A Ramadan Tale - Chacha & the Tapenade

In which Chacha’s alacrity exposes him to my inner control freak

In Ramadan our lives are turned upside down. The general idea is to reduce outer distractions so inner interactions can take centre stage. Its not just food but a whole slew of other worldly activities that are restricted. Life in Karachi often gets to feel like a runaway train, so when Ramadan comes round I welcome it with the relief of one who’s found the brakes.  I am forced to stop, take stock and narrow down. The simple act of proscribing any form of alimentation during daylight hours lends inner muscle to the deeper ‘authentic’ self.

As I settle into the rhythm of the fast, I find a blissful inner silence starts to descend and infuse throughout my being. The usual mental white noise is hushed by the lack of blood sugar and by the cessation of constant taste-bud stimulation. There’s a distinct shift away from worldly pleasure to inner treasure.

Which is not to say that fasting isn’t a challenge! Fasting in Karachi brings with it its own peculiar pressures, pleasant and unpleasant, both. Heat and long busy days easily erode one’s energy levels.  Possibly the most stressful and conflicting aspect is iftaar. Well, not the act of breaking fast itself, but the accompanying culture of fried foods and over-eating.  Once upon a time iftaar was a matter of a few dates, water or milk, and maybe a warm beverage or light soup. While dates still appear on the menu in Pakistan, iftaari, as the fast-breaking is known here, is a much grander affair: the common comestibles prepared are pekoras (spicey gram flour fritters), samosas and chaat (spicy salads of chickpeas or fruit). There are of course many other delectables but almost every household would have these as the core of their fast breaking.

A Pakistani Muslim prepares to distribute food stuff among the people for 'Iftar', a time to break the fast, at a shop on the first day of holy fasting month of Ramadan, Sunday, Aug. 23, 2009 in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. During the Islamic holy month of Ramadan observant Muslims throughout the world refrain from eating, drinking, smoking and sex from sunrise to sunset. (AP Photo/Anjum Naveed) http://newshopper.sulekha.com/pakistan-ramadan_photo_945169.htm

I grew up in an Arab/European family that broke fast with dates and water, prayed and then ate dinner starting off with a light soup. A far simpler affair. Every year since I moved to Karachi I would declare my home a pekora-free zone, as I also harbour a morbid fear of re-using oil (heating oil releases those nasty free-radicals & carcinogenic peroxides). And every year I have started to succumb more easily to the expectations of fried, toxically tasty morsels. While virtuous low GI chaats help feed the higher centres of one’s being, the greasy stuff just drags the energies down. But that, it seems, is what the punters like!

Ramadan meals,therefore, often become a big deal.  Even sacrosanct. During the first few days the day long deprivation is often rewarded upon fast-breaking by a heightened awareness of how Nature’s bounty is a banquet of pleasure in taste and texture, usually taken for granted.  In my case this gratitude is accompanied by a strong streak of nutritional self-righteousness and keen moral aspiration. The demon fear of starvation is also manacled as you realize you can go through a calorie free day without collapsing.

Nevertheless over-indulgence always threatens – let’s be honest here! As my husband and I have grown older, however, we find that after the first few days of preparing Ramadan ‘treats’, we tend to retreat to safe, nourishing, digestible food. In order to function optimally, you cannot indulge in eating what you like in any amount you like. Post-iftaar indigestion threatens to obviate the whole purpose of the fast. I start to obsess about what I put into my mouth and fear invitations to other people’s homes where banquets of fried foods and other delectable dishes that one wouldn’t normally dream of eating for 'break-fast' are served. Pekoras and samosas are, in the final analysis, hard to resist. At least in my own home I have greater control. What you put into your body becomes as important as what it tastes like in your mouth. It’s a happy day when a liking for the two coincide.

Made from olives, capers, garlic, olive oil, lemon juice, herbs to taste. http://dico-cuisine.fr/news/tapenade

So now let me wax lyrical about tapenade. Breakfast in general – even outside the ‘fast’ -  has long posed a problem for me. Sugary cereals are out – can’t deal with the post insulin surge-slump. Toast, butter and jam is another slippery slope, particularly here where we cannot get real whole wheat bread or pure rye. I never grew up with a British-style ‘fry up’ so its not in my culinary vocab. The early pre-dawn meal of Sehri demands just the right kind of nourishment, light and savoury. And skipping to the heart of the matter: there is no substitute for a good tapenade on toast, preferably with the cooling and sweet counterpoint of fresh yoghurt on top, with a few fresh mung bean sprouts sprinkled on for crunch and living enzymes. A close second would be my father’s famous breakfast mixture – based on za'tar (eastern thyme) and yoghurt.

