Iftar

He was young. He could run. He could ride. He could balance his rusting bicycle-with-side-car even with no one in the side-car itself. He could duck and weave the machine through the narrow and crowded street, and he could whip around wildly, the side car rising up on the tilt, his hand stopping it from flipping over. His legs pumped. He could race. He took the corners and swept and weaved and dodged the men selling cashews, the strolling women, the roaring motorcycle. The squeak of the pedals. His little breath, working.

There was a crack, a sharp burst of sound. Some other children nearby were setting off poppers. The street echoed with the noise. Birds rose from the trees, whirling into the greying expanses, above the paper flags and strings of lights. The smell of aubegine, of exhaust, of rice. He could soar. The other children watched him, making comments to each other. It was a rare and special thing, this bike. His legs never stopped.

The crowd had thinned and the street was quiet when he pulled up at the house. He went through the doorway, wary of the red-eyed old woman selling flatbreads outside. The stairwell was dark. Inside the house someone was dying. A cat startled him on the stairway. He reached his door, and he opened it up. It was his house, his and his fathers and his mothers and his two sisters. He went inside. It was his mother, dying, inside.

His sister was boiling hibiscus, the only light coming from a small lamp in the kitchen and the flame of the gas burner. His father sat with the Qur'an, his body shadowed, his head low. He kissed his father on both cheeks, who in turn held the boy and kissed his forehead. He looked at his father a moment, then returned a kiss on his father's cherry mark. His father never skipped a prayer, and the boy hoped to also have a mark just like his as he got older. The mark was brown and round, a perfect circle, a proud moon. The crackle of a microphone. The muezzin's call sounded, a long drawl, beautiful, unbreakable. He ran off to wash his hands and face.

Back at the table there was his mother and his younger sister, who had been in the other room. His mother was weakening, you could see it in her paper-white face, in the way her hands shook. She managed a smile when she saw him. Her hands were cold. Recently he had seen his father weeping, soft sobs in the darkness of a corner. This was something he had never seen before, something he had never even thought about seeing. Immediately he had run from the house, and jumped on his bicycle, and he had peddaled and pumped as fast as was ever possible, the side-car rising up high like a giant metal wing. He needed a refuge. He had rode around for hours looking for a place to envelope him. He rode around for hours in the bleating traffic and the constellation of bodies and the thick air and the oncoming night. He rode around looking for a place and then he returned home.

The family is together, brave faced and together, for the first iftar of Ramadan. The book is read. The bread is broken. The bowls of food group together like inverted mountains. The sky outside blackens. The street is silent, still. The earth is quiet. The father serves the meal, and the older sister feeds the mother. The boy watches the faces. He knows there is pain, but he does not sense it tonight. He is young. He can dream. The family eat, each bite slow and deliberate. The moon rises. It's night, and the city emerges, again.