When Emran opened his eyes, he realized that his forehead was resting on the floor of the mosque. He dozed off and lost control for a while. As he sheepishly looked ahead and sideways, he saw children laughing at him and musallis giving him angry stares. Emran was in a big mosque to offer Jummah prayers. He must have snored indecently; it was certainly a shameful thing to do, snoring among people focusing their mind on the divine.
That Friday was a special one; it was just a week before Eid-ul-Adha—the mosque was packed to the capacity. The eager musallis were there to listen to the special sermon to be delivered by the Imam on the spirit of sacrificing the beast in man. Emran should have been more careful; did he snore loud like a pig? The knitted eyebrows of the older musallis told him the real story.
The Imam of the mosque had a reputation in the neighborhood for sermonizing fluently in Arabic. He’d stop speaking Bengali the moment he entered the mosque. On Fridays, when the Imam rose to deliver his sermons, Emran usually passed his time by looking away at the window or by keeping his head down, worrying about his unsuccessful life as a banker. The Imam was, Emran thought, a perfect stranger: an Arab among a crowd of Bengali-speaking people.
On that Friday, Emran was a bit restless; he was unhappy about an event that had happened in the closing hours of the bank on the day before. The manager had lost his temper when he found out that Emran had failed to meet his credit target for the third time in three months; "I am going to triple the target for this month; unless you get it done, I will have you transferred outside Dhaka". Emran slept badly on Thursday night.
So, Emran was quite dizzy when he headed to the mosque, feeling unsure whether he could hold his attention for the all-important pre-Eid sermon or not. Arabic was hieroglyphic to his unaccustomed mind. Once the sermonizing began, his attention predictably started to stray and got caught on the air-conditioners of the mosque: twelve giant air-conditioners in one single room. The branch where Emran worked had only one air-conditioner installed in the manager’s room, who kept it switched off, complaining of having a cold.
From the air-conditioners, his eyes traveled to the beautiful chandelier hanging in midair from the ceiling of the prayer room. It was an intricate work of crystal; as it gracefully swayed, it cast a regular pattern of light and shadows on the floor. "What symmetry," Emran murmured to himself.
The swaying chandelier reminded him of his father, when he would push him as he rode a swing as a small boy. Back then, he lived with his parents in a small suburban town far away from the capital. In the afternoon, his mother would take him to his father’s office and all three of them would visit parks around the town in the evening. As they walked hand in hand, their hearts quietly took in the grandeur of an unspoiled semi-urban landscape. On their way home, his father would shop at a local market where the vegetables were leafy green and insanely cheap; his mother would always give him the biggest slice of fish when they would sit for a supper in their homely apartment. He was then many years away from knowing a disease called insomnia.
Slowly a trance came over Emran as he sat in the mosque reminiscing lovely memories of his parents. Soon he began to lose his sense of time and place, and in that blurred moment of half-consciousness, he experienced a moment of bliss: the world was suddenly a big chandelier, an ornate fixture, suspended magically in the air and emitting a soft translucent haze everywhere. In the mystically refracted light cast by the chandelier, he saw forms rise and merge into one another: the bank manager pointing his finger at him became the Arabic-speaking Imam who, in turn, became the ever-loving father pushing the swing he rode as a little boy like a prince …
The magical transformations seemed to be going on for an eternity when the chandelier came crashing down on his head!
That was actually when his drooping head hit the ground.
Clearly, for the musallis inspired by the Imam for the forthcoming sacrificial rites, there was no place for a daydreamer like Emran. As the musallis stood up after the sermon to perform Salat, they kept pushing him to the back rows; he was an irresponsible soul who sleeps during prayer: a disgrace to them all! How could they pray in the same row with him?
Emran ended up in the last row of the mosque, a place usually reserved for the beggars and very close to the exit. He was exhausted, literally dragged past a jungle of limbs and legs to the last row. Beads of sweat lined his forehead as his shirt became transparent with perspiration. He had no idea where he was.
"Hey! You are obstructing the gate. Get off right now." That was Lal Mia, the Secretary of the Mosque Managing Committee, who appeared and stood towering over him. Emran was in for a trouble. The prayer was about to begin. Evidently Lal Mia took him for a beggar; Lal Mia hated people with slovenly dresses. Slovenliness is bad for spirituality. Because the Secretary was so busy keeping things tidy, he always performed his salat standing in the last row.
Emran had to step out. He crossed the road and took his place under the shadow of a tree opposite the mosque. From there, he could see musallis perform salat. He kept standing there until the prayer ended. Suddenly there was a hurry: people raced past one another to get out of the Mosque. They went directly to a tin-roofed shop that had a corner screened from view with sackcloth. Rings of smoke billowed out of it and Emran knew who lit the fire.
With the prayer over, Emran decided to head home. "Go away you idiot, this is no place for your trash,” boomed a voice that sounded so familiar to Emran that he thought it was directed at him. Yes, it was Lal Mia again but the victim this time was a rickshaw-puller who unfortunately had parked his rickshaw in front of the main gate of the mosque.
As the Secretary of the mosque, it was Lal Mia’s job to ensure that Musallis exit safely from the mosque. So he started to shoo the rickshaw-puller away; but at one point, the lower end of the secretary's punjabi-shirt (the wind must have played a villainous role) snagged at some screw of that rickety three-wheeler. Then came one long ripping sound!
People around the Secretary closed their eyes and the rickshaw-puller immediately went down on his knees apologizing …
Emran wanted to have no more of this; he picked up the pace of his walk, but even as he was walking away, the noise that travelled to his reluctant ear reported of a cry of a man whose last means of livelihood were being taken apart into pieces.
Yasif Ahmad Faysal teaches English at Barisal University.