For Ramadan a few years ago Abbas had brought back with him from South Africa a small but costly jar of gourmet tapenade from a delicious deli.  And so it was with a sense of self satisfaction that we would spread a thin layer of this ambrosial paste onto our toast at 4 in the morning.  The earthy aromas and unctuous texture rendered the usual insipid ‘bran’ toast more than just edible, but delicious. Noble, even! So sparing were we with this treat that it seemed we’d be able to eke it out over almost the entire month. We were set!

Five days into the fast the jar disappeared. I let its disappearance go uncommented – after all we could eat other things too. I wasn’t too perturbed and enjoyed delaying the gratification. But the following day I searched throughout the kitchen for it. Finally, after a few puzzling hours of mounting frustration, I discovered the jar in the pickle cupboard. Suspicions aroused, I twisted the lid off to take a whiff – not entirely forbidden by the fast. Instead of that rich, olivey aroma, a sharp smell of vinegar scented with Iranian Angelica seed (golpar) assaulted my nostrils. What?! I was stunned. Some leftover Persian pickles had been decanted into this more appropriately sized jar. How could this have happened? As I googled my mind for all logical possibilities, one rapidly emerged. Chacha must have smelt the tapenade and thought it was off. And...thrown...it...out! Horrors! But he had saved the jar as he knew how thrifty I am with jars (well, they are very useful whenever its jam-making time).

I was apoplectic.

After a brief inquisition with Chacha, our tireless bearer-cum-chowkidar, he sheepishly acknowledged that he had indeed discarded the offending material as it had been left by the sink – an obvious indication to him that it was meant to be discarded. And besides, it did smell bad. To him. Needless to say, Chacha has never eaten an olive in his life, much less nibbled tapenade on melba toast. I’m not sure he even knew they feature in the Qur’an on that magical list of holy fruit and veg. After his admissal he first looked chuffed with himself, and then, as he saw my face cloud over, his eyebrows swiftly contorted into a spasm of mortification.

‘But Chacha!’ I remonstrated futilely, ‘it wasn’t supposed to be thrown away. It wasn’t bad!’ 

‘But it was left near the sink!’ he cried in dismay.

Too late. In my fulmination I thoughtlessly trotted out another dagger for his heart.

 ‘And it was expensive! Sahib had brought it from abroad!’ 

Having thus imbued this absent paste with even more unattainable mystique, Chacha’s mortification was complete. He hung his head in shame. The pain of failure and the embarrassment of ignorance radiated from his every pore.

His rueful demeanour slammed the brakes on my juggernaut of annoyance. I immediately castigated myself: how could I indulge in such indignation in the face of such innocence? Remorse reached down and in and whacked me one.

To see Chacha thus pained iced my ire in a jiffy, for Chacha is our resident Man Friday, our ‘salt-of-the-earth’.  And without salt bread tastes bland.

Respect!

The King of the Castle or Guru?

In which we learn about Sushi, the resident cat of 786 Hilal … and a bit about Kimchi, his nemesis.

Sushi is without doubt the king of the ‘castle’ that is 786 Hilal. In spite of his fishy name, he is, in our naturally partial view, a most splendid example of feline creatureliness.  

Of desi (native) stock, Sushi shows no traces of any exotic breed like the luxurious pelt or squashed face of pernickety Persians or the smoky aloofness of slinky Siamese. Sushi is a plain, common or garden variety, grey and white tabby. He’s not even especially handsome as the often pleasing symmetry of stripes in a tabby is, in his case, broken up on his snout by a small brownish coloured patch to the right. If one didn’t know better, one might be tempted to scrub this stain clean off his otherwise white fur. I somehow appreciate this half-hearted patch of colour, however, as if this minor blemish keeps Sushi within the realm of the mortal. For at times, Sushi reveals his alter ego as the resident Guru.

