white thread becomes distinct from black thread

*This is a long over-due entry, but don't give me lip about it*

Two nights ago, there was a shooting star so bright, that as it burned in the sky and fell behind my back, casting its greenish glow on the wall of Mohamed Ali’s house, I thought it was the light from a car. When I turned to face it I was just in time to catch it snapping out of existence forever.

Now is Ramadan.

If you don’t know what that is, then look it up (I would have had to), because it’s a shame we all don’t know a little more about each other. I’m fasting this year as a result of accident and pridefulness more than anything else. By the third person who asked me if I was going to be fasting, I found myself saying ‘yes’ just so that I wouldn’t have to endure the embarrassment of answering ‘ no’ .

Hardly what the prophet must have had in mind, but we are who we are. Surely it goes without saying that any of the appropriate religious reverence is, in my case, absent, and that I find such beliefs - that the omniscient creator of an unimaginably gargantuan universe (in comparison to which, of course, we are smaller than a bugger in an electron’s nostril) should or could give a celestial crap about when, what or how we eat/drink - patently absurd if not insane. Nevertheless, there is something about the concepts of ‘sacrifice’ and ‘stoicism’ and ‘struggle’ that are as irrationally appealing, at times, as addictions.

The first day - I spent it frolicking, (really) in the waterfalls which flow from miles and miles away over the cliffs to collect in a modest pool, the first and only time I got to do so this year, because the rains were so short that the waterfalls have already evaporated. It rained about 3 times here, and I missed 1 and ½ of them, though this probably for the best, because you see, my house is broken.

Thirst is …. interesting. I mean surely it’s obvious but it’s the thirst which gets you; hunger is nothing. Everyone knows that humans can live an inordinately long time without food, what is it, a month? Two? Without water you’re dead, or wishing you were, before the sun can rise twice. Well, here anyway. The thought of ‘thirsting to death’ probably holds a colder sense of horror for everyone than comparable forms of death, (what are comparable forms of death?) maybe partly because in addition to being unimaginably bad, it’s also rare. I mean, who dies of thirst? Of course fasting is hardly the same thing, yet my point is that it’s like tiptoeing around the lip of the same terrible canyon. In the late, endless hours of the afternoon, I was stuck thinking a lot about how I would be feeling if I didn’t know that my thirst was temporary, if I didn’t know down to the minute when I would be able to quench it. As it was, knowing gave a sort of thrilling edge to its overall, soul-destroying awfulness, but any illusions I might have held about using it to build a capacity for dealing with thirst are fantasies. There is no capacity for dealing with it, whether you’ve done it 3 times or 30, just like there is no capacity for dealing with having your tongue cut out. You just hope that it doesn’t ever happen to you and if it does then nothing can prevent you from being utterly screwed.

The only thing better than that last minute before you drink, as the prayer call rings out, with your skin and your thoughts all buzzing with the anticipation of gulping down a big plastic cup of something liquid, is possibly the minute after that, when you do it.

I always drink too much, too soon – this is the way it goes. It’s hard to stop; smart people drink from small cups, they pace themselves. Stupid people, like yours truly, drink from giant Nalgenes and don’t stop until they’re lying prostrate on the floor with a stomach ache. And such is my offering to the glory of god.

Immediately you begin to sweat, of course, something which you haven’t really done since 1 pm. Other things you have ceased to do with ease hours ago include blinking, and/or focusing your eyes, swallowing, peeing freely and licking your lips. Interestingly, one night I was having Yusef explain to me the meaning of a word he had used, and all that I was getting was that it was something like, ‘to snarl’ or ‘to bare one’s teeth’ which I thought was pretty dumb until I later realized it referred to the condition (which in English we feel no need to name) where one’s teeth are so dry that one’s lips keep getting stuck on them.

Do I get any respect for fasting? Well, results are mixed, but generally no, not that I want it. I’d actually prefer that no one really talk about it either way, because people that are all over it and encouraging make me feel queasy about my ulterior motives, and the people who deny me with ‘you’re not fasting’ just make me angry. ‘Okay then,’ I say, ‘then neither are you.’

To be fair, it can’t be easy for them to decide whether this ‘Christian’ who fasts but doesn’t pray or go to mosque is making a mockery of their faith, or whether he is only trying to understand them better. It doesn’t help that I don’t even know which one is closer to the truth.

When I go next door to Mohamed Ali’s, we break fast (officially) with shniinmwasi m’a it-tsuum?” (how are you with the fasting?) which like questions about the rain the heat and the cold, all have their little season in the sun, Christmas tree-like, before being packaged away until the next, identical year.

Fatimatou looks grave as she pours tea and answers me with, ‘Ramadan mtiin’ (Ramadan is strong/hard), “Huwe vaater-ne” (it tires us). She shakes her head, not unhappily, and gives me my little caisse of tea. Then a giant stainless steel bowl of shniin. Yusef gives me a pillow to recline on, and asks me if I ‘thirsted’ today, which is a question that I still find amusing, because, really? Are you kidding me? No, I’m a mountain spring over here. But that’s just the way things go, and you reply ‘mashallah, mashallah’ Unless of course you were on the brink of death today, and then we can talk about that.

The oddest thing of all, is that for something which, in the end, consists of a month of slow, parched days of torture, Ramadan has a pretty good rap. In the same breath, Yusef will tell me that today he got so thirsty that the hours seemed endless and then flash me a look with his lambent eyes and grin ‘Ramadan Zeyn!’ (Ramadan is great). It would be inadvisable to say anything to the contrary.

