Northaw author Dorna Djenab: the phone box that rang

Two schoolgirls, lost in a car somewhere in London with an A to Z, step into a telephone box to ring the friend they are trying to find. Before they can put a coin in, the phone rings. It is him, and he was not calling them.

That is the story Dorna Djenab, a yoga teacher and author based in Northaw and Potters Bar, chose to introduce her book, Who Flapped Their Wings? A Collection of Awe-Inspiring Stories. It gathers more than 70 true accounts of coincidences, signs and moments that left the people who lived them unable to explain what had happened.

“The book is a collection of true stories from ordinary people, stories of extraordinary coincidences, unexpected signs, synchronicities and moments that have left people wondering whether there might be more to life than we normally see,” she told the Borehamwood Post.

“It’s not a religious or paranormal book, but rather an invitation to wonder, curiosity and the possibility that life may sometimes surprise us in ways we can’t easily explain.”

She has been collecting and writing the stories for the past few years, and the book came out last year.

The phone box

Asked which story she would open with, she picked Public Phone, “as it was particularly well received by readers.”

It is set in 1994. The girl telling it is 13 and in year eight, a year after her family left Iran because of the political unrest. At her new school she is friends with Sarah, another Iranian girl two years older, and with Mehdi, a boy who arrived from Iran halfway through the year speaking very little English. At the end of the year he tells them his father’s secondment is ending and the family is going home.

The two girls buy him a goodbye present, and an uncle agrees to drive them to his house, which they have never visited. After an hour of following the map, they still cannot find it. The book takes it from there:

“My uncle stopped near a telephone box and asked us to call Mehdi for directions. Sarah and I jumped out and entered the telephone box. As we were preparing our coins and getting the number to call, the public phone rang.

“Sarah picked it up and looked at me in shock and disbelief, ‘it’s Mehdi’ she whispered. You might think he saw us from his house, knew the number of the public phone and called us to help us find him. But no, it turned out he was trying to call someone else, misdialed the last digit and ended up calling the exact phone box we were standing in.”

They got their directions. Back in the car, the uncle “never believed us”. The storyteller says that even now, recalling it, “my hair stands on end”, and that for fear of being scoffed at she had never told anyone until the book. Another chapter records that it came to Dorna from one of her cousins, who first shared it over a family lunch in London.

How the book began

In her introduction, Dorna writes that she is 55, and that an experience in her teens in Tehran, during the Iran-Iraq war, “blows me away” to this day. Years later, after reading a passage by Carlos Castaneda in which a teacher asks his student to list the meaningful events of his life, she made her own list and found that every item on it was a mysterious coincidence.

“I had a thought: if revisiting these experiences could boost me with confidence, courage and calm amidst challenges, it could do the same for others,” she writes.

She began asking everyone she met whether they had a story. Many, she says, had never told theirs before: “Some wanted to protect the sacredness of such intimate events, while others feared judgement, being doubted or dismissed.”

What she noticed was the effect of the telling. “One moment before sharing, they may have sounded a bit down, lacking energy and not really enthused by life and the next, they would be excited, inspired and filled with a zest for life.”

She does not claim to know what is behind them. “Are these experiences merely the products of our imagination? Is it at all possible that they are completely random?” she asks. “The truth is, we don’t have a definitive answer and it’s likely we never will.”

All but three of the stories came to her directly or are her own; she has rewritten them, she explains, keeping some original names and changing others. None is set in Northaw or Potters Bar, she says, though a few of the longer ones mention Barnet.

The author

According to the book, Dorna was born in France to Iranian parents, grew up in Paris and Marseille, and moved to Iran at nine, just before the Revolution. Her father first taught her deep relaxation as a child and later handed her a yoga book during a rebellious teenage phase; she practised from then on, and at 19 began Transcendental Meditation, which she still practises. She writes in the acknowledgements that she has lived in England for 36 years.

She now teaches yoga, meditation and mindful breathing online and face to face through Pranasana Yoga, which she runs with her partner Matt Gluck, who edited the book with Suzanne Sive. Her current courses, the book lists, are Jump Start to Wellness, Emotional SOS and Mindful Breathing.

Watch the interview

Dorna talked about the book at the Herts Book Festival in an interview posted on YouTube in May by the author TG Trouper.

What it means for you

Who Flapped Their Wings? (ISBN 978-1-0682300-7-3) is on sale as a Kindle ebook and paperback on Amazon UK, and an audiobook is coming soon, Dorna says. It can also be ordered from Waterstones online or in store, and through other bookshops using the ISBN.

The book ends with a page inviting readers to note down their own moments of “joy, gratitude, vitality and aliveness”. If you have a coincidence story from Borehamwood, Potters Bar, Radlett or Bushey, we would like to hear it: email hello@borehamwoodpost.co.uk.