I’m doing my dishes in the sink at 6:00 PM when I hear the melodious, rich call of the ajaan. For a second, I’m transported back home, when the light outside would get tinged with blue as it dimmed for Maghrib. A stillness would permeate the air as the voices of the neighbourhood kids playing cricket outside dwindled, their daily curfew reached. A sense of unease—or was it wonder?—would creep into my stomach, and Maa would holler for us to close all the windows and the veranda doors to keep the mosquitoes out as they awoke and emerged from Nanu’s gardens. Baba would soon peek into the reading room, checking that we’re finishing our homework before dinner, and reminding us to drink our milk with the cookies he brought. The storeowner knew the kind he liked to get and would pass them through the window of the parked car while our driver bought some fruit from the neighbouring floating vendor.
No, I am approximately 15,000 kilometers, and fifteen years, away from home. I glance at my ajar bedroom door and am relieved when I realise I’m not hallucinating, the source of the garbled ajaan is my phone. I don’t have an app for it because I haven’t prayed in years. I am still Muslim, but not the practicing kind. I don’t know if I’m the believing kind. I didn’t really fast this year. I just know I’m here, and I’ll participate and pray with my mom, and when I do I’ll mean it, and I’ll feel a deep connection to my family, my ancestors, my self of years past, maybe even Allah.
No, the ajaan is coming from the call that’s still connected, across the oceans, to my lover’s phone. It’s Fajr. Dawn, a time for folk tale jinns which once gave me a different sense of foreboding as a child: a timid hope when I was awoken by a bad dream. Birds would gently stir and chirp. Sharp rays of sun would soon cut through the cool air. Baba would be up working on his latest publication on his computer, or taking a break with whatever movie was airing. I would leave Maa in bed to watch with him, wrapped in his white kashmiri shawl, until I drifted out of consciousness on the living room sofa.
She is asleep. In the bedroom, I root through my quilt and pull out my phone where I had discarded it before heading to the kitchen. The ajaan ends, and I hear her rhythmic breathing. I feel a profound sense of … something. It’s inexplicable melancholy, such as that from the evenings and daybreak back home. I can’t believe I thought I was there for a moment. The notion tickles me, but I don’t laugh.
She will soon be flying to join me, out here, away from everything we know, to begin something we were never allowed to know. There is exhiliration, yes, and loss. Loss of the girl I once was, the woman I thought I would be, the parents who will never see me for the woman I have become. Loss of my fragile connection to home through a simple, choppy wifi connection. The sense of a thread being snipped, perhaps by the fates, perhaps by me. I wonder, not for the first time, if I’m ruining her life. She chose me, but I compelled her. For that, I have to hold her grief alongside mine. I wonder if this grief, or the fear of it, will someday tear us apart too. And then it will all have been for nothing. A memory, to leave behind, to look back upon ardently. Like home.
She changed the course of my life by materialising into it. I changed the course of hers through devotion. Is there love without manipulation? I feel manipulated by my parents, but I’ve already betrayed them too.
I wonder about the ancestors who were like me. Their stories were never told, erased for the sake of Allah’s followers. My existence is an oxymoron. I chose to be brave. I chose myself, and her. I hope it’s not a mistake.
I tap my phone screen in the silence to wake it. It stays blank. The battery has died.