Sushi’s arrival was fraught with trauma. His mother had been a domesticated cat belonging to my sister-in-law’s daughter-in-law. As she was moving home she had to rehouse her cat and its litter of kittens, so we committed to taking in one and left the choice up to her.  While bringing him over to us, Rubina had kept him on her lap. Needing to swing by her old flat for a moment, as she opened the car door, Sushi shot off into the garage and disappeared. Rubina alerted all the residents to contact her should he be found. He managed to evade detection for two days before someone found him and called her. When he reached us, scrawny Sushi was plastered with car oil. Hissing and spitting, he was in no mood to accept any TLC, so we left him in my son Joshua’s room for a couple of days to acclimatize and calm down.

Once he was cleaned and able to eat, Sushi started to delight us all with his kittenish antics and friskiness. He soon endeared himself to us with his playful swipes and keen intelligence. His sense of humour was subtly elegant. Teasing the geckos was a favourite pastime of his, though he was far too gentle to actually eat them. Or far too spoilt. Or too chicken. Or an advanced practitioner of Ahimsa.

I soon realized that in comparison with other friends’ kittens which had been adopted straight off the street, Sushi had been advantaged in the pet stakes by being the son of an already domesticated feral cat. This was what lent him such an agreeable air of nonchalant domesticity. And being the only indoor pet he had the run of the house – barring the bedrooms – and soon came to regard 786 Hilal as his territory. 

Naturally we would all give him the appreciation due to the territorial sovereign. Kindness and respect to domestic animals is an Islamic ideal my family grew up with. In the traditions of Islam we hear tales of how the Prophet Muhammad respected cats, to the extent of once cutting his robe so as to leave a cat that had been sleeping upon his lap in undisturbed peace. Wherever my family had called home, cats would soon move in, unannounced and uninvited but always welcomed. It was easy to extend this courtesy to Sushi, so amenable did he seem to us.

In spite of his high status Sushi found himself unpleasantly upstaged a few years later by the arrival of Kimchi. Kimchi was another scrappy thing that had barely been weaned from its mother before its owners, some dear close friends, had to move abroad. This kitten had been earmarked as Sana’s pet but she had hardly had her for any length of time, and now, having to leave, I felt sorry for the little thing, ugly as she was. And so Kimchi came home to 786 Hilal.

To cut a long and sorry story short, oriental food names aside, the two cats had nothing in common and Sushi took an immediate and intense dislike to little Kimchi. Kimchi had zero feline social skills. She also unfortunately did not respond positively to our attempts to civilize her  - she was never able to welcome human stroking or trust us enough to hold back on hissing and spitting after one or two tickles behind her ear - and it began to dawn upon me that Kimchi’s fate was probably to become the outdoor cat and live in the garden and garage. 

Nonetheless Sushi went into an emotional tailspin and sank into a marked depression. He lost weight and his zest for life and took to moping around miserably. He made his displeasure known however by leaving his bowel evacuations everywhere. Gradually he became a shadow of his former self.

It took the eventual banishing of Kimchi to the garden and an entire summer’s worth of TLC from my husband Abbas to restore Sushi’s confidence in being king of his castle. While I was away with the children over the summer holidays, Abbas made sure to indulge Sushi by allowing him every night  into the bedroom, heretofore off-limits, talking to him and stroking him lovingly. When we returned from our holidays, Sushi had been restored to a credible reflection of his former self. And Abbas had been blessed by his feline presence, not to be sniffed at, in the absence of his own loved ones. Furthermore, Kimchi’s new status as ‘gata (cat in Spanish) non grata’ suited Sushi just fine!

One of the most loveable things about Sushi is that quality he shares with all felines: the ability to sleep and laze around, unperturbed by the hustle and bustle of the day.  And this quality is not just lovable but instructive. Whether it’s a lion digesting his fill of a kill in the Kalahari, or Sushi’s post-prandial napping, their ability to repose in utter stillness is something I envy. It takes a lot to slow me down and make me stop. And as Sushi has grown older and less frisky, I regard him with awe and appreciation for reminding me to stop and be still, to merely observe and do less. It’s a lesson I need to continually learn, so addicted am I to action. 

Sushi shows me how he gets what he wants simply by being true to his nature, effortlessly. Its this instinctual quality of beingness that his feline nature exudes that makes me elevate him to the status of a domestic Guru. His mode of being is to be totally in the moment - what the Sufis call ibn ul-waqt. And sometimes I even find myself pressing my hands together in a namaste salutation to him as I catch the ‘lesson’. But don’t tell the neighbours: they may think I’m apostasizing!

