Everyone in the neighbourhood knew Omar Siddiqui as the Ramadan man.
Not unkindly.
It was simply the most accurate thing about him.
For eleven months of the year, Omar was ordinary in all the ways a man could be ordinary.
He went to work at the textile office where he had worked for twenty-two years.
He came home.
He ate what his wife, Sameera, put in front of him.
He watched the news.
He slept.
He was not a bad man.
He gave to the poor when asked.
He was honest in his dealings.
He did not cause trouble, and trouble did not find him.
But he was not, in the eleven months outside of Ramadan, a man who prayed all five prayers or read the Quran after Fajr or sat with his children in the evenings asking about their days with any particular depth of interest.
He was ordinary.
And then Ramadan came.
And Omar Siddiqui came alive.
From the first night of tarawih, he was at the masjid before the imam arrived.
His Fajr was never missed.
His Quran sat open on the dining table, and he read it in the mornings with the focused attention of a man who was reading something urgent.
He woke his children for suhoor and made the tea himself, standing in the kitchen in the dark at three in the morning in a way that his wife, Sameera, found both deeply moving and quietly bewildering.
He was patient.
He was gentle.
He gave more sadaqah in Ramadan than in all the other months combined.
He cried in the last ten nights.
Not privately.
In the masjid with the other men, openly, in the way that Ramadan permitted men to cry without anyone thinking less of them for it, the permission itself being one of the gifts of the month.
SubhanAllah, people said when they saw him.
See how Ramadan changes a man.
See how Omar becomes himself in these thirty days.
And then Eid came.
And Omar went back.
Not dramatically.
Not with any decision or announcement.
Simply, gradually, over the days after Eid, the Quran moved from the dining table to the shelf.
The Fajr became the first prayer missed, then the second, then a habit that was no longer a habit.
The patience thinned.
The gentleness retreated to the place it lived for eleven months, present enough to be called upon for occasions but not resident in the daily.
He was not the same man he had been in Ramadan.
He knew this.
Sameera knew this.
His children knew this in the way children knew things, without the vocabulary for it, but with the full felt understanding of it.
Every year, it was the same.
Every year Omar arrived in Ramadan like a man returning home and left it like a man going back to a place he had not chosen.
He told himself it was the month.
The month was special.
The shayateen were chained.
The gates of Jannah were open.
The mercy of Allah was descending in ways it did not descend in other months.
Of course, he was different in Ramadan.
The month made you different.
After the month, the month was over.
This was simply how it was.
He told himself this for twenty years.
In the twenty-first year, his daughter Maryam was fourteen.
She was the quietest of his three children, the one who watched things before she spoke about them, who had inherited from somewhere, perhaps from the part of Omar that only lived in Ramadan, a quality of stillness that made the things she said feel considered in a way that the things of other 14-year-olds often were not.
It was the twenty-third night of Ramadan.
Laylatul Qadr was near.
Omar had prayed Isha and tarawih at the masjid and came home and sat at the dining table with his Quran and a glass of water and the particular quality of alertness that the last ten nights brought, the sense of something large and close, the way the air changed before rain.
Maryam came and sat across from him.
She said Baba.
He looked up.
She said can I ask you something.
He said of course.
She said why are you different in Ramadan.
He said what do you mean.
She said you are different.
You make tea at suhoor.
You ask us about our days, and you actually listen to the answer.
You are not angry when small things go wrong.
You read the Quran every morning.
She said I have been watching you do this since I was small.
She said every Ramadan you come home and every Eid you leave again.
She said where do you go.
Omar looked at his daughter.
He looked at the question in her eyes, which was not an accusation.
It was genuine.
She actually wanted to know.
She was fourteen years old, and she had been watching her father arrive in Ramadan for as long as she could remember, and she was asking him, with the directness of a child who had not yet learned to dress difficult questions in comfortable clothing, where he went when the month ended.
He did not have an answer.
He sat with the question for a moment.
He said he did not know.
She looked at him.
She said do you think Allah only answers duas in Ramadan.
He said no.
He said of course not.
She said then why do you only make them here.
She did not say it unkindly.
She said it the way she said everything, with the stillness that was her particular quality, as a genuine question from a person who wanted a genuine answer.
He looked at the Quran on the table.
He looked at his hands.
He said I do not know, Maryam.
He said it honestly.
She said alright.
She said I just wondered.
She got up and went to her room.
He sat at the dining table for a long time after she left.
He thought about what she had said.
He thought about the 20 years of arriving and leaving.
He thought about the man he was in Ramadan and the man he was outside of it, and the distance between them, which he had always explained to himself as the distance between the sacred and the ordinary.
But sitting at the dining table on the twenty-third night of Ramadan with his daughter’s question still in the room with him, he understood, for the first time in twenty years, that he had been using the wrong explanation.
