the person next to you in a row at the mosque

ramadan's over, and i miss it

My whole life, Ramadan has happened at the right time for me. For the uninitiated, Ramadan follows the lunar calendar, which means it’s not at a fixed time relative to the Gregorian calendar.

When I was too young to fast, Ramadan was in September, right after summer vacation. The sorrow of the holidays ending was tempered by shortened Ramadan school timings (if you were in the Middle East). When I began to take fasting and my Muslim-ness seriously, Ramadan arrived in summer vacation, and I was able to breeze through the fasts in the comfort of the AC, after staying up all night for the dawn meal of suhoor and waking up at noon. Now, as an adult who works, Ramadan is in the winter, or what passes for winter in the desert, and will be so for a few more years.

It’s not the literal weather that’s important to me, although it does make it easier. Ramadan seems to know when I need it. Faith needs replenishing, and when I feel like I’ve forgotten the way to the wellspring, Ramadan arrives to remind me that sometimes it’s as easy as not eating or drinking for 10 to 12 hours straight.

My favorite part of Ramadan is going to the neighborhood mosque. I make it a habit to go for the additional taraweeh prayers and the middle-of-the-night tahajjud prayers. I’ve been going to the same mosque for nearly a decade now. It’s an unremarkable one, built when this place was barely a city. When I first started attending prayers as a kid, the ladies prayer room was a tiny square and had 5 rows in total. It didn’t matter how early my mother and I rushed to the mosque. The older ladies who attended the previous prayer used to camp out at the mosque and occupy all the rows, and we would be relegated to the outside, to pray in the muggy heat.

A few years later they set up an air conditioned tent during Ramadan. As you walked in, you could feel the ground beneath. The carpet was too thin to put up much of a fight against the sharp rocks. After the prayer, when we lifted our abayas, our knees would be indented with the painful patterns of the pebbles we happened to be standing on. The mosque mafia (older ladies who were already there) exiled every mother with a crying, colicky baby to the tent as well. Those were noisy prayers.

A few more years later, the men decided, in all their generosity, that women of faith deserve something more than a tent with a sheet pretending to be a carpet, and plans were made to expand the female prayer area.

a duck at the old mosque, that i noticed only because a kid was throwing plastic cups at it. i told him off and felt my transformation to masjid aunty become complete.

I wasn’t there to witness this glorious expansion. Those were my years away at college. My muslim roommate and I used to get by on scraps during Ramadan. We were staying in a Catholic hostel that didn’t really know enough to care. The cooks would sometimes give us extra watery curry for suhoor, but what was already terrible at night was so distasteful in the early hours of the morning that we felt we’d rather take our chances with a bowl of cereal for sustenance through the day.

One Ramadan (the second of 3 spent in college) we snuck into the hostel kitchen and stole some tomatoes. This was the only vegetables the sisters would buy in bulk, becoming the only one we could steal without drawing attention to the theft. We had cheese and tomato sandwiches everyday for suhoor that Ramadan, and couldn’t look at one again for the next two years.

It was my third (and last) Ramadan in Bangalore that something of a minor miracle occurred. Bangalore had great weather then, and we kept the only window of our room open all day long. I was praying in front of this open window when I heard loud sounds, definitely human sounding, from somewhere in the distance. Looking up, I could see someone in the building opposite me, looking at me, yelling and wildly gesturing.

Looking back, this is the moment in the movie where you scream at the protagonist to use her head and not do the dumb thing, and watch helplessly as she does it anyway. I ran into a building I’ve never been in, all alone, into the home of a person I’ve never met.

In college a friend and I discovered that past a certain point of exhaustion, she could get me to do anything just by asking. When I had to choose between being tired or having a thought, I always chose being tired Like the movie Ella Enchanted, but this was Ella Numbed.

I was exhausted all throughout college.

The screaming lady was old, almost grandmotherly, and as I stood in the doorway of her home, I figured she’d started a fire and damn it, I’d forgotten everything about how a fire extinguisher works.

She looked at me and said, ‘I see you praying through that window. You and one more girl.’

My roommate and I.

‘That’s a hostel right? What do you have for sehri?’

DIYs, a beetroot-carrot-apple juice that was expensive so it had be rationed over 3 days, leftovers and sometimes food we’d get when the wife of the owner of the shop opposite the hostel felt bad for us.

She made me an offer.

“I will make sehri for you.”

Adrenaline pumping from when I thought I was going to be an old lady’s hero and make shift firefighter, half crazed from the hunger of fasting, I didn’t think it was right to refuse what was clearly an angel sent from above.

I offered to pay, she declined. For the rest of Ramadan, the Muslim girls in a Catholic hostel (3 of us) had a steady supply of home cooked meals for dinner and suhoor.

At the end of that Ramadan, we wanted to thank her for her kindness and bought her a piece of unstitched cloth, with everyone she'd fed agreeing to pay a share. When it was time to collect the money, we discovered she gave us enough food to share with almost the whole floor of girls living away from home for the first time because almost everyone contributed, Muslims and non-Muslims.

