their necks as the Western world rose to diminish the senses deluded by religion. Maybe this is the charm that has splashed Anna into his arms, like a drop of water twisting with the wind hinges on a leaf and, with sunshine, sparkles with the colors of sunlight. She was sparkling in his presence, her winds having found the comfort of Zeb. Tonight they formed a color of their own as they kiss each other; the profanity was not bigger than religion, or else it would not be profanity at all.

Instead, time and space happened to be witnessing a coincidence in the wrong place. The selection of this place had been preconceived by Anna. She idealized it,  through her journeys around the world, and had done it in various places on many occasions. She would arrive in the city, travel to a historic place, walks around, and inevitably communicate with some bright, local boy. She would take his attention and all go through her idealistic approach—as if she was preparing notes for her masterpiece, the masters of love, the love of strangers.

For Zeb, the life that had been a prison was now opened through the reveal of this beautiful, artistic creature. His struggle with life ended now; a  rhythm, an inspiration, and a fulfillment of a buried wish. It was as if someone imagined, with a blurred thought in a noisy market, what mysteries and wonders our brain can create. Today he has realized the occurrence of mystery which takes birth within our imagination and grows in our hidden motives. When they solidify over time, the energy—the lava—inside holds no more of itself and bursts into our life as a grown child. His imagination had created the event but today he was witnessing it.

For Anna, her experiences spoke for themselves; they signaled her to make moves. She could look at a person and smell his personality. She had done the same with Zeb when she met him inside that historic mosque. Tonight was their fifth night together since then.

Zeb explained the calamity of his people, and how religion had forced them to eat up their reason. It was as though reason itself had disappeared from their life, as a phantom dream-shattering night’s sleep disappears from tired eyes. It was the strangest habit of people that each one followed and stumbled upon the ideas of others; how one idea could cloak the whole nation and despair becomes their destiny. Though once creative, the species lost its taste for differentiation of knowledge and ideas.

Though Zeb was not a person of great knowledge, a society like his was an open library. The nonsensical chattering, ugly accusations, and pervasive self-righteousness revealed everything about life. When there was then some type of transformative knowledge, such situations prevailed and lead to enormous crises. These in turn are fulfilled with desperation for learning; seeking and practicing the truth, he says.

Anna agrees with many of his points. In her heart, she began to believe that he was born in the wrong place at the wrong time. It felt similar to how nature sometimes becomes merciless and loses its temper, like a hurricane that seldom emerges but, when it does, the result is death and destruction.

He seemed to be into the topic of religion as if it were the end of the world and he was witnessing the believers and non-believers; as if the decision for who would go to hell, who would go to heaven had been drafted and handed over to him—though it seemed then he would drag all of them to hell in a blink of an eye.

Anna looked deep into his shining eyes, her passion to hold him heated up, gluing fever to her fanciest dreams; dreams desiring to experience the wildest creature. Perhaps her imagination had lied in predicting an animal to be that creature, though, as humans are bestial of all. She realized Zeb’s emotions have been suppressed, which resulted in his aggression toward society, hatred, and extremism of its own kind, she concluded.

She had read various theories of psychology, she adored Freudian which speaks of the repression of human emotions and their reappearance, which she confessed mentioning a lot while hanging out with her Western friends. She thinks of how she can get him to release those emotions. Zeb was erupting like a volcano, stirring decades of slumber onto the surface of the Earth. As time had justified its hidings in the form of Anna, and today was the day he would lash out at its bearer, she had descended on a special occasion. He had no shame in saying whatsoever that came through the stiffened tongue. His heart had gone molten and resolidified; silence was no more welded to his heart.

Tonight was the night she had chosen for the celebration. At their first encounter, she had only listened to half of the story. Now, she has gone deep into the meditation, crossing the common grounds of understanding. She has entered into the second stage of the spiritual world. For now, he is like a follower no more seeking comfort and security from his master; he is developing the bond on his own. Then he will create the bond of love, and freedom, to see himself apart from being a follower: entering into the realm of love. And love is not the finality of seeing the master; the beloved in the nakedness.

As they are entering into the second phase of their discussion formality has been withdrawn. He is as intriguing as any person she had known throughout her journeys. The search for mystery causes mystery to become reality, which was the point of coincidence that drew them together. Zeb’s belief in the utter magnificence of imagination is not that of an artist who delves into shapes and colors to sketch out his work, but rather it’s a sense of complete numbness. It is an act of myths and forsaken dreams.

When back from university, he imagined a girl from his class as the woman of his life. At the same time, his beliefs deluded him that his hands were too short to reach out for women of riches. Those thoughts always brought yearning for the stories his foster grandfather once blew into his ear: the legends of purest love and inspiration, the fairies loving humans such that the human soul was never required to suffer any kind of sickness, and where love was a sacred ritual performed by the lovers. Anna must have brought that same energy, as he was feeling nothing less than legendary in her presence. She was purest of all those forms, sizes, and colors.

It occurred to him that her being a foreigner brought the issue down to its knees; there was no debate about her being truthful to him. He had seen and spoken with many Westerners over the years, during his adventures through his father’s prohibited territory, when they basked in the sun under the roof of his father’s hotel.

Anna must have been bred of riches; her journeys must have taught her the lesson of simplicity in love. But all that must and should was little evidence of the time they were spending together, lost and numb. They were in a flow of their own, greased with time. It was as if time was set on an angel’s wings singing and humming a