Where are the stars?

When a 12-year old boy from Jabal Al Akhdhar visited Muscat for the first time in his life, he was wide-eyed from what he saw around him and every tall building and shopping mall was a new experience to him.

He was full of questions that his big brother could not keep up with all of his inquisitiveness. He said the buildings were as big as the mountains back home and the inside of shopping malls was ‘full of fun.” He did not want to go back to his brother’s house in the evening.
For three days, he was constantly out and asking his brother to take him everywhere. On the fourth night, his brother found him missing in his bedroom and he feared that he walked out of the house. An hour later, he found him his sitting silently on the roof. When he asked him why, the little boy just pointed to the night sky.

The brother did not see anything up there but darkness. When he asked him what he was really looking at, he just remained silent for a few minute before saying that there were no stars in the city’s sky. Then the boy got up and went down to sleep. Early in the morning, the boy went back to the roof and this time he was looking for the sunrise. The tall buildings, he found out, completely obscured the horizon
He refused to have breakfast and demanded his brother to drive him back straight to his home town. He was supposed to stay in Muscat for a month during his summer school holiday but lasted less than a week. When the schools were opened for the new academic year, he was asked by his teacher if he enjoyed his summer holiday in Muscat.

He told him that the city was ‘against the beauty of the nature’ and he would not go back again there. But as life would have it, the same boy was forced to leave his home town six year later after completing his secondary education. Since there was no university at Jabal Akhdhar and he was keen to get into higher education, he had to leave his hometown.

However, he decided not to get a scholarship in Muscat but chose to get enrolled in a University in the United States. His parents were baffled. How their small town son chose to study in New York instead of Muscat when he already complained of tall buildings that secure the beauty of the nature?

Their son did not offer an answer and that baffled his parents even more. He arrived in New York and soon found himself surrounded, like his email explained to his brother, with buildings that nearly touched the clouds. His brother was amused but decided to let him figure out his problems. The only worry he had that his younger brother was in a foreign country.

Almost twenty years later now, I caught up with him accidentally only last week after being introduced to him by one of his former university colleagues. He is now a director general in one of the civil ministries. He offered an explanation saying that the skyline in Muscat, when he was seven, was dictated by the fact it was right in his own country.

But the skyline in New York was a revelation and his imagination then was no longer dictated by nature but for the knowledge he was seeking to advance his ambitions. As it has turned out, he is an engineer with a responsibility of urban planning where tall buildings threaten to obscure the beauty of the nature.