I entered as the call to prayer rang out from the nine minarets of the Haram Mosque. The ground was immediately covered with rugs for prayer. The floor of the sitting room and the ground in the orchard became rows and rows of worshippers facing in one direction, and foreheads began sinking toward their Creator’s house.
The wings of angels are not made of feathers but of the sound of warm muttering.
On the Prophet’s birthday, once prayers were over, the worshippers formed a circle, the novices spreading themselves out. Mushabbab walked around, his arm covered up to the shoulder with prayer beads, some of them with a thousand beads, which are stored in ivory inlaid boxes that smell of amber and perspiration.
Mushabbab held onto his own prayer beads, which he never relinquished during the celebrations of the Prophet’s Birthday. They are made of serpent’s bones and whenever he flicked the beads, the life in the bones would whisper secrets of the afterlife to him.
I took my prayer beads of amber cat’s eye. The Eunuchs’ Goat ran his agarwood beads through his fingers, conjuring his fealty to the fire. I knew that you’d have picked the ebony beads like Mu’az does if you’d come.
Mushabbab sat in his spot to the right, at the tip of the crescent moon formed by the participants, while Mu’az, the Eunuchs’ Goat, and I stood by the doorway to the parlor, against the branches of the carob tree and the shadows of the volunteers who were circling with pans of Zamzam water, which was nearly foaming with the breath of the Mantle Ode and the remembrance ritual.
You, Azza, would’ve stood beside me, exposed to the parlor and the space that lay behind where the volunteers lit fire pits to warm the giant frame drums. The circle was formed in the utter whiteness of robes and headdresses, as our breathing rose, and the gold-trimmed pillows, carved wooden ceiling, and the remnants of the column capitals slipped from our awareness.
“O Prophet of God, O brilliant star,
“You lead all men, from behind the stars.
“Pray for the soul of the one who is present in his absence.
“Muhammad, God bless you and keep you and reward you!” Voices resonated around the room, followed by fingers in the air; millions of prayers for the Prophet Muhammad.
Beads whispered, breaths muttered, as they floated between index finger and thumb, encircling the prayer niche of the assemblage.
You could see the hands raising the prayers they’ve harvested into the air: “a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand …” The leader of the birthday celebrations gathered five hundred thousand prayers and blessings before he bent time: bodies stood straight; hands locked together in a circle of energy, interlinking to form a large field.
Welcome, light of my eye,
Welcome, grandfather of Hussein,
Bless you, O Messenger of God
Bless you, O Prophet of God.
The circle enveloped those present. They all breathed in time as the drums beat their praise, welcoming the Purest One who had been summoned and had arrived.
As though fire were as wet as water
in its grief, as though water itself were aflame.
The demons wail, the lights flash, and truth
in both word and meaning is made plain.
Then the entire group, in the painful throes of passion, prayed in one explosive voice: “Give us strength!”
“Give us strength!” I walked, I slapped the air, I was engulfed in al-Busiri’s Mantle Ode. “Give us strength!” I rose from the ground. My face breached the surface of a cool inundation, but Mushabbab’s voice brought me back:
“Yusuf. Yusuf, give blessings to the Prophet,” he whispered in my ear before splashing me with the poetry-foamed water of Zamzam from a pan, and I snapped out of it.
“The boy’s got a tender heart.” I smelled butter and milk mixed with the scent of agarwood and mastic. When I opened my eyes, I saw three thousand pairs of hands eating from massive trays of rice cooked with butter and milk. Some of the hands were spotted with warts, others are smooth and blemish-free.
I watched one grease-glimmering hand with a variety of the grimes of toil beneath its fingernails, as it scooped and squeezed rice alongside and in time with another hand with painted fingernails, wet and shining from the juice.
Hands, which in the light of day keep to separate spheres, came together, all of us, in passion and yearning and delight.
When I left Mushabbab, who was dressed in embroidered robes for the birthday celebration that hung loosely and smelled of fragrant oil, which meant it had been blessed to rub against part of the Kaaba’s covering, a sense of ecstasy had softened the corners of his mouth. I shut the orchard gate behind me. Behind it was Mushabbab; I don’t know what he got back. His private life is a well-kept secret, which he only occasionally gives me a peek of.
Azza, I carry you like the froth of that Mantle Ode. I once heard Mushabbab, raving that “We become orphans if the poem dies; we become naked if we allow it to disintegrate in our neglect.”
People say that al-Busiri was paralyzed, and that he saw the Purest Prophet in a dream and recited this poem for him. The Prophet, they say, gave him his mantle and when al-Busiri woke from his dream, he was cured of his ailment. I give you this mantle, Azza, so that you’ll be wrapped in the sweet black smell of it, so you’ll be bundled up so I can carry you around the Kaaba. I wash you and purify you and absolve you as if you were a sip of briny Zamzam water. Even if we both dissolve, its verses will drip honey on your tongue. Even in your shadowless room, you can hide inside of it.
Nasser was exhausted by all Yusuf’s effort. He’d nearly reached the conclusion that Yusuf didn’t care about Azza as a person, but simply considered her one of the spirits of the letters that he made submit to his will. He litters them here and there in his histories of Mecca, but in poems, he sets them out deliberately. He enlists them for his paranoia, but when they disobey him he goes on a rampage with his pen, crossing them out of the neighborhood. Why not?
FROM: Aisha
SUBJECT: Message 11
“This novel, which Lawrence considered his best, tells the story of the lives and complicated relationships of two sisters, Gudrun and Ursula. Ursula falls in love with Birkin, a stand-in for Lawrence the author, while Gudrun pursues a tragic and macabre affair with Gerald. These conflicts: intellectual, emotional, and doctrinal epitomize the course of love in modern society.”
Good lord, how much more shameless could I be?
I was reading Women in Love on the steps by the front door, as if just waiting for my father to come home.
Gudrun brought out the spitfire in me. I know now that I always wanted to be normal, to be Ursula, not Gudrun the rebel.
The passion of those two women was more than I could handle. More than I could take. Even now that I’ve been married and divorced. Perhaps your presence inside of me would allow me to reach those roiled heights. I was surprised tonight to read Gudrun saying on page ten: “If one jumps over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere.”
What if what we have to do now is to jump? Jump to make things change? Jump to detach the Lane’s many heads? To put them back in place? As a first step toward changing the fate of the land we live in.