To be a pilgrim

Farhang, Quentin and I are transformed beings. We have just been on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Not only are we transformed spiritually, but physically as well. Because some goon , whose name begins with F, instead of bringing the factor 74 lotion necessary for the scorching Israeli sun, brought along a jumbo tube of haemmorrhoid ointment without its label on. So not only did we all get hideously burned on our first day, the skin on our faces shrivelled up like organic apricots. We spent the entire trip resembling those iron age shepherds whose bodies, after being garrotted in ritual sacrifices, are dug up intact thousands of years later from peat bogs by amateur archaeologists on Channel 4.

I have to say we were nervous about going to the Holy Land in the current climate - 38 degrees in the shade and no breeze is a daunting prospect for palefaces like ourselves. Quentin is so pale he’s often spontaneously picked up by ambulances on the street and offered an emergency blood transfusion. That’s what a diet of mung bean and watercress juice does for you. Farhang fares a little better because of his swarthy complexion. But that got us into trouble at the airport. I repeatedly warned him about wearing his latest fashion accessories - the red and white spotted Arafat-style bandana and wraparound sunglasses. ‘You’re asking for trouble,’ I told him as we stepped into the airport terminal to check in. But would he listen to his always-right flatmate? Sure enough, faster than a Rafael Nadal ace shot, four security guards with what looked like Kalashnikovs had him pinned to the floor. ‘Get off, get off,’ whined Farhang, his face pressed to the tiles so that he resembled a strange Hall of Mirrors distortion of himself. ‘You’ve squashed the Snickers bar in my pocket, you brutes. I’ll sue!’

‘What’s your name, terrorist scumbag, and where are you from?,’ shouted one of the guards. ‘That’s Mr Scumbag to you, mateychops,’ retorted my fearless flatmate, provoking one of the guards to engage his wedding ring with Farhang’s flaring nostrils.

After several hours in custody, we managed to convince the guards that yes, this was our flatmate, yes he is an upright citizen (except when he’s being pinned to the floor) and the only thing he knew about explosives was how to microwave popcorn. Farhang’s shoelaces were returned and we were freed to get on the plane and wend our way to the land of milk and honey. Or the land of falafel and…well, falafel.

I have of course been to Haifa before having done a year of service in janatorial before I went to uni. Much has changed in the last two years, not least that whoever took over my duties employs a totally different method of cleaning the chandelier in the reception concourse of the Seat of the Universal House of Justice. How dare they leave a clockwise smear? That wouldn’t have happened in my day.

Needless to say the nine days passed like a dream. The shrines, the terraces, the gardens, the beautiful pilgrim from Bolivia who selflessly shared her orange segments with me in the Ridvan garden.

It was in the Monument Gardens that I remembered the prayer which says your wishes will be granted. I, of course, wished to be able to speak Spanish instantly so I could speak to the beautiful pilgrim from Bolivia (and tell her I am not that fond of oranges - next time try lychees - now that’s a fruit). Farhang looked very perturbed as we left the Monument Garden. ’How many wishes do you think God will grant?’ he asked.

’Just the one I guess,’ I replied, actually doubting the power of the prayer since my ability to speak Spanish wasn’t noticeably improved.

’Well that was a waste…’ said Farhang, ‘There was this mosquito bugging me the whole time in the garden and I thought, I wish you’d go away. And it did! Now I’ve wasted my wish and I can’t have another pilgrimage for ten years!’

We consoled ourself in a sidewalk cafe, with several sizzling balls of, you guessed it, falafel and some radioactive green peppers which brought even more colour to our already sun-scorched faces.

Apart from that little spiritual test, and the familiar large spiritual test of travelling with the two urchins I call my flatmates, pilgrimage was great. It gave us a glimpse of what a future Bahá’í world will be like - all the peoples of the world walking up and down staircases on a mountainside, smiling through their teeth as their calf muscles scream for blessed relief.

’When do you think we’ll meet the Queen of Carmel?’ asked Farhang earnestly on the last night as we mingled outside the Pilgrim House with our new friends.

’Go to Terrace 19…’ I pointed to the top of the mountain, ‘and call out to Zion. I’ve heard that’s when she appears.’ Later, when Farhang failed to return to our seedy hostel room in the Hadar, we assumed that his night-time intoning had probably alarmed the neighbourhood and he was now once again at the mercy of men in uniforms. When he rolled in at dawn he told us that the Queen of Carmel had indeed arrived - he had met the beautiful pilgrim from Bolivia and they had spent the night talking in a café, saying prayers together at the top of the mountain and watching the sun rise over the plain of Meggido. They are now fervently ‘investigating each others characters with marriage in mind.’ I felt sick.