Reality Check Route

In which I share three poignant observations that strike me on my daily morning trip to the gym.*

Every morning after I’ve dropped off the children to school I make my way to the gym across Phase Four and Two. The route my driver takes ensures that every day we pass  through the same backroads of Defence. The familiarity is hypnotic. The grey boxy concrete structures do little to stimulate the senses. Occasionally new configurations of craters and cracks appear in the roads, but mostly we drive through these streets on autopilot. And occasionally the silence is punctuated by a sharp intake of breath as a car pulls out before us from a side-road, the hapless driver giving nary a glance around him or her. My driver has long since wisely learned to quell his fight or flight reflexes and maintains a dignified, if smoldering, silence.

Along the way to the gym and from there back on towards home there are three checkpoints  I  pass through. These are not military ‘checkpoints’ per se, though we are in Cantt (short for Cantonment - Raj nomenclature persists in the lingo), but have been designated thus by myself.  In case my inner state may be slightly off kilter, going through each one of them recalibrates my inner compass to 'Gratitude' in the north and 'Humility' in the south.

The first is the blind man who stands, come rain (and when is that?) or shine, along X street. Clad in shalvar qameez, his longish hair kept in place by a cap, he stands there for hours with one hand outstretched, the other leaning on a cane for support. I’ve never seen him arrive or leave. He’s just there. Every day. Under the baking sun, near the corner of his street and Sunset Boulevard. His blank expression seems dignified, maybe even aloof. Unlike other beggars working the traffic junctions in the Defence/Clifton area, he’s not being led around by a scrappy child, thrusting unseeing eyes into your car window. No: he just stands there and waits for whatever comes his way – not ever knowing whether it may be a car careening towards him out of the control of  some spotty underage driver (of whom there are shamefully far too many in our city), or if someone is giving him coins or notes.

His otherwordly demeanour is a daily salutary reminder of the most obvious fact in my life: there but for the grace of God go I.

The second checkpoint is a short strip which I’ve come to call the Conference of the Babas. Again, every day between three to eight bearded Babas with topis on their head gather along a street corner, united by the fact that they are all either paralyzed from the waist down or limbless. Each one sits perched in his own wooden cart, leading me to wonder whether there’s a hierarchy of models and add-ons to this range of vehicles.

What fascinates me is how does each individual earn their portion of the sadaqah distributed by the passersby. It’s a conundrum: do they band together in musketeer fashion and share out whatever is given equally? Or do they take turns to pocket the baksheesh? Do passers-by familiar with this group take this into account and make sure to give each and everyone of these hapless mendicants a portion?

Each Baba seems to pitch up without any guarantees of how much he’ll earn on a day. But pitch up they do. They banter. They smile and laugh. As they sit there they commune in a brotherhood that gives them hope and purpose in life. They've even planted chillis and corn behind them, homesteading this corner in a symbolic way.

The last checkpoint is the rows of itinerant workers – karigars – that line Gizri, that attenuated medieval version of ‘Homebase’. They line up along this strip of hardware stores like ribbons of dusty brown crows. Hunched up before colour charts with small piles of tools neatly stacked up beside them, they are doing what every humble creature does: testing providence. The hadith (sahih or da'if its the meaning that counts, not the soundness of provenance) comes to mind ‘Does a sparrow know from where it gets its sustenance of a day? And yet every morning it wakes and flies off in search of it.’ And finds it of course. 

Slightly less active than sparrows, these skilled and unskilled menfolk hunker down hoping for a day’s work that will give them honest bread. Sometimes I want to be able to tell all of them, ‘Come! I’ll give you work!’ But alas: neither am I in the construction industry, nor fortunate to be building my own home, nor so unfortunate that the home I live in requires massive daily maintenance (though I have invited the plumber to move in with us as we seem to need him on an almost daily basis!).  They sit there day in day out with trust and good expectation.

The Gizri flyover now obscures the row of hardware shops and the day labourers lining the street.

All three checkpoints remind me of what Allah says: ‘I am with my slave’s good opinion of me’. This was my grandmother’s mantra – may Allah rest her soul in peace. She took stock from this hadith qudsi and overcame disappointment, fear and anxiety through it. Like her too this teaching is one of my own pillars of faith. Have the best expectation of Allah – not of creation, but of the Creator. The Creator’s agenda may differ from yours, so best delegate even the expectations to that power that knows what is ultimately best for us.

