Early Childhood
MY EARLY CHILDHOOD, SCHOOLING AND THE LIKE
The most noticeable memory of my early childhood is my special relation with my maternal grandmother. Divorced from her husband Mustafa ‘Hasanoz’, a notable, well-spoken blond and tall and religious gentleman running a shop or two in the local shopping area of my grandmother was a self-educated lady, white, thick and squat, almost a scholar in Islam and her bookshelves burst with big books from which she read out to us, around a charcoal brazier throughout the long winter nights both Prophet’s biography and Islamic history and interminable religious legends featuring a medley of prophets, saints, devils, dragons and the like which we enjoyed enormously. She was always ready with a smile and easily burst into gay laughter. It was she who inculcated in me and also my elder brother Ertan religious knowledge and sentiment. Although I had a separate single bed alongside Ertan’s in the big bedroom for us and our grandmother I often slept or migrated before dawn to sleep at her feet in her big and sumptuous iron bedstead equipped with a grand mosquito net and at dawn I rose with her to imitate her in her ablutions and morning prayers which she never missed. Additionally she kept our affections by her frequent embraces and big noisy kisses on the cheeks.
We had three bedrooms in our double cottage-like house with a biggish courtyard between its two wings. The first part was a big room, my parents’ bedroom which was built over the shop of our landlord Mehmet the charcoal merchant. The said bedroom was reached from the court by climbing a turning set of stairs and was fronted by a flat rooftop we called the terrace which I and Ertan used as our ‘bedroom’ throughout the long hot summers, each occupying a single black iron bedstead with a mattress and a thin cotton sheet as cover. We must have been fortunate not to roll over and fall down the roof into the courtyard- the terrace was quite large anyhow and our beds were far from the edge. Had we fallen though we would have hit that little pomegranate tree which gave us each autumn an inexhaustible amount of its delicious fruit. In the third big bedroom in the second wing of the house across the garden slept the grandmother and next door to the grandma’s slept our sisters and one baby brother, namely the future terribly blond and handsome photographic artist Erdal and next to them was the big dining room-cum-guest room. All, built of standard dried mud brick and plastered over with white gypsum plaster, looked Medieval and Roman,
Another tree, this in the middle of the courtyard, was that rare species, a lotus or jujube tree which we called ,ghinnab, from one of its its Arabic names ‘hunnab’ . It is very likely that it is the same tree mentioned as ‘al sidra’ in Surat al Najm in the Qur’an or at least closely related to it. Its fruits were almost identical with cherries but the taste was like soft mature apples. It made our staple autumn fruit diet alongside the pomegranate. The big tree had many slanting and swinging branches each of which were appropriated by each sibling, then about 6 and also served as a nesting system for the many childhood friends living around who found in our courtyard a good and safe playground. As a result, throughout the long summers from May to November our house shook with the merry noises we and our friends made while perched or swinging on swings hanging from the branches, which noises competed with those made by the ever-present crickets, those big tropical to subtropical insects famous for their chorus of a monotone noise from dawn to dusk.
Our religiosity was enormously helped by the no less committed religiosity of our parents. My father was a dark, black curly haired and big black- eyed and well-dressed man of middle stature with very handsome features and an eloquent tongue which made strangers think that he was a lawyer. Perhaps even more intelligent and eloquent was my blond and extremely beautiful mother. The occasional merry arguments of the two was a spectacle to attend and cherish long afterwards, in which equally devastating arguments and counterarguments wrestled for their silencing power but were not serious enough to send tempers soaring in the combatants or prevent roaring laughters from the spectators. The two were obviously very much in love and obviously terribly enjoyed their intellectual and verbal jostlings. My father was also a good amateur musician on the lute and a singer with a deep and heart-stirring melodious voice. It was in fact his regular attendance at the mosque and his beautiful azans (calls to prayer) which had made my maternal grandfather Mustafa Hasanoz to pick him up for his son- in- law for his only and daughter, pretty and slim Mazlume. It should come as no surprise then that together and within a span of twenty years they produced five boys and five girls without a fight or complaint. It is also important to note that when my parents and grandparents were so religious, religion itself as a social phenomenon was declining fast among the Turkish Muslims of Cyprus perhaps thanks to the secularist and even anti-religion winds blowing over from Turkey to the north, Turkey which was going through the heady and traumatic reforms of Kemalists more commonly called Ataturkists by Turks themselves.
