The one question I have been asked the most since my return to Lahore is “Why are you back in Ramzan?!” In my defense, I really didn’t plan it like that, and so I find myself mumbling vaguely about discounted tickets and Schengen visa applications in response to such needling.
But I understand my interlocutors’ incredulity. When the Month of Abstinence makes a mid-summer appearance, many people I know, fasters as well as non-fasters, tend to escape to cooler climes. Now I find myself in the unusual situation of being here while most of my friends are away.
I rather like it. Apart from last week’s “collapsing wall” debacle, I am enjoying the summer (update: wall has been rebuilt, is bigger than ever and topped with shards of glass that make it look like a Tim Burton set piece). But the fact that Ramzan was here did kind of just sneak up on me. It hit me last Sunday when I went to the grocery store - I wanted some baby carrots for my ongoing regimen of starvation and artisanal self-loathing - and there was not a single parking space available, which was unusual. As I walked out of my car I could hear something fierce and indistinct, like a beehive in the distance. The steady thrum of shouts and murmurs grew louder until, past the sliding doors of the entrance, the full carnage of the scene unfolded before me like the first bits of a war movie. Sweaty people were running from aisle to aisle, wide-eyed and agape, throwing whole shelves of daals into their many carts before moving on like locusts on a landing mission. Two women were fighting over the last two tomatoes, and the bread was almost entirely gone (thank God). I didn’t get my carrots, deciding instead that they were probably not worth my life.
Sweaty people were running from aisle to aisle, wide-eyed and agape
Most every other store I went to was the same: ghost-town empty, the shelves bereft of all but the most exotic ingredients (apparently people don’t like olives here), the hapless attendants slunk in the corner with their traumatised expressions. A run on the food aside, the other thing I am not looking forward to is how it will be impossible to get anything done during the day. Lunch, by far my favorite meal, is now a thing of the past; the mere mention of brunch is sacrilege; and dinner turns into a fearsome early-evening catastrophe. To say nothing of the use of toothpaste (or lack thereof), which is the cruelest part of all.
Despite all these complications, or maybe because of them, the month of piety does usually bring out the existentialist in us all. There is something about the ritual of a fast that makes the presence of a divinity in your daily life a conspicuous thing. Even more so than in other months, which in Pakistan is really saying something. Party people (or “movers and shakers,” as GT Magazine flatteringly calls them) tend to give up drinking and smoking; those usually heartless officials in hardwired bureaucracies tend to act kinder and sweeter, if only for the sake of racking up some piety points. I don’t think this is a bad thing at all, or even disingenuous; anything that makes us behave slightly better towards one another is always welcome. My point is that I find people talking about God more openly during the month, and this is a massive relief. Mainly because for the most part it’s not a subject people talk a lot about. I don’t mean religion, which we go on about ad nauseum. I mean belief.
The Ramzan rush hour
Several years ago, when my faith first underwent an overhaul and changed irrevocably, I felt terribly alone. It was a loss akin to the death of a loved one. There was a hole in my being where something used to be and in a sense I have been trying to fill it ever since. Most people my age didn’t talk about stuff like an afterlife or the minutiae of their religious beliefs. It would be generous to assume they didn’t talk about it because such things are private (tell that to the constitution), but I think it was because they really didn’t think about it, choosing instead to talk about music, grades, dating. I don’t judge them for this, but I was surprised by the lack of introspection. Isn’t what you believe the most important question of all? How can you go through your life not having interrogated what (or who) you believe in? How can you have kids and then give them a version of “truth” that you haven’t fully considered yourself?
My own loss of faith was a trauma that never really healed for me, and the cliché is that faith is its own journey. I went through all the stages of grief that one associates with death; I denied, I bartered, I was angry, I was decimated, and slowly I accepted a new form of belief, which is not knowing. In a way I am grateful, because not knowing allowed me to realise that faith is just that, a belief in what you cannot know. But that doesn’t make it any less real.