The distance between the Ramadan man and the ordinary man was not the distance between the sacred and the ordinary.
It was the distance between the man he chose to be and the man he allowed himself to be.
In Ramadan, he chose.
Outside of Ramadan, he allowed.
He allowed the laziness at Fajr.
He allowed the impatience at home.
He allowed the Quran to move from the table to the shelf.
He allowed the distance between himself and Allah to widen by the width of each small permission he gave himself.
And he had called this distance the natural order of things outside the holy month.
He had called it the way life was.
He had called it everything except what it was.
Which was a choice.
His choice.
Made every morning when he did not get up for Fajr.
Made every evening when he did not ask his children about their days with the depth of interest he had in Ramadan.
Made every time he picked up his phone instead of his Quran.
He had been making choices for twenty years and calling them the absence of Ramadan.
The truth, sitting at the dining table on the twenty-third night with the mercy of Allah close in the air and his daughter’s question still in the room, was considerably simpler and considerably harder.
The truth was that Ramadan had been showing him who he could be for twenty years.
And he had been choosing, every year after Eid, to be someone smaller.
He made wudu.
He prayed two rakats.
He did not make a grand declaration.
He did not write anything down or tell anyone.
He simply sat on his prayer mat after the salah and said, quietly, to Allah, who heard the things said quietly in rooms in the middle of the night, he said Ya Allah.
He said I have been arriving for twenty years and leaving.
He said I do not want to leave this year.
He said I do not know how to stay.
He said, but I am asking.
He said that was all he had.
A man on a prayer mat in the last ten nights of Ramadan, with nothing to offer except the asking.
Innaka ‘afuwwun tuhibbul ‘afwa fa’fu ‘anna.
O Allah, You are the Pardoner, You love to pardon, so pardon us.
The dua of the last ten nights.
He said it until the words were no longer words but something else.
Until the asking was no longer a performance for himself but a genuine reaching toward something he had been standing at the edge of for twenty years.
He did not transform overnight.
That was not how it worked, and Omar was old enough to know it was not how it worked.
Eid came.
The biryani was made.
The children were dressed.
The relatives arrived.
And the pull was there, the familiar pull back toward the ordinary, the first missed Fajr of Eid morning because it was Eid and Eid was a celebration and celebration began with sleeping slightly later than usual.
He felt it.
He knew it.
And this time, for the first time in twenty years, he named it.
He said to himself this is the pull.
This is the moment.
This is the morning.
He got up.
He prayed Fajr.
He was slow, and his eyes were heavy, and his wudu was cold, and it was not the Fajr of Ramadan, with its particular urgency and clarity.
It was an ordinary Fajr on Eid morning.
But it was a Fajr.
He sat after the salah for a moment.
He opened his Quran.
Not for long.
Ten minutes.
Then he went and made tea for his family because Sameera had been making tea at suhoor alone for twenty-two years of marriage; it was Eid, and she deserved a morning where someone else made the tea.
Maryam came into the kitchen while the kettle was boiling.
She looked at her father.
She looked at the Quran on the dining table.
She looked at the kettle.
She did not say anything.
She sat down at the table.
He brought her tea.
He sat across from her.
She said Baba.
He said yes.
She said you are still here.
He understood what she meant.
He said I am still here.
She looked at her tea.
She said good.
She said I like you when you are here.
He looked at his daughter.
Fourteen years old.
Watching him.
The way she had always watched him.
With the stillness that was her quality, and the eyes that asked genuine questions and expected genuine answers.
He said Maryam.
She looked up.
He said thank you.
She said for what?
He said to ask where I go.
She looked at him for a moment.
Then she said she had been wondering for a long time.
He said he knew.
He said he had been wondering too.
He said he thought he had found the answer.
She said what the answer was.
He said it was not the month that made him different.
He said it was him.
He had always been him.
Ramadan had just been the thirty days a year when he had permitted himself to be all of him.
He said he thought perhaps he should stop waiting for permission.
Maryam was quiet for a moment.
Then she said that was a good answer.
He said it had taken him twenty years.
She said better than twenty-one.
He laughed.
The real laugh.
The one that his children knew from Ramadan.
She smiled.
Outside, the Eid morning was beginning to arrive through the windows, the particular quality of Eid morning light that was the same as any morning light but felt different because of what it was carrying.
Inside the kitchen, a man was sitting across from his daughter with two cups of tea, a Quran on the table, and the question of where he went was answered at last.
He was not going anywhere.
He was here.
He was choosing, this morning, to be here.
And tomorrow morning, he would choose again.
And the morning after that.
Not because it was Ramadan.
Because it was his life.
And his life was the only Ramadan he had left.
Alhamdulillah.
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