Our parents as well as later us the children could not understand why modernization made escape from religion necessary and therefore could not follow the herd instinct. I believe we have been fully vindicated in our cautious stand seeing that United States of America is not only the most developed and powerful country in the world but also the most religious. Apparently working towards prosperity and power in no way suffers from being pious and instead can work in synergy with it provided one knows how to go about it. I also have proof closer home: I am a fully trained scientist and technologist with good long technical and managerial experience in petroleum and then in production industry as well as a man of religion and Sufism and always found that each not only does not clash with the rest but all can work in wonderful synergy. Our brains are too vast and versatile to fail to find both comfortable room for as well as delightful synergy between many diverse interests and commissions. I regard ‘only science’ type heads a bit flat and shallow and lacking in confidence. My philosophy is this: Do not be an intellectual autistic but break the moulds and go out and explore, find, study and enjoy all avenues of your soul a free normal mind and clean conscience can offer you man!
At this juncture I feel it is time to relate my early spiritual or psychic experiences as a primary school age child of about 8 or so. Profoundly influenced by the stories about our Prophet Muhammad (Peace and Blessings of Allah be on him) and his close companions like Abu Bakr, Umar, Ali etc. that I was having dreams connected with them. Of course our father was taking us to the grand mosque near which was his carpenters shop and at noon we were attending the congregational prayers offered there at times. Attending the mosque on religious holidays was another pleasurable experience for me and Ertan. So imbued with religious instruction, information and occasional practice, it was no surprise in retrospect for me to dream religious dreams in which I was visited by angels in the form white pigeons who were saying to me that they were bringing to me salutations and compliments from Allah and His Prophet which I coyly acknowledged and thanked for. I was raised so conscientiously that I could not hurt even an ant. I remember a case when I was an adolescent of about 12 when one’s blood begins t boil and savage instincts stir: emulating my friends hunting birds by rubber catapults I had hit a pigeon on the head which sent it into a terrible spin on the ground obviously suffering badly. I was so shocked with the pain I caused to the poor animal that I panicked greatly and my conscience went into overdrive protesting against my brutality and threatening me with Hellfire! I never joined any street hunting expedition again. Actually I never started a fight in my life and was not attacked by anybody except Ertan my elder brother who was quite normally behaving as a male adolescent almost programmed to use violence. Otherwise he almost worshipped me- he was my best friend.
My close association with Ertan continued throughout our school years until he graduated from
By age 22 Ertan was already engaged to a local girl, namely Sherife renamed Gonul who was the daughter of a fellow carpenter Mehmet Degene who was also a muezzin with a particularly beautiful voice at the Limassol Grand Mosque.
It was also at this same mosque that my father as a young bachelor used to call azans back in late 1920s early 1930s and thereby winning the heart and then the only daughter of my grandfather Mustafa Hasanoz. They married in 1933.
In fact Hasanoz and my father were related by marriage: Fatima the half-sister of Hasanoz was married to Mehmet Bully the maternal uncle of my father and his effective guardian. That was in 1933. Why they called him Bully was that he was a loud if playful bully of sorts but was never in trouble with the law. ‘He more roared than rained’ as the saying goes and actually was a short and fat man normally cheerful if often noisy. He was illiterate and had a bit rough manners but inside very compassionate and loyal. He was like a paternal grandfather to us. He manufactured and sold yoghurt and various home-made cheeses from which we had our free regular supplies.
