Sindi

I decided to do a post about each of my daughters this holiday season, one before Ramadan, the other after Eid.  I flipped a coin, and Kesho came first (see the link below)  with Sindi second.  It is Sindi's time now!

For a long time, I figured Sindi was destined to be a weirdo.  She was always very earnest, but she swerved a bit around middle school. She took to wearing mismatched socks, and would've been a "goth" if she knew what that was.  We were quite concerned about her, but time took care of this slight detour. 

Sindi is the younger of our two daughters, and she was always serious and at times irreverent. She  looked after her older sister, and was very responsible from an early age. I didn't know how to communicate with her for a long time, and when I did learn, it involved mostly listening. I remember coming into the living room one evening seeing sitting in the middle of the floor with a forlorn look on her face.  When I asked what was wrong, she replied "I have no car, I have no money, I have only Kesho!"  I didn't know what to say to that, so I went back to my room.  On another occasion, I came back into that same room to find her singing a Johnny Cash tune, just in time to hear her belt out "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die", and once again had no response other than retreating back to my room.

As Sindi grew older, she remained serious and developed a degree of impatience with the world around her. She caught a curious disease many young intelligent people are susceptible to, Preposterism - a term coined by Jacques Barzun for the condition where one just cannot understand why the rest of the world doesn't see the blatantly obvious around them.  Sindi was constantly frustrated by this, the ineptness surrounding her.  But like many critical people, she was driven by a large, caring heart and endless compassion for the less fortunate.  I saw this from an early age, and it has not waned.

Sindi is developing into a very intelligent and compassionate young woman who is learning to cope with her less astute peers and parents.  She is very diligent about most things, and has an usually clear sense of her morality and ethics.  Her world is still a bit dichotomous - things are either trivial or massively important, but she is learning a little more about human politics.  She wants to go to London and study after high school, and I have no doubt she will.  I am not sure if she knows exactly what she will do for the rest of her life, but it will be done with a lot of gusto and laughter.  I am very proud of her and I cannot wait to see what life has in store for her, or more likely, vice versa.