With Ramadan kicking in full swing, my days have now turned slow. After hurdling from one exam to another for the last few months, suddenly this almost dull and muted standstill has left me feeling a little bit off balance, I admit. But I wouldn’t say that the feeling is entirely unwelcome.
Where I come from, Ramadan is all about families and getting together. Call it sort of like Christmas or Thanksgiving if you will. It goes on for about a whole month, with a festive rush as any holidays do, before coming to an end in spectacles just like new years eve. Because of this, I’ve been busy seeing too many familiar faces in too many familiar places for the last few days, even though the number of said faces has shrunk quite a bit compared to just a few years ago. Time flies and we all fly along with it. Those who were once a big part of all things festive become ghosts whom you rarely hear of. Some leave, and some perish; it’s all a big part of the grind that is life. It is what it simply is, in the end, and we can do nothing but get with the program of it all.
The thing that I most like about this one month of fasting is how much time it opens up for me to read. I always have my nose stuffed into one book or another throughout this period, and by the time Eid (A celebration of sorts for us Muslims) rolls around, I find myself finishing a handful of novels with ease, feeling content and fulfilled. It’s not the most exciting of things to be doing, but it always helps me unwind, shading all the pent-up worries and frustration I managed to hoard.
So yeah, the start of this week has been good in many ways. And as I continue to shove one novel after another down my throat in glee, I can’t help but contemplate what each of these stories leaves me with.
One of the most recent things would be the fragmented idea of tradition.
It is undoubtedly a broader term when looked at in a cultural and even religious sense. But what I am talking about are family traditions; the little mundane yet constant things that most families take part in doing which shape our inner values. Helping my mother peel potatoes and fry up eggplants might really not look like a shining beacon of a tradition now in my mind, but give or take twenty years, I surely know that I’ll be looking back to this very memory with bittersweet nostalgia lining with what once was and what now is gone.
A chaos-filled visit to the aunts on every Eid morning, laughter-filled sleepovers, last minute all night shopping, sore legs, and perched throats because of all the running and shouting; even a few years ago, these things were at the core of family traditions that I knew of, and little me back then used to look forward to it every year without fail. But with leaves turning brown and years passing by, they are all now but a memory in making; because even my treacherous mind seems to have grown too old to remember it all in vivid detail. Parents who used to be the life of the party now gave greys lining their hair, and their slow paces only remind me of how fast they used to run just to get on that last bus that would take them home for the holidays.
Family traditions… such wonderful things they are. One minute you seem to have it all without notice, and the very next, nothing is the same anymore and you are left with just vague memories.
I see them dance in the dimmed eyes of my mother. And I see them escape in a rush with the quiet sighs left by my father as he still constantly sits beside her every night without fail, even if the once full table now rang empty and barren, with no festive laughter heard in miles.