99 names: al Aziz: the Victorious i

january, the first month of the judea christain calendar. any day could be the first and any the last. my boro bhaiya's first was a few days back, he reached the number of guns preferred by rappers in their alter-egos. 

my alter ego is that which you see in pictures, that which hides the Victorious.

hands over my face, i am learning the disicpline of keeping hidden to become, to be Victorious, to be more than and at the same time less than, the begining and end. 

all praise is given by way of bowing, my abbu tells me. bowing requires cleanse. cleanse prepares for the journey to the Victoious.

meditations on 99 names, i've been meditating Victorious under snow falls, behind cliques and plans for the party later. om  i say, hands together, in bowing to the Victorious in them. i'll pass. 

i pass, walk through desolate upstate towns, from trailer parks to farms hustling chickens, to oak-lined suburban strips of pure beauty, where houses appear to be built by monet's and van gogh's, comissioned to paint brush home. yet instead of a daily communal celebration of this collective beauty, of sharing, of dinners and weddings, and making paratha together, silence. neighbors are partitioned by invisible walls of private property, beware. perhaps a wave, hello and small talk, 

i walk, continuing to the Victorious, neither falling into a strut nor a spell. no anxiety about police with necks fatter than boars, nor burning crosses, nor gun claps on my sacrum. 

sacred protects me until i reach the village home of my parents, their parents...into ancestry, into ancient mathematics that i study in the constellations from the bamboo chair my chachima has made and lines the mud hut of my fathers childhood. 

the code to Victorious is always the same, usually lost on westerners - white, black, brown, yellow - who come to these parts for anthropoology or spirit or product or commodification. they leave wih books and films and ashram-ideas, and recipes for restuarants and expertise to validate their certificates, degrees, papers on official. 

the code to Victorious is always the same - shhhhhhh....