Young men, for whom fasting at 17 or 18 is a sign of manhood as one might well imagine, love to be flamboyantly exhausted in the afternoon, and come plop themselves and their dry red eyes, in a heap on my patterned plastic floor mats. I love to needle them and say ‘I don’t understand why you’re fasting – you’re just a child’ or, ‘here, let me make you some tea’. Actual children, like my often bratty, but useful friend Cheikh, will sometimes lie and say that they are fasting and I just roll my eyes.

One thing that sets me apart, out of thousands, from everyone else is the fact that I don’t go to the ritual reading/recitation of the entire Qur’an, which is called it-terewah. Each night everyone gathers at the mosque to listen to a recitation (or to recite themselves) of a portion of the Qur’an, and throughout the month the entire thing is strung out in its meandering, mellifluous beauty.

As for me, I would love to go to the recitations (people are constantly asking me) if I were able to go strictly as an impartial observer, but I know much better than to think that is possible. In fact, one of my larger regrets about my time here, is that I have not learned nearly as much as I would like about Islam and its many practices, because I’ve been burned so many times that I know not to touch it with a 10 foot pole.

So while everyone else goes to it-terawah even Mohamed Ali’s three daughters who never venture out after dark, I stay behind with the simmering pots and the soft moonlight, lying curled on my side dreaming of fruit salad. When Mulbarka, the husky and fabulous, not-young-but-prematurely-elderly matriarch stays with me (which is often) she lies moored in the middle of her wooden bed of sticks, (a tabourit) chanting and humming and singing the name of god, the safe, the merciful, the beneficent, ‘Yaa, mulaane il aaviya, Yaa mulaane il aaviya!’ She will groan out painfully when making a difficult maneuver such as fluffing her own pillow. The rest of the time she casually sings bits and fragments of various songs in her Julia Child-like falsetto, whose lyrics generally contain little more than the word ‘al-Lah’, and passes the time in her rather world-weary yet dreamy, opiate-esque fashion.

Her hair is like an iron-grey puff of dirty cotton under her ubiquitous, thread-bare veil.

One frequently used method of coping with thirst is to bathe, although this is somewhat ironic because doing this involves one putting water everywhere except where one actually wants it. It’s a little like being really tired and then occupying yourself making a beautiful bed in which you cannot possibly sleep. And yet, it does strangely help, if only by making the thirst so acute that it is somehow easier to bear.

Aside from bathing proper people will often dump whole buckets of water over their heads, clothes and all (a sure sign that they are fasting) which in fact is just about the most lovely, rejuvenating feeling one can get outside of a swimming pool. Or a Corona with lime. Neither of which are things Mauritania offers.

As the month goes on, the moon balloons out to become like a pearly floodlight in the sky. It’s really so lovely, moonlight. I’m sorry, I can’t get over how I never knew it, living all those years under all those roofs that we work so hard to build. Then suddenly one day they are taken away, and there is nothing between you and the austere sky, and the moon grows and opens up to illuminate everything that was always happening below it, like the life under a rock.

The children play noisy soccer on these kinds of nights in a vacant plot between me and the market, and every sound carries. I can tell who each one is by their laughter, by their harsh, barking shouts and admonishments in that prematurely adult tone, which everybody learns to learn from the first day of life, the one in which affection has been masked and replaced by a smirk, so that no one will ever find it.

Ramadan is expensive, and no mistake. Meat (in some form or another) and potatoes every night in tajiin, and endless kilos of sugar and tea, do not come cheaply, but I suppose the terrifying idea of a god who cares would make the splurge seem worth it. I don’t know where the money comes from – we have no savings worthy of the name, animals are the only banks and instead of account numbers they are branded with the sinewy letters of Arabic.

Awkwardly, I ran out of money during the month, and so even though I ate with them every night the only money I had to contribute to my neighbors was stored inaccessibly in my bank account, 4 hours away. I made up for it by eating very little, and trying to hide the fact from their inevitable protests that I should eat more, something which is easier to do before the moon waxes, when the location of one’s hand in the communal bowl is anyone’s guess.

Money is such a dirty subject anyway, anyhow, no matter where you go in the world. About a month after I first moved in next-door to them, my neighbors just started sending their daughters, one by one in a veiled parade, bringing me unasked-for bowls of food every day. Because I could not bring myself to talk to them about money, fearing as always, embarrassment and tactlessness, I just started to give them little gifts of sugar, onions, peanuts and dates. Then I started giving them food and tea. Then just a lot of tea. And then one day, because I could no longer stand the feeling that I was being a burden, I took the chance and included a little white envelope filled with ougiyas along with the tea, labeled in unable-to-be-read-by-them-French, ‘pour la famille de Mohamed Ali ould Assweylou, and that was that. Now I give them white envelopes of cash in a bag of tea every month and we’ve never said a word about it, which is just how I like it.

On night 27 of the holy month of Ramadan, the reciting of the Qur’an comes to a close and absolutely everyone goes, except me. I was snoozing on the tabourit when they returned and was woken up by Mohamed Ali sprinkling droplets of cold, Qur’an-blessed water on everything in the compound that seemed to need it - the tent, the sand, the goats, the house, the pots and pans, and, apparently, me.

So now, after all this time, I have been blessed. Thank God.