On the eve of Ramadan, I still check for the moon. My family waits on some kind of digital alert; they Google if the moon has been sighted and debate whether to start their fast early. I am the only one who still stands in the cold, searching for that slight sliver of light, the crescent hanging distantly in the night sky, just like I did as a child.
It doesn’t feel like Ramadan without the ritual, even when I do not sight the moon (which is often now, with the city light pollution and cloudy nights). There is something in the struggle that reminds me that Ramadan is beginning; the cold air biting my skin, the gravel sharp on my bare feet, the strain of my neck as I search the sky. Ramadan is about sacrifices, and this is one of mine. Others make bigger, objectively better, sacrifices, but I hold onto tradition with a tight fist; it is the least I can do.
During Ramadan, you give up your food, your drink, your sins, and your time. All for Allah, for your community, and for your own practice of worship. Sacrifice and devotion don’t come easy to me. I am a bad Muslim, even when I try not to be — I can give up my meals, my water, and my time, but my sins? I hold onto them like a child holding onto a worn blanket, tearing at its seams, in hopes that it offers me the same comfort it once did.
As a child, Ramadan was my favourite time of year. It still is, but there is a heaviness in the air that wasn’t there when I was young, naive, and unsure of myself. I feel as though I have grown out of the rose-tinted religion that was offered to me in my childhood; I have gradually put a distance between myself and Allah that I am not sure how to cross anymore.
Islam, and the community that we had built around it, was all that made up my childhood — sitting cross-legged Mosque rugs and Arabic letters and passing around bhaja-pura on the floor of my family home. So, I hold onto tradition, with a tight first, where I can. My spirituality is my tie to a community I once had, the only tie to who I had been before I became recognisable to myself. But Ramadan hasn’t been the same since I have grown into my sins. The community who once were the tie between myself and my God have left, gone on with their lives, grown down a different path. I am left alone; myself, Allah, and all my guilt.
Guilt, it seems, fills the gaping space where worship should have been. The feeling sits dormant through the year, when there are no daily reminders of how much I lack in my spirituality, but I can’t escape it during Ramadan. Everything — the hunger, the thirst, the iftars and sehris, and the sound of my mothers duas — is touched by guilt.
11 months of the year are spent in sin — drinking and sex, flirting and swearing, disowning God at any given chance. I do not pray; my refusal is rebellion against all the tainted moments from my childhood, against all the promises God had made and left unfulfilled.
Ramadan comes around and I am engulfed with the guilt of forsaking a God who I had once loved — one who I might still love if I could look past the resentment. I offer up my food and my water, and put a pause on my sinning. I pull out my jai-namaz, brush off the dust that had collected, and teach myself how to wudu again. The surahs I recite sound foreign on my tongue — I am not sure what I’m really praying for anymore — but they sound like a memory I have not yet forgotten.