A professor who was interested in spirituality in general and by the only Muslim girl in class in particular, once loudly proclaimed to everybody that I was fasting and that meant that my body was relieved of the busywork of constant digestion, which allowed my other senses and sensations to surface. She said I was a better observer than everyone, simply because I was fasting. Preceding this declaration, I was staring out of the window, daydreaming, thinking about how the gutter running past our classroom sounded like a brook.

Observation without action is toothless, and Ramadan rewards doing. You notice things that are easy to overlook and try to fix it best you can. They say you earn nearly 3 times the reward, just for trying to do better. So you notice the stray cats, skin and bones, loitering near the mosque and share your iftar with them. You notice the two girls praying through an open window & offer to cook for them.

You pay close attention to the kids in the mosque you’ve visited your whole life growing up between the rows. It’s a group of them, two sisters and their friends. They come in with their mother, who prays with a chair at at the back of the mosque.

In your first memories of them, the whole group is too young to know how to pray. The mother tasks the oldest of the group to keep them in line and not disturb the congregation. She takes this job seriously, shushing the group at regular intervals, her shushes noisier than the kids. The group hangs off of her every word. She is wearing a brightly colored scarf with a big flower stuck at an angle.

The next year you notice them, the oldest of the bunch are mimicking the prayer actions, and the youngest are miming the mimics.

This year, the whole group comes clad in abayas, with their hijabs tied in the latest vela styles. They are talking about exams and the how tough it is to study while fasting. You are eavesdropping. You don’t miss high school, with all its angst and drama and exams, at all. The younger of the two sisters seems to be the most popular, and her in-group within the group whisper-scream loudly to each other, all of them hunched together in a perfect circle on the floor, backs curved like a bud yet to bloom. The oldest sister is beginning to look most like the mother, who still sits in a chair at the back of the mosque. She seems to be at the periphery of this group, looking over at the girls gossiping in a place of worship, equal parts disapproving and longing.

I alternated between my old mosque, and a newer, snazzier one this year. The new mosque was located in a better part of town. It had dazzling gold chandeliers where the old one had harsh fluorescent tubelights. The carpet was plush, and the room had a TV with a live broadcast into the imam’s pulpit.

One of those nights, after the prayer had begun, a girl squeezed into the space between me and the old lady in a chair next to me.

I greatly enjoyed this game of tetris at the beginning of each prayer, the feeling of gaps being closed, of things complete. The process of finding your space, shoulder to shoulder and the temporary solidarity of the saf delighted me. The person next to you in a prayer row affects your prayer as well, whether they know this or not. I could be praying next to a hafidh, someone who’s memorised the entirety of the Quran, and their gentle mouthing of the verses along with the imam would fill me with a guilt, wondering if this made their prayer is more meaningful than mine. Or I could be praying next to a child and be half distracted the whole time by the way they lie flat on the ground while the rest of us bow down in a delicate sujood.

Halfway through the prayer, the girl asked me if I was okay with sharing my prayer mat with her, which I was.

At the end of the prayer, she told me that she was a college student. I told her that that was cool. She asked me where I went to school. I corrected her, feeling the stupid delight one feels at having been mistaken for someone younger, and she did the polite thing and said that I looked ‘so young for my age’.

She was studying web designing at school.

“That’s cool.”

“I don’t really want to do it.”

I didn’t understand what about my lacklustre response had prompted the confessional tone we’d just slipped into, but I welcomed it.

“Oh, what is it you want to do?”

“I want to make drawings and post them online.”

Cool was the adjective of the evening because I told her that was cool as well, and that I knew some people who did that.

“I think I want to work in digital marketing.”

Finally, familiar territory.

“Oh, I work in digital marketing! It’s fun, you should do it!”

“You do?? That’s so nice, but my dad wouldn’t be happy. He said I have to do something serious”

“What if you just did it anyway?” Somewhere, they were polishing my trophy for ‘Worst Advice Given’.

“I think he might pull me out of school if I did.”

The weight of that admission created an immediate vacuum in the easy conversation of two girls who found themselves next to each other in a row in the masjid, sharing a prayer mat, one that I didn’t know how to fill. I knew what I would do if I was in her place, and I hoped she was a different, more stronger person than I would be.

My terrible efforts at coming up with a response were interrupted by someone calling to her. They were ready to go.

“Do you come to this mosque often?”

“Every other day,” I said.

“Cool, see you around!”

We didn’t see each other again that Ramadan.

I try to carry the renewal I feel in Ramadan for as long as I can once but largely, it hasn’t worked. For the first few weeks I am more observant and intentional with the way I spend my time, reasoning that this time last week I was hungry, that I was skipping lunch and sleep to be more present and more pious, and if I could do it last week, I can do it this week. Nothing, besides the calendar, has changed.

The blandness of daily life gets in the way, and I stop paying attention to the world in exchange for being preoccupied with my own hangups – the thief that is the passage of time, my search for love, a fear that life that seems to be on hold but also speeding by. The usual.

My interiority, both in digestion and introspection, comes roaring back, drowning out the sleek, bone-thin awareness I had carved in Ramadan.

I try not worry too much because I know I’m capable of it. I’ll try again in 12 moons, and maybe this time it’ll stick.