“I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours”
― Bob Dylan
As we approached our first sunset in the unique town of Fez, we scrambled to find a place to get a bird’s eye view of the entire city. A quick search of adjacent rooftop bars and restaurants brought our very own Riyad’s rooftop bar to the top of the search list, no pun intended.
We quickly hurried up to the terrace and were greeted by a spectacular 360 panorama of balconies with clotheslines, thousands of video dish antennas sprinkled like dust on the rooftops, and a cityscape that gradually rose upwards all around us putting us at the center of a fishbowl like experience.
This uniform landscape of diverse rooftops was interrupted intermittently by mosque minarets, peeking their heads up like gophers in a dried-up meadow.
As we soaked in our remarkable surroundings, we noticed two young girls who were rope-skipping on the balcony just across from us. Since I was standing with a camera and tripod, they noticed and uttered a strong “No!”. I obliged, and took the camera away from line of sight.
For the next 30 minutes, we played charades with the girls, desperately trying to communicate a slice of each others’ lives without much success, but successfully managing to impart a little bit of curiosity and a little momentary happiness to each other.
The time of iftar drew near and the skies around us erupted in a symphony of azaans from the surrounding minarets. Night fell on Fez and folks hurried to their homes to break their fasts.
As the yellow houses of Fez lit up their blue windows, we were left wondering what would it be like if we could communicate a sliver of our lives with each and every person’s life in each one of those blue windows surrounding us.