‘It was very mysterious,’ said Farhang, ‘I suddenly found I could speak almost perfect Spanish!’ And then I realised for the first time I had been in Israel I hadn’t been bitten to pieces by mosquitoes. I am now writing to the Universal House of Justice to see if there’s such a thing as getting a crossed line while praying.

The Exam Season

“I never, never want to do another exam again in my life,” screamed Quentin as he burst through the front door, “…never, ever, not ever!” And with that he hurled his battered satchel to the ground, rupturing the packet of organic puy lentils therein contained, spraying the tiny protein-packed pellets pell-mell all over the floor. “Don’t worry about it, Quentin” blustered Farhang, who rushed off in search of Darth Maul, our terrifying cat, who in his declining years is turning into the Dyson vacuum cleaner of the feline world.

This is the kind of tantrum from Quentin that my peculiar classmate in the University Drama Society would call a ‘hissy fit’. We haven’t had the misfortune of witnessing one for a while - not since the student’s Christmas Carol Concert when some hapless campanologist rang his handbell so enthusiastically during a rousing chorus of ‘Ding Dong Merrily’, that its clapper flew out, whizzed past the conductor’s head, narrowly avoiding toppling his toupée, and hit Quentin, seated in the front row, smack bang in the front teeth, mid-Gloria-in-excelsis. But that outburst was nothing compared to this one.

“Why, oh why do we have to do exams? I hate them! I loathe them! They’re so unfair…so…third epoch.” (I am not entirely sure whether the fifth epoch promises a more egalitarian way of assessing people’s intellectual capacity). “I agree,” moaned Farhang, whose English was so dubious when he first came here that when the teacher told him he was going to have an examination he dropped his trousers and stuck his tongue out.

“I mean I wouldn’t mind if they were going to get me a job or something at the end of this stupid degree course…” bewailed Quentin, and aye, there was the rub. For our friend has just spent the last three years studying Applied Macrobiotic Cookery - a science that begins and ends in herbs - and, deep down, I think he’s worried about what to do next.

“You can be anything you want to be,” said I, plucking words from the air and realising that this was the title of a self-help book I saw the other day in the Popular Psychology section of Waterstones. The authors were called Tammy and Troy Grabhorn and the picture of them on the cover suggested that this couple had really self-helped themselves - to just about every kind of cosmetic surgery available to their bulging best-seller bank balance. “I mean,” I continued plucking titles, “Feel the fear and do it anyway! Hurry your life is waiting! End the struggle and dance with life! Er…The road less travelled….” I drifted off into an incoherent mumble. Emotional intelligence is not one of my strengths.

You see, exams do strange things to people and we all have different ways to cope. When I was at school, just before entering my English exam, my classmate Pratt (by name and, I am sad to say, by nurture) told me he had already conceived what his creative writing essay would be. It was a lengthy saga about his pet parrot. When I saw the given title on the exam paper was ‘A view of bridges’ I wondered how Pratt would fare. Later I asked him what he had written. ‘Easy,’ he replied, ‘I began the essay - “Bridges is the name of my pet parrot”. And Pratt, not surprisingly flunked English.

I have to say I also panic somewhat when facing exams. My driving test was a fiasco. Approaching the end of the session, my examiner quizzed me, ‘If you drive through a deep puddle and your brakes get wet, how would you dry them off,’ I broke out in terminal perspiration. ‘Er…a towel?’ I ventured. That was test number one. The next four were not much better.

But I suppose examinations do serve a purpose. Perhaps, I muse, they are the material manifestation of a spiritual reality - uh-oh Roscoe is getting profound. If you need to know how well you have learned a lesson, taken something in, internalised knowledge, gained understandings - well, it’s quite a good thing to be tested, isn’t it?

“No it’s not!” snapped Quentin, “I’ve been making perfect mung bean rissoles all year at home and what happens in the exam? Total internal collapse followed by spontaneous combustion. It looked like I learned my craft from the Stephen King Cookbook! I couldn’t even get away with the ‘Persians call it tadik’ excuse!”

Such is student life. Or was. This is the last Roscoe’s World from our serene student household. Who knows where we’ll be when I file my next missive, as we embark into the big, wide world. Good luck everyone with your exams.

Virtually in Love

Recently, our Auxiliary Board member for Protection, the enchanting Sepideh von Wittgenstein (half-German, half-Persian who's very careful about her choice of language) asked me if I would consider being her assistant with special responsibility for youth problems - in other words, (mine not hers), my flatmates Quentin and Farhang.