All we the older four siblings, namely girls Umran and Suzan and boys Ertan and myself Saydam attended the local primary school in our turn at our respective different age levels. Umran graduated in 1946 and was sent to Lefkosha (better known as Nicosia the capital of Cyprus) to study as a boarding pupil at Victoria Girls School but next year the addition of Suzan to her as another paying boarding school pupil made our parents think. They felt that despite our modest prosperity not only they could not afford all four of their older children from Umran to me Saydam to follow each other into paid secondary education and even if they could after some straining what would happen to us after finishing our secondary education they wondered. My mother, a superb intellectual and psychic was the especially ambitious parent about our education and she wanted all of us to have university education since each and every one of us was the top student at our respective classes. I especially was the ‘phenomenon’ if you know what I mean; I was admitted to the primary school a year younger than the normal because the head teacher was very much delighted by my answers to her questions and felt she could drop her objections to my entry on the grounds of small age. My mother kept telling me that I hardly ever cried as a baby but either slept peacefully or smiled and smiled between my suckings from her breast or from a bottle of cow’s milk and even diluted condensed milk as available. My grandmother whose also favourite I was, kept saying that since birth the Satan had never touched me, meaning that I never misbehaved. I do not remember a single instance being either reprimanded by any of my elders or teachers and the like or being in trouble with anyone. What she meant by that of course was not that I was a holy child which could do no mistake but that I gave almost no trouble to anybody as a suckling and then toddling baby, like crying too much, and later as a growing up child I simply did not have the capacity to offend and rebel if my rare acts of tactlessness in speech are discounted. One was as follows. I was about four and a friend of my mother was visiting her and I was watching her as every young child watches a visitor it sees for the first time. At one point mum offered her a piece of a home-made orange peel jam which the lady tried to excuse herself from taking by declaring that she rather would not- for protesting some reluctance before accepting such an offer was regarded good manners. because I knew from myself that such a tasty thing could not be resisted I observed “You would like to eat it very much but you are ashamed to admit”. The poor lady turned many colours before confirming me by taking the offered item and then laughing with some embarrassment. The same ‘giving no trouble to nobody’ continued throughout my childhood and beyond- I simply have had not the slightest inclination to be naughty or violent throughout my life to this day. For example I never ever came to blows with anybody seeing that I was a boy and then a man, I mean of the male sex which is violent almost by definition. Not that I can never show aggression. When something very great is at stake I can feel very angry without losing my cool grab the person concerned to persuade him to repent. One example was a man betrothed to one of female relations but later tried to release himself from his pre-agreed commitments. Not even the muscular and terrible martial Ertan could bring himself to bring this man to account. I could not stomach this man’s breaking his pledges hired a taxi and caught up with him at his den and grabbing him from the neck and looking him terribly in the eye ordered to recant and reverse which he sheepishly did. Suddenly I was the hero of the family which situation I had never expected myself to become. Needless to say such heroism was never again needed in my life. I simply kept out of trouble at all times and never joined any mobs or their instincts. Of course I am not unique in my peacefulness- I know many boys who have been as peaceful as my readers also must have seen or been. The likes of me are simply detached observers by temperament more interested in understanding and evaluating behaviour of and relations between persons than taking a plunge and joining their agitation.
As important as this trait was my quickness of learning anything and everything on just hearing it once. This made me not to study my lessons at home but make do with listening to the lectures of my teachers. Then I was ready to answer any questions for all time to come. Over time and as my school level climbed this habit of not studying my lessons at home but making do by listening to lectures begin to give me some problems; I could more or less manage at the junior secondary school level without home study except doing the mandatory home-works but as from the senior secondary (called the ‘Lycee’ then) my marks began to suffer a bit. I began to abscond lessons and pursue my own interests like reading about subjects I loved more. What time I stole from my formal curricular studies I used to study a hundred subjects so-to-speak, like religion, history, off- curriculum science, literature, encyclopaedias and most importantly English. I was especially interested in building up my