Daily I am humbled at these checkpoints. Daily my heart is prevented from becoming blasé and cynical. Daily these reminders invoke in me profound gratitude that is purified of any complacency or smugness. And daily I say prayers that these folks may find the sustenance they need. While the gymming gives my body the workout it needs, this reality check route is a daily tonic to my ego-self’s outlook. And I always return home in a cloud of humble reverence.

*This was written in about 2008/9. Of the people I mention here,  only the blind beggar has moved. My kids have since moved onto other schools and I no longer gym at the same place. Any foray into those areas still invokes the same effect, however. 

Our Afghan Neighbours

In which is told the story of a refugee family from Afghanistan that lives on the knife edge of destitution.

About six months after we’d settled into 786 Hilal and familiarized ourselves with the neighbourhood, I realised that there was in fact an Afghan refugee family residing on the empty plot in front of our home. Not just a couple of men, but a whole family, minus its head. The plot in which they had made their encampment has an intriguing topography of pits and rock formations, affording ample nooks and crannies for homeless people to bed down in relative safety for the night or, indeed, build makeshift shelters out of thorny bushes and discarded bath tubs, as they had done.

This family caught my attention because it was not the usual motley crew of adolescent scavengers busily providing Defence with its unofficial recycling service: it comprised a burqa-clad mother, a teenage adolescent boy, a strikingly handsome beanpole of a younger lad and a cute little girl with raggedy-muffin sun-bleached hair.

Every day we’d come across this family doing something or other in our neighbourhood or  street. Concern for their welfare caused me to engage. We started by letting the kids come to our house every day for water. Food and money would occasionally come their way from 786 Hilal. They started storing some of their stuff down at the servants’ quarters. The mother never ever emerged from her black burqa, nor could she speak Urdu. The oldest son was clearly mentally disturbed in some way. He was by no means dysfunctional, but it seemed unlikely that he would ever be capable of an independent life.  The mother’s spokesperson was the handsome, smiling young lad who spoke plausible Urdu.

After several conversations with him, I realised that 'he' was in fact a short-cropped girl. Yagana* was beautiful, with fine chiseled features and green eyes, her skin slowly accumulating scars from life on the street, her coltish frame muffled in a boys’ loose shalvar qameez. But for how long, I wondered. Puberty was bound to set in sooner or later, and then what? Given that they were prey to all manner of unscrupulous opportunists, it was too gruesome to think about. The youngest, Sholah, was a sparkly happy-go-lucky creature who seemed to think that life was a big adventure and grinned incessantly.

Gradually I managed to get their story. The woman’s husband had been a traffic cop in Kabul before he had fled to Pakistan with his family, probably towards the late 90’s. Like many de-racinated Afghans he fell into scavenging the garbage heaps of Karachi to sustain his family from selling recyclable garbage.  Misfortune greater than what had already befallen them then struck and he was forced to endure an amputation of half a leg due, it seems, to bone cancer (or was it gangrene?). He died shortly thereafter, leaving his family adrift and homeless. How they came to settle in our area I never found out, but they made a life for themselves here, managing to avoid harassment by the police, for periods of time at least; every now and then the police would come and turf them out of their temporary shelter and then they would mooch about forlornly outside a local mosque.

In spite of living on the streets, the mother never once abandoned her burqa. One day, while sitting on my lawn, I managed to persuade her to pull it up to let me see her. As she gathered the cloth up I noticed her fingernails were painted a crimson red, though chipped. Her fair face was careworn but beautiful. She was probably in her mid-thirties but her delicate features had been prematurely wrinkled by the toll of this hand to mouth existence and she looked more like 60. She seemed unable to maintain eye-contact, looking far away, but not seeing anything at all other than, perhaps, the tragedy of her life.

Naturally their plight affected me greatly and, as you might expect, I thought that there ought to be a solution to this problem. Problems exist to be solved, right? Proper shelter was the obvious starting point. With board and lodging sorted, the children might be able to attend school. Through my capable sister-in-law we arranged something with the Edhi Foundation. The mother and older son would work in the kitchens, the family would receive housing and food and the youngest two would go to school. It seemed perfect.