I watched Farhang's large face drain of its default aubergine hue, as he thought - having grown up in a pioneering family in Sicily - that the Protection Board is a posse of unsmiling, middle-aged men in voluminous pin-striped suits who come round and threaten to shoot your grandmother unless you give them money. "That's no way to speak of Herbie," moaned Quentin, who thought Farhang was talking about the Florida-born treasurer of our LSA and who is living proof that you can take the man out of Miami but you can't take Miami out of the man. As I attempted to untangle my beloved friends' crossed wires, a letter plopped onto the doormat in mysterious Hogwarts stylee. Checking the skies above for signs of owls, I wrested the letter from the clenched incisors of our terrifying cat, Darth Maul, and opened it to find a hand-written note. "Dearly loved and highly esteemed Roscoe," it read, (and who am I to argue?) "In your oh so wise opinion, what do you think about relationships between Bahá'ís from distant places, who primarily meet on the internet, in Bahá'í chat rooms, but who have never met in real life. If they truly care about each other and are in love...could it be called a relationship or is it technically not a relationship if they have never met?"

Well, I thought - remembering to let deeds not words be my adorning - if I am to answer this question appropriately then I had better take the chance myself at getting into an internet relationship. So, I ran a search on google on a few key words - Bahá'í, single, chat, dating, Ben and Jerry's (well you have to have some tastes in common) - and came up with a site called www.unrestrained_wind.com - the 'place for young Bahá'ís to find love and nudge nudge more'. After entering my details into the form, almost the first potential internet partner I encountered was a very sweet sounding girl called Helga. 'I am 19 years old, petite, blonde-haired with an unusual personality. I love nature, reading and thrash metal. Would like to write to a Bahá'í boy my age. Must be patient and have good sense of humour.' OK Helga here I come! (Although I am not so sure about the thrash metal - maybe she could get to like Kylie in time). And so I write. 'Dear Helga. My name is Roscoe. I am 21, finishing off my studies and trying to be a good Bahá'í. I live in a basement - but Bahá'u'lláh tells us to fear not abasement ha ha - (I thought that might demonstrate my good sense of humour...or not) - with my two sad flatmates Farhang and Quentin. I hope to take a year out when I finish my degree to go travelling to some remote part of the world where I can be as far away from my flatmates as possible! What are your thoughts on marriage? Warmest Bahá'í love, Roscoe' I've learned that it pays to be direct.

One evening went by, then another, as I eagerly awaited a reply in my inbox. Then, on the third evening, acrid smoke began billowing out of my wireless router - the Vatican 4000 - a time-honoured sign that a message had arrived. 'Dear Roscoe. Thank you for your email. I am sorry I haven't written sooner but I was out of action yesterday having my treatment. (Treatment?!) You see I am in this institution and I want to leave. Do you think you could send me $400 so I can come and fly to your country and live with you. You're my only hope to make a new start. I love you, Helga xxx.' Well, I have to say when Helga - 'unusual personality' - said her dream man 'must be patient' I didn't realise she meant the noun not the adjective. And what about the 'xxx', not I hasten to add a reference to Vin Diesel but, I fear, an expression of not altogether sound feelings (or a typo she had crossed out, but I doubt it.)

I wrote back. 'Dear Helga. Sorry to hear you're unwell. I hope you get better soon. I actually am skint and engaged to be married to someone very soon so sorry I can't help. Yours faithfully, Roscoe.' Phew. Got out of that one. Sorry Bahá'u'lláh, is it acceptable to tell a little white lie to get out of a difficult situation? I'll wait a few decades to see my tablet of chrysolite for the answer if that's alright. Just as I was about to write back to the writer of the original letter with some words of unadulterated wisdom about how they shouldn't kid themselves about internet 'relationships', Quentin came through into my room with a smile the shape and size of a plantain stretched across his pinched, vegan face. 'Hey Roscoe, we have a visitor coming tomorrow!'

'Who is it?' I asked.

'Her name's Mariella Diablo. She's from Spain. I've kind of been getting to know her on the internet.'

'What?!'

'Yeh, you know those yams I bought at the greengrocers the other week. I was looking on www.rasta_vegans.com to find a decent recipe, and I went into the chatroom to read tips on the best way to steam vegetables and I got into this conversation and she's...she's like wonderful, man.'

'And she's coming to stay?!'

'Yeh and she's bringing like some really hard-to-get pulses and beans from Spain that you can't find over here.'

'But Quentin, how do you feel about it?'

'I really can't wait to taste them'

'Not the vegetables, you goon, the...er...relationship.'

