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"Heed thy thoughts, for they will become words,

Heed thy words, for they will become deeds,

Heed thy deeds, for they will become habits,

Heed thy habits, for they will become character,

Heed thy character, for it will become DESTINY."

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I remember it like it happened yesterday … Perhaps it is not quite the most appropriate phrase to begin with, a cliché some would say, but truth be told, there is no other phrase that crosses my mind, to better express what I feel. It did not happen yesterday, it happened ten years ago, but when one is given the chance to experience something so intense, something unprecedented and unheard-of, something that permanently changes the course of one's life, this is the feeling that one is left with. The aftermath of such an event is so fierce, and the impact so much stronger than your own will, that you find yourself reliving the same moment every morning, over and over again, for the rest of your life. I suppose a better way to put it would be … it feels as though it happened yesterday.

Society today is governed by an intricate system of laws, both natural and man-made, written and implied, the latter varying from one century to the other, changing as mankind steps forward into the future, for the better or for the worse. According to these implied, unwritten laws, each person could know, more or less, what to expect in life. For instance, a most general law belonging to this category says that there are events in life that are bound to be experienced only by the rich and others that are bound to be experienced only by the poor. Of course, there are always the exceptions but in the end, at least in theory, a logical solution can be found at all times. However, when unnatural forces make their appearance in our lives, it does not matter if you are rich or poor, young or old. No matter who you might be and no matter what you would do, you simply cannot accept it as such. People need to understand everything that happens to them, and around them, and so, when something extraordinary happens in one's life, one always asks oneself two simple questions: "How?" and "Why?".

I myself make no exception. Like everyone else, I asked myself, first of all, "How?" and even though, to this day, I have not received an answer that would satisfy my curiosity and comply to my expectations, or to better say, correspond to my own version, the question "Why?" has always been the one bothering me the most. For ten years I have tried to come up with a plausible reason of my own but my mind is apparently incapable of producing one. Maybe this is it, the true reason is not one to be understood by the mind of a mere mortal. If such is the case, then I suppose I will just have to content myself with the ambiguous answers I have already received, such as: "It is the will of the gods" or "It is your destiny".

A pragmatic individual would probably ask himself only "How?" being more interested in the laws of physics that would allow such a phenomenon to occur, but I have always lingered over the question "Why?" more, as a consequence of the lack of confidence I used to have in myself and the general pessimistic attitude that defined my character. Most say it is a matter of will to change your own concepts regarding yourself, and discover your special qualities that would make you unique, and therefore perfect, but there are times when the situation is simply out of your hands. Unimaginable times, when you have so much to offer, but there is no one willing to accept it.

I was twenty-four years old back in the summer of 1923 and for the first time in the course of my passing through this life, I had traveled abroad, to Cairo, capital-city of Egypt, a place where, from what I had heard, people from all over the world were received with opened arms. Surely, people in Great Britain were also renowned for their hospitality and elegant manners, but unlike the Egyptians, the British were very selective when it came to meeting new people. I could not understand why they had such principles and especially such prejudices. I could not understand why I was not allowed to benefit from the same advantages like any other typical British, if I had received the same education and had equal skills.

The reason I had been offered for my situation was to me, simple and most absurd. Tradition was very important in Great Britain and it appeared that my family ties were the ones preventing me from becoming an integral part of British society. My mother, to be precise, was, in their eyes, the cause of my being an outcast, for she was not a British woman, but a Moroccan woman, whose skin was much darker than the porcelain-white one of women across Europe. I had never been able to truly understand the complex feeling that is love, the same as I had problems finding a meaning in the British social principles and I was never able to understand why was everyone so resentful towards my mother, when my father sacrificed everything, his career, his friends and family, just to be with her.

Resented as we were, my family and I led a fairly good and decent life in a modest neighborhood in London, for about twelve years, when the dark veil of death fell over our house, striking my mother with an appalling, incurable disease and making my father the innocent victim of a reckless driver. Their deaths did not have the same effect on me as it would have had on other children of my age. Mother had always told me about the immortality of the soul and the after life, and even if I was frightened to find myself, all of a sudden, completely alone, I knew that my parents had gone to a better place, from where they would watch over me. In my daily prayers I spoke to them and even if they never answered, I knew they were listening.

Having no relatives –my father's parents had died and my mother's parents, living in Morocco, had no knowledge of my existence, for they had disowned her the day she had decided to go against tradition and marry a man of different religion and origins– after the passing of my parents, I had been sent by the authorities to a local orphanage. Life did not prove to be too bad there and I even managed to make friends, for in that cold shelter our common sorrow and loneliness united us and the bound proved to be stronger than the casual discriminations most British citizens were taught to employ.

Strange as it seemed to me at that time, it appeared there was a grand destiny in store for the twelve-year-old Creole girl with deep black eyes and long, sleek, ebony hair. Not long after my arrival at the orphanage I had the unimaginable chance of being the point of interest for a middle aged aristocratic British couple who had the intention of adopting a little girl. At almost thirteen years of age I was not quite the little girl the couple had in mind, but being two extravagant individuals with obvious preferences for the exotic, they saw in me an enchanting, mysterious creature. On the first day of their visit, the couple made the necessary arrangements and later on that same day I set foot for the first time in my life in an automobile, being driven along a dusty country road, passing through bewildering green landscape, all the way to the exquisite old manor of my adoptive parents, Lord and Lady Hensley.

I spent the next twelve years of my life with the Hensleys, learning to be a lady as well as an educated woman, though all the education I had received was at home, under the guidance of numerous private tutors. In order to make a lady out of me, my adoptive mother paid great importance to molding my exterior appearance. She had me wear long sleeved dresses and always cover my head with a large hat, not to mention that I had to spend most of the time indoors, all of these so that the sun would not make my skin darker than it already was. The natural color of my skin was that of any white woman who had been exposed for a longer period of time to the boiling summer sun, and because I had inherited mostly the European facial features of my father, I could sometimes pass as a common British woman, when people did not find suspicious my uncommonly dark eyes and hair.

Life with the Hensleys had been rather good and I hardly ever found any discomfort in the way they treated me, though often when they discussed about me with their friends who came to visit, the word "pity" always seemed to pop out. After my education was completed, I became Lord Hensley's secretary, one of my usual duties being that of translating all sorts of documents from English to Arabic and vice versa, since my adoptive father had business to conduct with men from the Middle East or Egypt. I was the only one he knew who was able to read and write Arabic, having learned the complicated but fascinating language from my mother. Therefore, under this pretext I accompanied Lord Hensley in his voyage to Cairo in the summer of 1923, for what I though it would be "only a couple of weeks".