stopping at wadi e hamra
The Appearance of Anger
It was the next day that I understood the value of keeping money on me even if I was just going to the haram a minute away. It was after Zuhr when I saw two women looking lost and panicked. Clad in shalwar kamiz I knew they were from the homeland. I asked them what was wrong.
“Kya baat hai Amma?” I asked in Punjabi.
In Medina Shareef apparently I liked to try out all the terms of address otherwise missing from my life. Baji, Apa (although I do have one very special Apa!), Amma, Maa ji!
“We want to go to Gate 5. We asked a couple of men but everyone says it far.” I looked around. Turned out they were separated from their party and now didn’t know how to meet them again. They had a card, it had a number scribbled on it but when I tried it, it seemed to be short some digits. We were in front of 16. I could see 7 towards the other side of the Mosque in the middle. I pointed at it and said 5 would not be much further but it didn’t make them any less distressed.
“Can you just take us? Please, we cannot go alone.”
“Sure,” I said. I needed to pay penance for a reaction of haste I had had earlier in the morning with my housekeeping staff. This was perfect! Repentance in the form of a walk might redress that. I thanked God for the ability to be kind, for the ability to be helpful, for the opportunity to be selfless and as it later turned out, for a reason to spend on another. And we made our way towards the said destination.
On the way, I placed my hand on the shoulder of the older woman as if being lead by her while it was actually the opposite. Within a second, I felt the fingers of the other lady making a bracelet around my wrist. I started smiling. We were now physically entwined in a curious way. It wasn’t like I was going to get separated from them but I guess they didn’t want to take any chances. The Mosque was full and the area we were going through was not segregated.
They were from Bukkhar. I had no idea where that was. My ignorance in geography is firmly inclusive of the homeland as well. When we approached Gate 7, I realized that 5 was in fact quite a bit further. It was bang opposite where we had started from. Parts of the marble were piping hot so we moved quickly over it. I realized that the older lady had no shoes on her feet and none in her hand.
“Aap ke jotey kahan hain Amma?”
“Pata nahin,” she said, replying in Punjabi. She said she didn’t care. She just wanted to meet her “men-folk.”
It was in that walk that I realized something remarkable. The whole way there the two women talked and the only thing they said in different ways was how Beneficent God was and how He was going be The One who would make them meet their relatives. “Sohna Rab kareesi, Sohna Rab san milesi.” They never mentioned me :)
Later that night, while waiting for the ziyarat of the Rauza Mubarik, I gave some sadqa to the woman sitting next to me. That was another act of penanace. I had spoken to her a little sharply when she squeezed herself between me and the edge of the wall I myself was stuck in. But the older women around me had let her do it so I had no choice but to acquiesce as well.
Later we ended up chatting, sharing my dry fruit which she seemed to like a lot. She was also from Lahore. I had asked her where and had not been familiar with the answer she gave. I wanted to probe but was worried it would only unveil my ignorance. My markers for the places I know nothing of are too touristy. At one point I heard her daughter tell another Pakistani woman about the mark on her face. It was of a purple colouring, like a splash on one cheek that then crawled up in a vein like pattern to one side of her forehead.
I could tell from her exasperated look that the Pakistani woman was hounding her about it. I just heard her say again and again, “But I don’t want to do that” so I guessed unwarranted and deeply offensive suggestions were being put forward. Of the variety of how to lose weight as soon as one kilo was gained and one appeared “healthy!” Except this was probably more cruel.
Her mother seemed impervious to the commentary although I wasn’t sure she could hear anything if I couldn’t.
“I think it’s beautiful,” she said. “The night she was born, it was a lunar eclipse and her father was smoking a hookah. The mark is of the moon covered by his smoke,” she beamed. “Rabb ditta he, Sohne Rabb di nishani he.”
Since I’m in love with the moon, I wholeheartedly agreed. Any nisbat to it in any form was indeed divine fortune in my opinion. But for her it was not about the moon. Her love for the mark was precisely because it came from her God.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s a picture of the moon on that night when it was hidden. It’s beautiful.”
How lucky some kids are, I thought, that what the world judges as “flaws,” their parents think of as beauty. She kept looking over at her daughter with such tenderness, even my heart, stranger to both, felt her love.
Just when I thought the time had come for the doors to open, I gave her daughter some money. The mother raised her dupatta with her hands towards the sky and said, “Rabb da langar he! Rabb da langar he!” I was so happy that she was happy that I had pulled out all the notes in my pocket and handed them to her. “He sent it for you too,” I said smiling and she laughed. But she only looked up again and again and thanked Him. It was extraordinary, the instant, spontaneous, gut reaction, no the reaction of the heart, that all of everything came only from Him, from His Love.
Later while I read the Tafseer e Jilani I came upon the word Rabb again and again in different verses. The exegesis of the word by Ghaus Pak (ra) was magnificent. Each time it was different. But I focused on the word because I came across it accidentally while at the Riyaaz ul Jannah on my first day. After praying nafal, I sat way back at the end and just stared around the Mosque. In the distance, I saw verses written in gold on the wall. I zoomed in and took a photo. At the hotel I sent it to Qari Sahib to ask him which verse in the Quran it was.
It was Aal e Imran, Verse 36-37. The words of the wife of the Prophet Imran (as) when she gave birth to her daughter:
Then when she delivered her, she said, "My Lord, indeed I (have) delivered [her] a female." And Allah knows better (of) what she delivered, and is not the male like the female. "And that I have) named her Maryam and that I seek refuge for her in You and her offspring from the Shaitaan, the rejected."
What were the odds?
I happened to have the first volume of his tafseer with me because I was reading Surah Baqarah. I went to the verse above and it was the word “Rabb” that caught my attention. In Urdu it said:
Apni Taaqat aur Qudrat aur apne Mubarik Qaul se meri parwarish farmane waley Rabb!
The tafseer by Ghaus Pak (ra) for the word Rabbi as used by Nabi Kareem (peace be upon him) was even more intense.
The One who has raised me with the most special qurb (closeness).
The poor women I met that day had only called God by that name. They never said Allah or Khuda, only Rabb. I have been saying a tasbeeh of Allah o Rabbi since I read that it was on the Ghilaaf of the Ka’ba. It was also in the verses of Qaseeda Ghausia. Being the God that raises me from a child to the rest of my life, that was how I wanted to address my God as well. That was the word I used when I asked him to raise my niece, teach her that which the world and those in it never could.
Strangely enough, it wasn’t until the women’s use of the word Rabb coincided with the words used by Bibi Maryam’s (ratu) mother that I read in the Mosque that I realized I had, all the while, been saying Rabbi, just like her and other Prophets, in all my prayers, in each and every ruku’ of each and every rakah.
Subhan Rabbi Al-Adeem when I bent my back to touch my knees.
Subhan Rabbi Al-Ala’ each time I went into sajda.
I had, way before reading a tasbeeh and because the words appeared on the House of God, been saying Rabbi my entire life. It was just that since I had been focusing on the speed of my prayer, slowing it down to a crawl, which had come about only because of the study of the translation, I had been preoccupied with the beginning, the Fateha, and then the dialogue at Ascension, Attahatu lillah he…Even the Darood e Ibrahimi. But except for the Fateha, which would take several lifetimes of someone like me to truly unveil and even then not, the other prayers were not in every rakah. But the use of the word Rabbi was.
What could be better than being raised by God Himself?
Being saved from every single decision by humans that could be wrong and cause devastating consequences for the soul. Be it in language then speech, food, clothing, shelter, the learning of knowledge and most important, the shaping of behavior, the carving of morality. A character formed as only one’s own under His Direction. No emulation induced by sharing time and space but only chosen.
Suddenly being in a boarding school at 5 that I joked about as being an orphan-esque experience didn’t seem so bad. Even the grief of separation from my mother which was probably what was still exuding from eyes was worth it. When I was around her again at 10, my heart was formed. I can’t say it was normal but it was independent nonetheless, for its identity had been shaped in another realm by someone other than my parents. As I sat in the haram between prayers, I pondered over what would be my definition of Rabbi when I would use it going forward. Different thoughts went in and out of my head.
The One who raised me such in the absence of my parents that He granted me the will to explore the capacity to change in life. Who gifted me the ability to learn and listen when I would be shown my flaws, then repent over them, then forgive me again and again. Who taught me to obey instruction and feel love. Bi lutfi-ka (by Your Special Kindness), bi rahmati-ka (by Your Mercy), bi fadli-ka (by Your Bounty), bi ehsaani-ka (by Your Favour)…
The blessings we are granted that we are entirely unaware of made me sigh deeply till the sun lost its whiteness of the lit afternoon sun and gave way to the pinks and purples, then darkness of the night. But wait, I haven’t finished my other story yet.
We got to Gate 5. There was no family waiting. “Now what?” I asked.
“We want to go back to the hotel,” they said. “We can wait for them there. He will unite us there,” they said.
That was when I put my hand in my pocket and pulled out a 50, breathing a sigh of relief. Done! We got into a taxi, where luckily all the drivers speak Urdu no matter who they are. I told the driver to drop me at my hotel and take them to theirs. I told the women the plan and they seemed ok with it. But I could hear their urgent murmurings of “Bismillah” recitations in repeat.
“Nothing will happen,” I said as I left the car. “He is a good man,” I pointed at the driver. I took the change and handed it to who was now my Amma. “Buy a new pair of shoes,” I said jokingly. She held up her hand in refusal but I insisted. “You will need them” and off they went.
I entered my hotel with a smile only to find the fruit and tip I had given my housekeeping guy was sitting on the bed. He had returned it. It didn’t damper my mood. I went outside and walked the floor to find him. He was a young Bengali chap, very competent but I had been impatient about getting a softer pillow earlier and complained to Housekeeping that he had forgotten, mentioning like a ghatia loser that I had tipped him as well.
When I saw him I offered my best smile.
“Bhai,” I said. “Aap naraz ho gaye hain. Please yeh fruit to leh lein. Aur yeh paise bhi.”
He looked away from me. “I will call my supervisor,” he said.
I was continuing to apologize when the supervisor appeared. I started smiling at him. “Yeh mujh ae naraz ho gaye hain. I should not have said anything about the pillow. I’m sorry, I got impatient and thought he had forgotten and left for the day.”
The supervisor was Pathan. “You said you tipped him. That is not good.”
“But tipping is a done thing,” I replied. “Everyone does it.”
“No,” he said emphatically “everyone does not do it.” And then came the retort. “And if someone does do it, they don’t then speak of it.” “Koi de ke batata nahin hai” were his exact words!
Now I started apologising to him too. “Mujhe pata hai. Aap mujhe maaf kar dein. Please. Mere se ghalti ho gaye. Mujhe ghussa aa gaya tha.”
There it was! The admission that I had lost my temper. That demon beast of anger that lies dormant for so long sometimes that I forget it and then it gets the chance to rear its head and appear in full form in an instant, making Iblis feel over the moon. That was in fact the worst of it for me now, doing something that would make Satan happy! I had known when I left that I should not have said anything but I had no expectation of returned fruit and the tip, plus a young man upset with me.
Still, the supervisor was gracious. He accepted my apology and when he left, I looked at the housekeeping guy again.
“Bhai,” I said, “teen dafa to maafi maangi hai. Ab to de do.”
He smiled. “Theek hai.”
While waiting for Asr the same day, I noticed two cats near me on the carpet. The cats are the only animal privileged to walk around the Mosque as if they own it. If one plants itself where one has to rest their head for sajda and for some reason decides not to move from there, the pilgrims do instead. One cat, white in colour, kept clawing at the carpet repeatedly while spread on it sideways. It did so a few times until the other smacked its hand as if to say, “Stop that!”
After that the white cat kept raising its claw slowly as if it was going to attempt it again and again but never actually did it. It was hilarious. Like when a child does something and gets a slap on its wrist from the mother to behave, then keeps acting like it might do it again but doesn't out of fear of the next smack.
On the carpets, I saw men pressing their mother’s feet and receiving all the prayers of health and life and wealth and goodness in repeat. I saw men laying their heads on their wives’ laps while their children played nearby. I saw women distributing food before Maghrib, dates and croissants, candy and juice, from large bags. Some had their young children with them and made the child take the food out and give it away. Those children were lucky! The experience was going to stay with them forever if not transform them.
During Maghrib, I realized that I knew the verses recited in the first raka’h. They were from Surah Muhammad and I had just read it the previous night. I was trying to read the surahs that are Nabi Kareem’s (peace be upon him) names. Ya Seen was my favourite. As I fixated all my energy on the words with a hidden smile, I noticed something pulling on my leg. I looked down to find that the cat that had swiped the other’s claw from the carpet was scratching my pants. I jumped in surprise and it moved back. It was funny. The coincidence of it coming to me out of the blue just as I was listening to something I recognized. Maybe like the other cat which it had admonished earlier, it was also telling me to stop feeling glee about the recitation and to focus on it seriously. It was like the Mullah cat of the Masjid!
@the.softest.heart
stopping at wadi e hamra
The Appearance of Anger
It was the next day that I understood the value of keeping money on me even if I was just going to the haram a minute away. It was after Zuhr when I saw two women looking lost and panicked. Clad in shalwar kamiz I knew they were from the homeland. I asked them what was wrong.
“Kya baat hai Amma?” I asked in Punjabi.
In Medina Shareef apparently I liked to try out all the terms of address otherwise missing from my life. Baji, Apa (although I do have one very special Apa!), Amma, Maa ji!
“We want to go to Gate 5. We asked a couple of men but everyone says it far.” I looked around. Turned out they were separated from their party and now didn’t know how to meet them again. They had a card, it had a number scribbled on it but when I tried it, it seemed to be short some digits. We were in front of 16. I could see 7 towards the other side of the Mosque in the middle. I pointed at it and said 5 would not be much further but it didn’t make them any less distressed.
“Can you just take us? Please, we cannot go alone.”
“Sure,” I said. I needed to pay penance for a reaction of haste I had had earlier in the morning with my housekeeping staff. This was perfect! Repentance in the form of a walk might redress that. I thanked God for the ability to be kind, for the ability to be helpful, for the opportunity to be selfless and as it later turned out, for a reason to spend on another. And we made our way towards the said destination.
On the way, I placed my hand on the shoulder of the older woman as if being lead by her while it was actually the opposite. Within a second, I felt the fingers of the other lady making a bracelet around my wrist. I started smiling. We were now physically entwined in a curious way. It wasn’t like I was going to get separated from them but I guess they didn’t want to take any chances. The Mosque was full and the area we were going through was not segregated.
They were from Bukkhar. I had no idea where that was. My ignorance in geography is firmly inclusive of the homeland as well. When we approached Gate 7, I realized that 5 was in fact quite a bit further. It was bang opposite where we had started from. Parts of the marble were piping hot so we moved quickly over it. I realized that the older lady had no shoes on her feet and none in her hand.
“Aap ke jotey kahan hain Amma?”
“Pata nahin,” she said, replying in Punjabi. She said she didn’t care. She just wanted to meet her “men-folk.”
It was in that walk that I realized something remarkable. The whole way there the two women talked and the only thing they said in different ways was how Beneficent God was and how He was going be The One who would make them meet their relatives. “Sohna Rab kareesi, Sohna Rab san milesi.” They never mentioned me :)
Later that night, while waiting for the ziyarat of the Rauza Mubarik, I gave some sadqa to the woman sitting next to me. That was another act of penanace. I had spoken to her a little sharply when she squeezed herself between me and the edge of the wall I myself was stuck in. But the older women around me had let her do it so I had no choice but to acquiesce as well.
Later we ended up chatting, sharing my dry fruit which she seemed to like a lot. She was also from Lahore. I had asked her where and had not been familiar with the answer she gave. I wanted to probe but was worried it would only unveil my ignorance. My markers for the places I know nothing of are too touristy. At one point I heard her daughter tell another Pakistani woman about the mark on her face. It was of a purple colouring, like a splash on one cheek that then crawled up in a vein like pattern to one side of her forehead.
I could tell from her exasperated look that the Pakistani woman was hounding her about it. I just heard her say again and again, “But I don’t want to do that” so I guessed unwarranted and deeply offensive suggestions were being put forward. Of the variety of how to lose weight as soon as one kilo was gained and one appeared “healthy!” Except this was probably more cruel.
Her mother seemed impervious to the commentary although I wasn’t sure she could hear anything if I couldn’t.
“I think it’s beautiful,” she said. “The night she was born, it was a lunar eclipse and her father was smoking a hookah. The mark is of the moon covered by his smoke,” she beamed. “Rabb ditta he, Sohne Rabb di nishani he.”
Since I’m in love with the moon, I wholeheartedly agreed. Any nisbat to it in any form was indeed divine fortune in my opinion. But for her it was not about the moon. Her love for the mark was precisely because it came from her God.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s a picture of the moon on that night when it was hidden. It’s beautiful.”
How lucky some kids are, I thought, that what the world judges as “flaws,” their parents think of as beauty. She kept looking over at her daughter with such tenderness, even my heart, stranger to both, felt her love.
Just when I thought the time had come for the doors to open, I gave her daughter some money. The mother raised her dupatta with her hands towards the sky and said, “Rabb da langar he! Rabb da langar he!” I was so happy that she was happy that I had pulled out all the notes in my pocket and handed them to her. “He sent it for you too,” I said smiling and she laughed. But she only looked up again and again and thanked Him. It was extraordinary, the instant, spontaneous, gut reaction, no the reaction of the heart, that all of everything came only from Him, from His Love.
Later while I read the Tafseer e Jilani I came upon the word Rabb again and again in different verses. The exegesis of the word by Ghaus Pak (ra) was magnificent. Each time it was different. But I focused on the word because I came across it accidentally while at the Riyaaz ul Jannah on my first day. After praying nafal, I sat way back at the end and just stared around the Mosque. In the distance, I saw verses written in gold on the wall. I zoomed in and took a photo. At the hotel I sent it to Qari Sahib to ask him which verse in the Quran it was.
It was Aal e Imran, Verse 36-37. The words of the wife of the Prophet Imran (as) when she gave birth to her daughter:
Then when she delivered her, she said, "My Lord, indeed I (have) delivered [her] a female." And Allah knows better (of) what she delivered, and is not the male like the female. "And that I have) named her Maryam and that I seek refuge for her in You and her offspring from the Shaitaan, the rejected."
What were the odds?
I happened to have the first volume of his tafseer with me because I was reading Surah Baqarah. I went to the verse above and it was the word “Rabb” that caught my attention. In Urdu it said:
Apni Taaqat aur Qudrat aur apne Mubarik Qaul se meri parwarish farmane waley Rabb!
The tafseer by Ghaus Pak (ra) for the word Rabbi as used by Nabi Kareem (peace be upon him) was even more intense.
The One who has raised me with the most special qurb (closeness).
The poor women I met that day had only called God by that name. They never said Allah or Khuda, only Rabb. I have been saying a tasbeeh of Allah o Rabbi since I read that it was on the Ghilaaf of the Ka’ba. It was also in the verses of Qaseeda Ghausia. Being the God that raises me from a child to the rest of my life, that was how I wanted to address my God as well. That was the word I used when I asked him to raise my niece, teach her that which the world and those in it never could.
Strangely enough, it wasn’t until the women’s use of the word Rabb coincided with the words used by Bibi Maryam’s (ratu) mother that I read in the Mosque that I realized I had, all the while, been saying Rabbi, just like her and other Prophets, in all my prayers, in each and every ruku’ of each and every rakah.
Subhan Rabbi Al-Adeem when I bent my back to touch my knees.
Subhan Rabbi Al-Ala’ each time I went into sajda.
I had, way before reading a tasbeeh and because the words appeared on the House of God, been saying Rabbi my entire life. It was just that since I had been focusing on the speed of my prayer, slowing it down to a crawl, which had come about only because of the study of the translation, I had been preoccupied with the beginning, the Fateha, and then the dialogue at Ascension, Attahatu lillah he…Even the Darood e Ibrahimi. But except for the Fateha, which would take several lifetimes of someone like me to truly unveil and even then not, the other prayers were not in every rakah. But the use of the word Rabbi was.
What could be better than being raised by God Himself?
Being saved from every single decision by humans that could be wrong and cause devastating consequences for the soul. Be it in language then speech, food, clothing, shelter, the learning of knowledge and most important, the shaping of behavior, the carving of morality. A character formed as only one’s own under His Direction. No emulation induced by sharing time and space but only chosen.
Suddenly being in a boarding school at 5 that I joked about as being an orphan-esque experience didn’t seem so bad. Even the grief of separation from my mother which was probably what was still exuding from eyes was worth it. When I was around her again at 10, my heart was formed. I can’t say it was normal but it was independent nonetheless, for its identity had been shaped in another realm by someone other than my parents. As I sat in the haram between prayers, I pondered over what would be my definition of Rabbi when I would use it going forward. Different thoughts went in and out of my head.
The One who raised me such in the absence of my parents that He granted me the will to explore the capacity to change in life. Who gifted me the ability to learn and listen when I would be shown my flaws, then repent over them, then forgive me again and again. Who taught me to obey instruction and feel love. Bi lutfi-ka (by Your Special Kindness), bi rahmati-ka (by Your Mercy), bi fadli-ka (by Your Bounty), bi ehsaani-ka (by Your Favour)…
The blessings we are granted that we are entirely unaware of made me sigh deeply till the sun lost its whiteness of the lit afternoon sun and gave way to the pinks and purples, then darkness of the night. But wait, I haven’t finished my other story yet.
