Qat 4 Sana ani Qat and an Adeni Lunch

Yemenat

Ahmad Saif Hashed

It took time, no small amount of it, to mend what that shocking moment at the very outset of my stay in Sana’a had broken and damaged in my soul.

I needed a period of recovery, a chance to regain my balance and to bridge the gap left by what happened during my very first qat session in the city. It was a wound that kept bleeding, leaving a deep mark on both myself and my companion in ideals and convictions, Jazim Al Areeqi.

I can no longer recall with certainty how long that recovery took, though it was long by my own standards of forgiveness and forgetting, even when some wounds refuse to heal completely.

I called Mohammed Al Mutari and invited him to lunch and qat on a Thursday, driven by a sense of gratitude for the generosity he had shown me during our previous meeting and the events that followed.

I wanted to repay him, twice over if I could. I did not know then that I would end up swallowing a far greater dose of embarrassment than I had ever imagined, along with a recklessness wholly unexpected.

I chose Thursday for the qat gathering. It marks the midpoint where the week begins to loosen its grip.

I wanted to repay a favor long overdue and to settle a debt that weighed heavily on me. Fridays I usually spent trying to recover from sleeplessness and exhaustion, and I needed Saturday and Sunday to erase what the body had endured.

One single qat session was enough to sap my strength for half a week before I could return to myself again.

I was accustomed, more often than not, to marshaling my reasons and insisting firmly on abstaining from qat. Yet whenever I was compelled