In Our Mad and Furious City by Guy Gunaratne

Author:Guy Gunaratne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Headline
Published: 2017-10-12T07:07:08+00:00

Yusuf

When I turned eleven years old my family took us to Pakistan. It was a day before my birthday. We spent the morning at my Aunt Sanah’s house eating iced cake and overly sweet coconut cubes drenched in sugar-syrup. Later that day Abba took my brother and me to the Sarhad to see Mohabbat Khan. It was some glorious palace, a white Mosque where two tall minarets seemed to spin into the sky when I stood under them. Inside the courtyard were decorated walls built in like the seventeenth century. The purity of the spires and sweeping arches, the intricacies of the art gave me mad galaxies to drift away within. I remember walking toward the prayer hall with Irfan. He was holding my hand leading me along. My small head was the last of me to follow, goggling at the patterns on the wall. Every so often he would give a sudden yank of my arm and then slack as if I were his yo-yo. Abba had insisted we look after one another as he attended to his work.

– The place was built to venerate God, he said. We were all his children. Here, Abba would have to share his role as our father with Allah, who saw everything.

The ceiling was a pulsing explosion, flowering in all directions as far as I could see. As we stood there under the dome my father stepped over to my brother and me, laid his hands on our shoulders and crouched, smiling with his moustache cut perfectly thin to his upper lip. Looked like he wanted to impart a miracle. He spoke to us about the swirling art, the significance of the greens, the purples and red circles, the elaborate geometry, all painted hundreds of lifetimes ago. He told us that the dome had hung there in fantastic colour for an eternity.

The three of us stood so close, a small family cluster inside a worshipping stream, all dressed in bright white. My own sleeves were far too long for my arms, flapping around my fingers, our feet bare. This was an ancient place my father said, aching with wisdom. On the edge of a decade of life on this planet, I instinctively understood the sense of wonder he tried to offer. Even if most of what I knew of Islam had just as much to do with listening to Nas’s Islamic references in raps or watching Muhammad Ali speak about the most high, everything that day seemed manifest and maximal to me. It was my brother who seemed nonplussed by it all, though Abba tried to coax as best he could.

– You see my sons the verses written along these walls? If you learn Arabic you can read this Mosque like a book. But remember it is all written with belief, ah? Without belief all you have is art – but what art, nah?

Irfan seemed uncomfortable in this foreign Mosque. He was bored and burdened with pimples and gamey limbs. For my

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