'It's amazing. It's like our souls were kneaded together at conception into a great wholemeal loaf. I just wouldn't have known that anyone so amazing could exist...I really must thank whoever it was invented the internet. Who was it?'

'I really don't know...' though if I was in the mood for awe and wonderment I would say God and Bahá'u'lláh, of course, because how else can the world become more united.

So now we await the arrival of Senorita Diablo. Quentin has polished all our best utensils and Farhang has promised not to scrunch his Y-fronts behind the towel rack as he is wont to do when he takes a shower and then leaves them there for weeks - for the duration of her stay. And I sit poised to reply to my correspondent about whether internet relationships can work. And for Quentin's sake, I really hope they do.

Me? Well I think I'll just have to go to Landegg and see if there are any sane, Scandinavian law students ready for commitment and a good sense of humour.

 By Roscoe

For four months now our normally peaceful, virtually soporofic, student existence has been rocked to its core by the incessant chatter of crazy beats and sub-bass booming from the subterranean recesses of Farhang’s bedroom, known affectionately as the Síyáh-Chál because "no pen can depict that place, nor any tongue describe its loathsome smell."

Farhang and his college friend Aziz have decided that they are about to be the next big thing on the music scene and have, thanks to Aziz’s dodgy brother Salim who runs a highly successful jewellery and perfume outlet from a suitcase on the High Street, kitted themselves out with the latest drum machine, turntables and keyboard technology.

Asking me to describe the sounds emanating from behind the iron grill in Farhang’s door would be like asking TV gastronaut Delia Smith to comment on Quentin’s mung bean casserole - in other words, I wouldn’t have the words to know where to begin. Even our terrifying cat Darth Maul, who I would have thought would seek out such blood-curdling sounds, has found every reason to be out of the house when Aziz comes round.

"Face it Roscoe," yelled Farhang at me one day after I told him I would rather eat my trainers than listen to his music, "You are a snob. You listen to your poncey Portugese Fado music and obscure Somalian pop and when it comes to me, expressing the essence of my soul through the medium of technobabble, or whatever it’s called, you dismiss it as if it was some foul odour wafting past your up-in-the-air nostrils."

"Yeah, right," I snapped before throwing my minestrone Cup-a-Soup over Farhang for being rude to me - and for being right. I was not in the mood for a discussion on the merits of music which to my ears sounds like a fleet of mechanical diggers ripping apart a mattress factory.

"But this is what the Faith needs!" protested Farhang, wiping the coagulated spaghetti hoops from his raging forehead, "How often have you said the music at Bahá’í events is awful... now here’s our chance to do something that will make the kids sit up and listen!"

"...and will make the adults leave to join the Quakers," I retorted.

I know I am perhaps being unreasonable, and yes, Farhang’s right, we have all - have we not - sat through the excruciating pain of a five year old inflicting their violin scales and arpeggios on us at Feast or the former-hippy-now-52-year-old in floral-print shirt, cowboy boots, (worse still, his trousers tucked in!), singer-songwriter with acoustic guitar giving us his rendition of "Lay me down my weeping soul at the gates of Shiraz".

And yes, of course we must allow everybody to express their faith through the medium which most speaks to them and their generation. But that, Farhang, to my ears, is not music. It’s the kind of industrial waste which governments make international treaties about.

Anyway, how wrong can a man be. There we were at the national Bahá’í youth conference - Point of No Return 2005 - and the moment came when Farhang and Aziz were to make their debut as the self-titled Heavenly Mullet Brothers.

After much backstage shuffling about and microphone feedback, the curtains parted to reveal our two friends, in silver shell-suits, submerged in dry ice.

The kids went mad, as if none other than Kanye West himself had entered our midst - or mist in this instance. The beat kicked in, the synths chattered and pinged, and Aziz took off on a flight of high-octane rap where I was able to make out the occasional word such as "mad-cheddar", "gats", "bling", "Ramallah" and "Bagpuss".

Three minutes later and the crowd were wild, screaming, throwing their Ruhi books in the air, non-Bahá’í visitors declaring, otherwise respectable members of senior institutions jumping up and down - it was a miracle to behold.

"Well Farhang," I told my flatmate later, "You certainly proved me wrong... I was actually... well... quite proud of you."

"Aw thanks Roscoe," sniffed Farhang. "I knew you’d see sense... Oh and by the way..."

"What?"

"The kids loved our music so much that we decided to have a weekly dance-trance fireside here in our house..."

Fantastic. Just let me know the day so I can join Darth Maul out on the street.

By Roscoe