vocabulary and by my last year at the Lycee in Izmir in Turkey I was able to write English pieces where our teacher could find words he did not know himself. That of course did not mean that I knew more English than him but that what an adventurer I had come to work towards expanding my vocabulary at the expense of studying my formal school subjects more properly . My marks should and did suffer as a result. At the university I was famous for having memorized the famous English- Turkish dictionary Redhouse which of course was not true. I simply knew a very large vocabulary but never anywhere near to the whole word count. Out of this same fascination I learned basic French by listening to professor Gerngross lecturing us on industrial chemistry and his Turkish assistant translating it from French simultaneously. Then I could help my classmates to translate their allocated 50 page from a French technical book and submit the translation to the foreign languages tutor for his marking- learning enough English, French or German for student chemical engineers was mandatory. Later in life I similary learned Greek, Arabic, Italian and Persian and retained the first two well while Italian and Persian faded a bit due to non-use for many years. It usually takes me a week or two to crack and prattle a foreign language at passable level. The most hilarious was my learning Italian: In October 1970 we the trainee refinery engineers were sent to Italy to continue our practical training in Shell Taranto refinery in Italy; at the Schippol airport in Holland I bought an ‘Italian for Turists’ handbook and by the time we landed in Italy at Rome Fumicino airport and reached Taranto in the evening I was able to go into the streets and talk to others and shop at Italian shops . Of course there was a simple trick: A lot of English words have Latin origin and by simply relating Italian words to English words of Latin origin my vocabulary became phenomenal overnight. The only thing I was to note was the Italianate sonorosities of such words and utter them with an Italian affectation. So when the same evening I sat at an Italian restaurant and the waiter attended to me asking for my orders I said to him in confident notes and Latin musicality “Pasta e pane per favore” whereupon he bowed and obliged. Of course pasta meant a macaroni dish and pane meant bread. Once in Taranto and training in refinery operations like distillation, catalytic conversion and automatic process control I rapidly improved my Italian both by talking with and getting help from my fellow Italian operations engineers and reading daily papers etc. until barely two weeks after was able to hold lengthy if halting and fumbling conversations with my Italian hosts until I was accepted as one of them so-to-speak. My inevitable errors elicited roars of laughter from them and that made me the favourite foreigner in the refinery with everybody liking to meet and joke with me. Among them was a very handsome and kind man about my age whose name was Salvatore Grenara with whom we became like two inseparable brothers and he and his beautiful angelic wife and myself and my wife (for I had to fetch her from Cyprus because of my prospective long stay in Italy) visited each other like best neighbours and became very spiritually drawn to each other. Grenara helped me to build up my Italian and became one of the most loved and unforgettable friends of my whole life. His example taught me that national and religious differences between men are only skin-deep determinants and although Islam is by far the most advanced, realistic and practical of all religions (to which Grenara graciously did not object- another saintly trait of his) good character an disposition in man is more God-given than simply built up by religious inculcation although the latter counts a lot. This makes good breeding though marriage as the best investment for mankind than the increasingly promiscuous breeding practices of the current Western culture. Sexual partners should be tied together through that solemn and holy institution of marriage based on mutual compatibility and consent as helped by and involving the two families concerned. Honour and reliable bloodlines should remain. Unfortunately our contemporaries are taught to value and take pride in wrong moral choices instead of valuing and honouring rightly time-honoured traditions. I am not saying that all cultural traditions of all times and at all places are worthy of survival; far from it. But marriage and breeding through marriage and close kinship relations, at least to me, are as valuable as the creation and survival the human species itself. Kinship care economises on the national welfare spending including health care and also the curbing of crime. Atomized anonymous citizens may be like free-floating sea mines ready to explode at the contact of boats or other mines. Making babies in laboratories are even worse; human dignity should not be sacrificed to instincts for technological adventures which affect some scientists like a mental illness. Artificial methods may be mandatory in therapeutics but should not replace the natural and time-honoured traditional ways of human procreation. Natural parents should jointly own up to and lavish care on their offspring if we are to remain human.
