“It took us fifteen minutes to get through the Dawn Prayers this morning. My father the Imam got confused when he was reciting the verses. I was standing behind him in a row with the other worshippers. The voices of the men who knew the Quran by heart rose to correct him, and he struggled to pull himself together. He sat down and read from the text. My mind drifted during the pause. I thought of my sisters. They, like me, were frightened that the Quran would begin to slip away from him. I heard his own frightened voice in my head: ‘They’re not going to let me lead the prayers any more if I start forgetting the Quran’.
“‘Years of raising children and looking after the mosque have turned my hair gray.’ I watched him run his fingers through my mother’s gray hair.
“He reassured her: ‘This grayness won’t last forever, God willing. Consider it the price you pay to be thirty-three in heaven.’
“‘Thirty-three?’
“‘Yes, it’s the best age for a human being. It’s the age Jesus was, peace be upon him, when he was raised up to the sky. It’s the age at which we’re reborn when we enter heaven.’
“My sister Maymuna went to answer the early-morning knock before the rest of us could, so that, as my father would say, blessings would be revealed to her. Before decline beset The Lane of Many Heads we were used to the Eunuchs’ Goat coming to our door in the early morning: ‘From my father al-Ashi of the cooking courtyard. Empty the pot out and give it back.’ The Eunuchs’ Goat was always disappointed to find Maymuna’s hand snake past the door to take the pot he’d brought over so early, hoping to hand it to Sa’diya. The Eunuchs’ Goat was quite the devil. He’d try to nudge the door open slightly with the side of his foot to get a look at Sa’diya, who was rubbing her sleep-puffed eyes with one hand and with the other emptying the pot into a bowl, adroitly avoiding the layer of burnt rice at the bottom of the pot. She could no longer distinguish between her dark hands and the blackened pot, scraping here and there. These morning handouts irritated her no end. When she’s asleep, she dreams of throwing rice-missiles at the do-gooders who never think of them until their food’s about to go rotten. Gaining blessings for a new day with yesterday’s inedible leftovers. She sleeps with one eye closed and one eye on the worms clustered around the streaks of filth on the floor of their concrete bathroom. Bunched up in a line between her feet, she had no idea where they were headed.
“‘Those are the worms that are going to feed on you in the grave if you don’t shield yourself with faith.’ My mother almost tore the worms open with her finger.
“Sa’diya handed the still-wet pot back to the Eunuchs’ Goat, but it did nothing to extinguish his passion. ‘God bless you and may He count this among your good deeds on Judgment Day,’ she said softly. Her smile is special, it plays on the corners of her lips when she pictures the scales of their good deeds crawling with worms depending on how stale their charitable offering is.”
“And what about your father?” Nasser asked.
“My father has his daily routine down to a T. Every morning after dawn prayers, he exhorts the angels of good fortune with his chanting, and after night prayers he chants that the followers of Muhammad will grow and multiply. Every year brought my father another child. With each of them, he increased the number of the poor and the blind. The people in the Lane of Many Heads used to make fun of him with stealthy glances, but they also envied him the number of sons of his who’d become Quran reciters. The burden he bore wasn’t because of all these mouths that needed feeding, but because of the forehead-splitting sadness that came from knowing what punishments awaited man. Sa’diya was convinced that our father had memorized all the Quranic verses about perdition and the various punishments that awaited unbelievers. ‘Diabetes has put out the light in my eyes,’ he complained. ‘Diabetes is like disbelief. One takes away your ability to see with your eyes — may God have mercy on us — and the other takes away your ability to see with you heart.’
“Whenever he slipped deeper into infirmity and thus nearer to death, he’d brace himself by filling his heart with the fear of the torments that awaited him after death and filling his mind with visions of the angels of paradise. Then he would recite the Quran in that sweet voice of his as though to line his grave, making it more comfortable, in preparation to receive his body.”
From where they were sitting, Nasser saw the imam going into the mosque. Mu’az turned his back to hide from his father because he didn’t want to be spotted loitering with the rest of the cafe crowd. Once his father was out of sight, Mu’az carried on:
“My father is constantly frowning. The only time his features relax is when he’s standing in front of the shelf of Qurans that people have donated to the mosque. Then he gives in. At sunset, he stands there patiently going through the donated Qurans, smelling their ink and leather binding. He bides his time till he can pick out a rare one and add it to his shelf, which is brimming with Qurans of all different dimensions. My oldest brother Yaqub, who wears glasses as thick as the bottom of a tea glass and is the Quran reciter at the Umm al-Joud Mosque, will come over and take a Quran off the shelf to the right of the door and sit down across from my father. Then the rest of us, boys and girls, are expected to fill out the arcs of the study-circle, to connect their two poles.
“When a man dies, his good deeds end with him except for three things: an upright child who prays for him … Whenever we sat down to memorize the Quran, our father’s blind eye would be there, pleading with us: ‘When you feel the flocks of the Quran slipping away from you, gather them up against your chest and bring them to me in my grave.’ My siblings would shut their eyes and begin swaying as they recited. The recitation would begin at the bottom of their spines and work its way up, causing their bodies to sway until it reached their tongues. My father’s cane was hot on their heels, though:
“‘Don’t read with your eyes closed! You were blessed with sight so you might as well keep your eyes on the verse as you’re reciting.’ We trained our eyes on our Qurans in a pathetic attempt to follow the verses, but it didn’t take long for our eyes to shut once more, causing us to sway again; miniature copies of my father.”
“The Eunuchs’ Goat used to attend the memorization classes at your house. He said he was in love with Sa’diya.”
Mu’az laughed. “In love with her elbow, more like it. I was the first person to notice. I sat there paying attention to all of them. I took the largest share of my father’s caning: whenever I’d sit on the outside breaking the circle, whenever I’d look in the direction of the door, whenever I’d play with the mat or the pools of light in the middle of the circle, or when I’d lay my voice out over the circle, soaking up the rhythm, training my voice, or when my father would sense that I wasn’t reciting the verses, rather floating and bobbing on the surface of the music, dipping my vocal cords in its sweetness. His cane and his shouting both stung: ‘Recite properly, boy!’”
Nasser cut him off, laughing: “Do you sing, Mu’az?”
“No, I cry … I pin a recitation on the scales of a melody. I uncover new horizons for my voice in the rules of Quranic recitation.” A light flickered in Mu’az’s eyes and he carried on: