Skip to main content

My brother's Ramadan antics

I don't know how you did it.

Regardless of all the warnings, you'd sleep late every night. Before dawn, Mom would be in and out of your room a dozen times, shaking you, calling your name, announcing how many minutes were left.

Sometimes you didn't get up. But, usually, you'd manage to stumble out of bed and make it downstairs in a daze, squinting in the bright lights, glasses placed on your face haphazardly.

“Pass me a jug of water!” you'd yell. “How many minutes are left?”

Usually, they'd be less than five.

We'd be getting those last gulps of water, looking at the wall clock above the dining room table, and you'd just be starting. You'd grab whatever was on the table and ingest it at an alarming speed—ensuring indigestion later, but desperate times call for desperate measures!

Mom would have a pitcher of water ready for you, daily—was that a wry smile that she hid from her firstborn?—and we'd laugh out loud watching you glug, glug, glug, water spilling down your cheeks. I think you must have enjoyed the audience.

And after every clock in the house had declared that the time was indeed over—you'd check each one for a chance at an extra minute to swallow something—you'd collapse on the couch with the rest of us. Then followed those hysterical moments of laughter and sibling camaraderie that, somehow, only happened after suhoor in Ramadan.

As for what you used to do on Eid... don't get me started.

(June 2018)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

To school on a winter morning

I love the walks to school on winter mornings. The crisp weather, the leisurely stride, the friendly banter between my daughters and their cousin. Sometimes they link arms with her—not with each other, to be sure—and sometimes they take quick steps, trying to outpace each other. The puffy black jacket I bought a decade ago on another continent serves me well. Today, grey clouds loom above, but so far there is no rain. (It doesn’t take long for the streets to fill with water when it does rain, and then the walk turns into a delicate crisscrossing dance.) We’re approaching the school gate now. “Anyone want to hug and kiss me in public?” I quip. The girls politely decline, but they do say salam and “I love you.” I stand until they pass through the doors; both of them look at me and wave. I turn back, and soon I’m crossing a one-way road; I live in Egypt, so I look both ways. My way back is contemplative. I study all the greenery on my path—trees and bushes of various shapes and sizes. Som...
Post a Comment
Read more

The writer in me

The writer in me, nurtured at an early age but silenced in its prime by country-hopping, teaching, and babies —an occasional gasp for air its only reprieve from slow suffocation— longs to speak again. I've so much to say, it tells me, but you haven't been listening. Don't hold me back, it says by shopping, cooking, and lame excuses. Let me go, it says; let me speak. Ya Allah, strengthen my voice. (July 2018)
Post a Comment
Read more

Shoe hostages

You used to hide our shoes. It was your tried-and-true way of getting your nieces and nephews to sleep over. “Okay, kids, let’s go home now,” one of your siblings would say at the end of a visit. “But their shoes are nowhere to be found,” you’d say. “I guess they’ll just have to sleep over!” Your siblings would chuckle at this hostage-taking and relent. But not my dad. He’d demand the shoes be procured immediately. And what choice did you have but to listen to your older brother? You had no children of your own, and you spoiled us rotten. Love flowed freely from your heart, knowing no bounds. We saw it in the hours you spent telling us stories, in your home that was always open, in the milk you put out for strays, and in your endless batches of fried potatoes. They were legendary, those potatoes. I still don’t know why yours always tasted the best. My brother would eat a plateful all by himself, and you’d just laugh and go make more. You don’t make them anymore. The last time I saw you...
Post a Comment
Read more