But we have to go back to
BACK IN
I had started primary school at five instead of seven because the headmistress had found me quite precocious and till the end I remained the first in my class. I became so used to be the top of my class that I was devastated to be relegated to the second place later in
Now let us go back where we left off in
By the time I was attending the fourth year of the primary school my parents, seeing that all four of us their older children were top of their classes and secondary education was to be paid for in Cyprus while university was not available, had made up their minds to emigrate to Turkey where education at all levels was free. Umran was already a paying boarding student at Victoria Girls Lycee in
Going back where we left off, on late June 1948 after the schools were closed we, all packed up, went to Larnaca, a smaller town and seaport to the east of Limassol and we, namely the two parents and seven children, were boarding SS Dumlupinar, a rather dinghy Turkish steamer part cargo part passenger ship, accompanied by suitcases and sackfuls of personal effects and beddings as well as some food on our way to Iskenderun, a seaport of Turkey about 150 miles from Larnaca. We sailed out by about midday and anchored at
There was no pier big and with deep enough water for our ship to dock and soon small oar-driven boats began to surround Dumlupinar. Father soon negotiated with one of these to take us and our baggage ashore for the price of 5 Turkish liras. We accordingly climbed down the ship’s suspended side stairs into the boat and the boat owner began to pull oars towards the land. Midway he stopped and we thought that he was tired and was trying to recover. Not only he did not look tired however but he also looked as if he could not care less about for us to reach the land. Father asked why wasn’t he moving and the man replied that that was the distance we could travel in his boat for the money we offered as if it wasn’t him who had quoted the price of 5 Turkish liras. The man wore baggy pants and a big kushak (rolled cloth belt) around his waist with a dagger’s handle visible tucked across it. As my father tried to reason with him he retorted “Either 30 liras and all baggage and you will find yourselves in the sea”. My father was neither a coward nor a muscular light-weight but the man was armed while we children could not be put at risk by father’s defiance. He accordingly coughed up the 30 liras (two weeks wages for a worker at the time) and we were accordingly delivered to the pier by the boatman. As soon as we landed my father complained to an armed policeman standing as a guard on the jetty but he was not sympathetic. Eyeing my father with contempt he remarked “Weren’t you man enough to fight?”. We were enlightened on the matter later when we met our host in
This said Dr Shevki Gulboy was also from Limassol. He and his brother Ragib had both studied in
In the meantime Dr Shevki, seeing that despite more than a month passing with no job in sight for my father advised that we better go to
“Our reverend president of the republic and beloved father” and went on to explain our objective for coming to the motherland (educating children to serve the great Turkish nation) and complained about the disgraceful behaviour of the customs officials. He posted the letter. Two weeks later al our goods were delivered to our door by a bevy of uniformed officials who saluted my father as if he was some privileged government dignitary.
Despite this spectacular success our stay in
Nothing left for us to do but go back to town and find an accommodation for the two weeks before another ship could call and sail to
In due course we caught the next ship to Larnaca port in
Mehmet Bully, as a youth, had served as a sailor on wind-sailing ships crisscrossing the seaways between Limassol, Beirut and Alexandria but later, as you may remember, he settled down to Marry Fatima the half sister of Mustafa the father of our mother and to become a dairy products maker and lastly the owner and operator of a small hammam, that is to say a Turkish bath for the public. Needless to say, as he and Fatma havaing produced no issue the couple looked on us as their children as well; as a result it was us the eight children of Rushdi who benefited freely from this small but all-marble bath for free. Needless to say again, we could also consume as much yogurts and cheeses as we needed our great uncle and aunt produced, for free. Bully was especially fond of me and would not supper unless I was with him at his open air table in his cement-paved garden. After feeding me he would also push a few precious coins into my palm for me to use as pocket money at school the next day. In other words I was the darling of all grown- ups in the extended family because I never crossed anybody but always remained cheerful and obedient. To this day I remain the most accommodating sibling in the family not because I strain to look like that but I am unable to behave otherwise. I hardly take offence and can forgive any offenders instantly- if we may call not being resentful ‘forgiveness’ also forgiveness. I may be stupid or some may call me so. I simply cannot bear a grudge except on account of a victim I feel responsible for and victimized by another. For my own self I simply cannot exact revenge.
Soon after our arrival at Bully’s house mother bore her eighth child, the boy Oktay.
After another school year In Cyprus the summer of 1949 found us on our way not to
For a few months we stayed at a hotel in
We could only find a two-room flat cut out from a bigger family home for rent. It was in the mountain-top Kadifekale area of
We find Izmir people more civilized than those of Adana and the city itself looked like a magnificent metropolis crisscrossed by innumerable busses and trams on well-paved streets side by great modern buildings. At the time its population was an ‘incredible’ 250 thousand and its two mile long port resounded with the noises made by dozens of great modern cargo and several passenger ships. Izmir had a smaller district, namely Karshiyaka on the other side of the gulf which could be reached both by land round the gulf and pretty ferryboats crisscrossing the gulf from dawn to midnight and often packed with passengers to the full. It was the greatest and most beautiful town we had seen to date and we enjoyed everything about it for the coming seven years by when we all had to clear out, myself being the last.