Jasmine and Fire Read Online Free PDF

it means doubling up on lunches or dinners when time is tight. Now that I’vemanaged to parlay this lifelong pathology into a career as a food and travel writer, my whims have taken on the urgency of deadline assignments, even if they’re really just self-indulgent missions I’ve dreamed up for myself—partly for sheer pleasure, partly for education, and partly as an excuse to disappear for hours on rambling adventures.
    But my fridge is so full right now, there’s no room even for the big bottle of water I’ve been dragging with me since Rome, let alone for any immediate food-gathering I might do on my own tonight. I spot the classic Lebanese dish of
rizz w’djej
—strips of tender chicken over rice studded with golden raisins and pine nuts—along with the creamy and thick yogurt cheese known as
labneh
, plus a plate of dandelion greens called
hindbeh
sautéed with garlic and topped with thin strips of sweet fried onion, and a basket of fresh Arabic bread, and a bowl of bright-green lemony tabbouleh garnished with small lettuce leaves—all foods I love, and enough to feed me for days. Since it’s nearly dinnertime now, I convince Josette and Marcelle to stay and eat with me, and we take out the chicken and rice to heat on the stove, as well as the tabbouleh and bread. I’m too wiped out and emotionally shell-shocked to make much conversation, but they tell me how happy they are that I’m here, and this time not just for a quick flyby vacation. We exchange family gossip and tsk-tsk about the once-again-grim political situation.
    “War is like salt and pepper here,” Josette says to me, shaking her head and scooping up a mouthful of tabbouleh with a lettuce leaf.
    At the moment, the perpetual standoff between the Hezbollah party and Lebanon’s southern neighbor, Israel, is heating up again, in part over a UN special tribunal investigating the assassinationof former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri and other prominent politicians and journalists in 2005. The tribunal is rumored to be about to implicate members of Hezbollah in the killings, and Hezbollah is blaming Israel for collusion. In the past few weeks there have been skirmishes between Hezbollah and the Israeli military along Lebanon’s southern border. Other long-running political tensions are brewing around Beirut. Last week a fight over a parking space among a group of Sunni and Shiite men in a Beirut suburb led to a shoot-out that left several civilians dead. In Beirut, seemingly small-scale scuffles like this have, in tense times, triggered longer outbreaks of violence and even war. Some are saying this parking space incident is an omen of a bigger sectarian war, yet another one, to come.
    In a way, these worries are like warnings about The Big One, the huge earthquake that will allegedly hit California this century. It will happen, seismologists keep saying. The question is when. Now? Maybe. Maybe not for a long while. But it’s bound to happen eventually.
    After Josette and Marcelle leave, I discover there’s no wi-fi signal in the apartment tonight, so I walk around the corner to a smoky Internet café to send Richard an e-mail, letting him know I’ve arrived safely. There’s an e-mail from him waiting in my inbox, saying how much he already misses me. Reading his note makes me swallow my stomach and tighten the small muscles around my mouth. I can’t cry in here, not within sight of the chain-smoking cashier and the teenagers playing video games at terminals next to me. I e-mail him back—
I’m so tired, I miss you so much, more news tomorrow
—and I head back to an empty apartment. Unlocking the door and walking into the dark, quiet space, this time without family around, is hard. Not just hard: it’s been a long time since I’ve feltthis disoriented and down. My head is pounding from jet lag, and everything in me aches, from my feet to my neck to my heart to the inside of my brain.
    I allow just one
what the fuck am I doing