We got to Gate 5. There was no family waiting. “Now what?” I asked.
“We want to go back to the hotel,” they said. “We can wait for them there. He will unite us there,” they said.
That was when I put my hand in my pocket and pulled out a 50, breathing a sigh of relief. Done! We got into a taxi, where luckily all the drivers speak Urdu no matter who they are. I told the driver to drop me at my hotel and take them to theirs. I told the women the plan and they seemed ok with it. But I could hear their urgent murmurings of “Bismillah” recitations in repeat.
“Nothing will happen,” I said as I left the car. “He is a good man,” I pointed at the driver. I took the change and handed it to who was now my Amma. “Buy a new pair of shoes,” I said jokingly. She held up her hand in refusal but I insisted. “You will need them” and off they went.
I entered my hotel with a smile only to find the fruit and tip I had given my housekeeping guy was sitting on the bed. He had returned it. It didn’t damper my mood. I went outside and walked the floor to find him. He was a young Bengali chap, very competent but I had been impatient about getting a softer pillow earlier and complained to Housekeeping that he had forgotten, mentioning like a ghatia loser that I had tipped him as well.
When I saw him I offered my best smile.
“Bhai,” I said. “Aap naraz ho gaye hain. Please yeh fruit to leh lein. Aur yeh paise bhi.”
He looked away from me. “I will call my supervisor,” he said.
I was continuing to apologize when the supervisor appeared. I started smiling at him. “Yeh mujh ae naraz ho gaye hain. I should not have said anything about the pillow. I’m sorry, I got impatient and thought he had forgotten and left for the day.”
The supervisor was Pathan. “You said you tipped him. That is not good.”
“But tipping is a done thing,” I replied. “Everyone does it.”
“No,” he said emphatically “everyone does not do it.” And then came the retort. “And if someone does do it, they don’t then speak of it.” “Koi de ke batata nahin hai” were his exact words!
Now I started apologising to him too. “Mujhe pata hai. Aap mujhe maaf kar dein. Please. Mere se ghalti ho gaye. Mujhe ghussa aa gaya tha.”
There it was! The admission that I had lost my temper. That demon beast of anger that lies dormant for so long sometimes that I forget it and then it gets the chance to rear its head and appear in full form in an instant, making Iblis feel over the moon. That was in fact the worst of it for me now, doing something that would make Satan happy! I had known when I left that I should not have said anything but I had no expectation of returned fruit and the tip, plus a young man upset with me.
Still, the supervisor was gracious. He accepted my apology and when he left, I looked at the housekeeping guy again.
“Bhai,” I said, “teen dafa to maafi maangi hai. Ab to de do.”
He smiled. “Theek hai.”
While waiting for Asr the same day, I noticed two cats near me on the carpet. The cats are the only animal privileged to walk around the Mosque as if they own it. If one plants itself where one has to rest their head for sajda and for some reason decides not to move from there, the pilgrims do instead. One cat, white in colour, kept clawing at the carpet repeatedly while spread on it sideways. It did so a few times until the other smacked its hand as if to say, “Stop that!”
After that the white cat kept raising its claw slowly as if it was going to attempt it again and again but never actually did it. It was hilarious. Like when a child does something and gets a slap on its wrist from the mother to behave, then keeps acting like it might do it again but doesn't out of fear of the next smack.
On the carpets, I saw men pressing their mother’s feet and receiving all the prayers of health and life and wealth and goodness in repeat. I saw men laying their heads on their wives’ laps while their children played nearby. I saw women distributing food before Maghrib, dates and croissants, candy and juice, from large bags. Some had their young children with them and made the child take the food out and give it away. Those children were lucky! The experience was going to stay with them forever if not transform them.
During Maghrib, I realized that I knew the verses recited in the first raka’h. They were from Surah Muhammad and I had just read it the previous night. I was trying to read the surahs that are Nabi Kareem’s (peace be upon him) names. Ya Seen was my favourite. As I fixated all my energy on the words with a hidden smile, I noticed something pulling on my leg. I looked down to find that the cat that had swiped the other’s claw from the carpet was scratching my pants. I jumped in surprise and it moved back. It was funny. The coincidence of it coming to me out of the blue just as I was listening to something I recognized. Maybe like the other cat which it had admonished earlier, it was also telling me to stop feeling glee about the recitation and to focus on it seriously. It was like the Mullah cat of the Masjid!
@the.softest.heart