An Iftar of sweet memories

When all the humans around me transform into individuals and escape to their burrows well past midnight, it's amazing to watch my living room metamorphose into a lonely planet. Like a blue rose blooms at an ungodly hour. Sepal by sepal. Petal by petal. There's a rhythm to it. There's music in it. There's a redolent aroma in it that touches my soul.
As I sit staring at my desktop, intending to write my column, the large screen in night mode expands to fill the room and unfolds a black horizon over my empty head where sprightly celestial bodies sing the chorus, Twinkle, twinkle little star, to serenade me to sleep. A white tulip springs up in the little corner where a pantheon of neglected brass deities is enveloped in a thick layer of emerald patina. A host of golden daffodils sprouts around the couch and beneath the TV stand.
Like Wordsworth. I wander lonely as a cloud, as a little stream foams over the rocks beside the bookshelf. Butterflies in myriad colours hover over a half-full crystal mug with the Eiffel Tower engraved on the outer surface. There's a Beethoven in the gentle breeze that flutters the draperies. The half-eaten fruit dropped by a benevolent squirrel tastes heavenly. Her loose-flowing hijab sways as Ayisha nods negative to my offering. "I'm fasting," she tweets. There's a gleam in her eyes as she sits gazing at the intricate henna work on her little palms. Yellow glass bangles chime on her slender wrists. Memories are like slow poison. They knock you out when you are least aware and at the peak of ecstasy. And when you wake up nearly dead, you find your emotions and thoughts petrified. No words written.
Many eyebrows have risen like tousled arches when I started to post my solo Iftar photos on social media. Iftar? Fasting? But why? People asked me privately. My family would have taken it as one of those extreme things that a crazy writer does in a state of disillusionment. Some believed I had reached a point of no return. Fasting is not a fad I have invented to reboot my spirits. It's a tribute to a handful of people who had touched me, by shining their inner light of wisdom in my life's journey.
Some of them have already left for their heavenly abode. No one knows where Ayisha is, or if she is alive or dead, but she is an ineluctable part of this encomium. Some of my readers might know Ayisha. For the uninitiated, let me reproduce a few paragraphs from an old article. Ayisha is a constant so words that have sculptured her memories in my heart cannot be recast.
In my growing up years, we trekked kilometres to the school, crisscrossing vast paddy fields and coconut plantations. We sauntered through lush tapioca groves and played Tarzan on low-hanging cashew boughs. We passed by a roofless makeshift temple where my friends deposited small coins as a bribe to pass exams. I offered a handful of shingle and shells collected on my way. The priest smiled at my offering of rubbish. Whenever I was empty-handed, he asked, "Nothing to offer? Unload the trash and purify your soul." I didn't quite understand, so I just shrugged. And the priest smiled.

A few metres away, there was a mount covered with overgrown mango trees, some of which were one day cut down to make way for a small mosque, a one-room madrasa and a pigeonhole living quarter for the maulvi, whose daughter was as beautiful as the full moon. The family had moved in from a distant village. I was head-over-heels for the girl of my age and was quick to strike a friendship. Waiting for her madrasa classes to get over, I splashed around in the water for ablution. The maulvi smiled and freed up his daughter to be with me. I grabbed her copy of the Holy Quran when she straightened her hijab like a grown-up and whispered into my ears, "Non-Muslims should not open the kitab."
"Why?" I asked, throwing a green mango at Ayisha.
"You will lose your eyesight. How will you see me then?" Her eyes crinkled as she bit into the fruit and joked convincingly.
I obeyed her. Not for the fear of losing my eyesight. I stopped dirtying the water for ablution. She also asked me to stop throwing shingle and shells into the temple. I agreed. Reads like a silly childhood love story? Maybe. But Ayisha was my madrasa where I learned my first lessons in religious tolerance and harmony, despite the trait of rebellion in my DNA. What Ayisha taught me was not just to not disrespect religions, but to not disrupt traditions that are not harmful to society.
Today, when I prepare my Iftar myself and wait patiently for the Azan (prayer call), tears roll down my cheeks for good people like Ayisha and two Pakistani editors, Jamil Akhtar and Tahir Mirza, whose deaths were unacceptable to me. Wifey had a tough time consoling me when Jamil, a long-time colleague, died a few months after we last spoke over the phone.
"Suresh Saab, I have become old. See, I can't even talk properly," he mumbled from his Karachi home. We talked about Rizvi, an old friend who passed away in the US the day before. "We all will die on day," he said, words that stung me like a thousand bees. They echoed the ultimate human helplessness.
Come Ramadan, Jamil would by default become the omphalos of Iftar activity. We wouldn't flinch until the office boy, Chacha Ibrahim, spread the table and invited Jamil to MC the event. As the animated crowd waited for the Azan to end the fast, Jamil would unleash some stale jokes he had acquired during his China days. He recycled them at every Iftar, every Ramadan. And every time, I would burst into laughter as if I heard them for the first time. It was this camaraderie that bonded an Indian and a Pakistani when they together strategised the front page during the worst crises between their nations. The occasional mango diplomacy between the feuding nations excited the perennial optimist in Jamil.
At our jocund family parties, Tahir, the suit-booted, pipe-smoking former BBC journalist, would roll out classy yet sarcastic jokes about Indo-Pak relations. He was upright, his political perceptions as perfectly clear as the ice cubes that went down his glass. "Suresh Saab, Smiling Buddha in 1974 undermined our relations forever. That made us cross the Rubicon." There was a lot to learn from the Jamil-Tahir-Joseph Nellary trio. They were my political and professional madrassa.
"Dad, you are lost in thoughts. Didn't you hear the prayer call?"
Tears streaming down like a faucet wet my lips, ending the day's fast. Mum's words echoed in my ears like the prayer call. "Rich or poor, Hindu or Muslim, Indian or Pakistani, every tear drop tastes the same. It's saline, son."
suresh@khaleejtimes.com