But not to the mother. She refused point blank.

I had suspected that living on the streets for too long a period can actually make one afraid of settling back into society. Her behaviour often betrayed a functional level of paranoia. In spite of the hardships, I also recognised that there was a certain perverse freedom associated with existing beyond the fringes of normal society. Then there’s also a point beyond which it becomes almost impossible to be rehabilitated into regular society, and maybe this woman had reached this point.

I tried another tack: repatriation. Phone calls to the UN refugee commission yielded an arrangement to board one of the many buses that were then being organized for repatriation to Afghanistan. I was thrilled with the possibility for them to return home.

Yagana’s mother was not. ‘We have enemies in Kabul. They want to do away with us. Why would I want to go back?’

Enemies? I was nonplussed. No amount of reasoning made the idea appeal to her.

Through the servants’ grapevine I found out that she did in fact have relatives in Sohrab Goth, a suburb to the north-west of Karachi with a predominantly Afghan population. They were her husband’s relatives, but that they had turfed her out and warned her never to return else they would burn her alive. Since this destitute family had lived on the streets for so long, the relatives could not accept the possibility that their izzat (sense of honour) might have been compromised.

One day the mother turned up in a faint. She claimed that an Afghan man had tried to molest her and ripped her shalvar with a razor in an effort to gain access to her body. She was beside herself. Through the servant grapevine I’d come to learn that all the locally based Afghani scavengers held her in contempt and insisted she was mad. But clearly she and her children would remain vulnerable if they remained on the streets.

One day something happened in our relationship that put a huge distance between us. I’d set out a tablecloth in our driveway to feed the family – it was Ramadan. For some reason the girls were inside while the mother and her son ended up being locked out on the outside. The girls were beside themselves with fear that they might be separated from their mother and started to bawl and shriek. I told the guard to let them out and off they scarpered.

Things soured further: after demanding some money from our chowkidar (guard) – money he didn’t have for I had not left anything with him to give her – she pelted the gate with rocks, denting the panels. This sat very badly with our servants who took this as the last straw and withdrew their willingness to help this family out.

Gradually I let go of the idea of ‘solving’ this family’s problems. Clearly they had become accustomed to this life and clearly the mother was in charge. As long as the kids perceived her as the director of their affairs there was nothing we could do. I tried to plant some seeds of ambition for an education in Yagana, but I had no way of knowing when and how these would bear fruit. I’d sit the girls down and give them books to colour. I’d preach homilies about how reading and writing were essential to get on in life. They would smile and colour for a bit but then disappear off on errands.

Coming across them day after day was a constant reminder of my failure to ‘do good’. But I accepted this decree. Who was I to alter this particular part of the pattern of the universe? The mother was clearly deranged – who wouldn’t be after such loss, grief, fear and the sheer business of survival? As long as she led this family, they were condemned to remain on the streets which perversely felt safer to her than being among her compatriots.

Then they disappeared. Vanished. Days and months went by. My enquiries eventually yielded the following: their relatives had finally found them and taken them home to Sohrab Goth to look after them. They had apparently spent several years looking for them, always missing them. The stories we'd been told about them being ready to kill Yagana and her family had not been true after all. I was glad. At last the kids would have the nurture and protection they needed.

My relief was short-lived. Driving past a local mosque one day I noticed the family sitting outside. By now Yagana had indubitably become a woman and could no longer hide in men’s clothes. Furthermore, it transpired a young Afghan man had fallen in love with her and vowed to wed her. The mother resisted the idea but the man persisted. We helped him with the rent on a one room home which he had secured for their use. Yagana planned to take Sholah away with her. And so she did.

News came almost a year later that Yagana had given birth to a boy. Sholah was now living with her. And going to school!

Yagana’s mother and brother are back in Defence. Doing the same things as before, wandering around, picking things up, selling them, accepting sadaqah, visiting the local ‘hotels’ for food, and bedding down for the night between the thorny kheekar of empty plots. The last time I saw her, she’d finally pushed her burqa up onto her head, the better to free her arms to pick over refuse and carry things.

Sholah was not back with her. I can but hope and pray that with Yagana’s help they have managed to settle into a semblance of a safe family life.

Photo of a garden near Bam courtesy of Patricia Omidian, Medical Anthropologist & Focuser.

*Names have been changed.