Sevde Kaldiroglu
Pairs
It’s an email from her.
Hey,
Got a colleague of mine who’s looking for an administrator at his school. Wanted to send him your CV but realized it’s better to ask for an updated one from you. Send it my way sometime.
Hope you’re doing well. Safe and all.
Regards,
Selin Karacı
Attorney
Nişantaşı, İstanbul
Esma gets up from the table, goes to the kitchen, and turns on the water kettle. She opens the upper right cupboard and takes the rosemary tea jar. She pulls out a purple mug from the cupboard next to it, then decides to take the shorter, faded green mug instead, then figures she’d rather have a white, plain mug—the one with the thinner ceramic, so her fingers can feel the warmth of the tea as she holds the cup.
She replaces the rosemary tea jar with the green tea jar. But, no, it’s still early in the day, so she could have some strong caffeine instead. She turns off the kettle, mixes Turkish coffee and water in a cezve, and places the cezve on the stove top, low heat.
The doorbell rings. It’s her mother.
“One second, Ma!” She opens the door and runs back to the kitchen—the coffee might overflow. It’s still. She lingers there, praying it doesn’t boil until this forever of an afternoon is over.
The next morning, she wakes up, determined to reply to the email. It’s been five years since she got an email from her and three years since she heard anything from her at all. It’s strictly professional, she thinks. It’s a nice email, she thinks. Unexpected, sure, but nice nonetheless.
She sits down on the table, her laptop charging, a plate of chocolate truffles from yesterday sitting next to it. After thirty minutes of catching up on Facebook, checking the daily news, and re-reading the email five times, she gets up from the table without having written the reply.
She calls her daughter. Her daughter picks up on her first call, to her surprise.
“Hey Pelin, my daughter,” she says. “Turn on video so I can see your beautiful face.”
Seeing her daughter through the screen relaxes her a little. She doesn’t mention anything about the email. It’s not a big enough deal to talk about, she thinks. Deep down she knows she doesn’t want to hear what Pelin might say, if she mentions it. Deep down she knows she wants to reply and doesn’t want someone else stopping her from doing so. She, herself, is enough of an obstacle.
In the evening, she replies.
Hi Selin,
Thank you for reaching out to me about the job opportunity. I’d be happy to send my CV--see the attachment. I’d also love to learn more about the job, when you get a chance.
I am well. I hope you’re doing well, too.
Sincerely,
Esma Tenekeli
“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.” - Helen Keller
PDF - Esma Tenekeli CV
It’s 1:31 am and she can’t even keep her eyes closed. The darkness of the room is too distracting. So is the hallway light. She thinks of turning it off, but the idea of pitch darkness scares her. If anyone attempts to break in at night, the hallway light will expose them.
She goes to the living room and turns on her laptop. She checks her inbox—no reply. She rethinks the email she sent back, word by word. She kept it professional. She was professional. It was about the job, that’s it. If you think about it, her relationship with Selin has always been strictly professional; Selin was her attorney after all.
She answers a handful of emails, all from her clients, and continues proofreading the biophysics article from her Postdoc client. By 2:44 am, her head is throbbing and the article’s references on her screen appear double, so she infers that it’s time to give sleep another shot. She knows she’ll be awake until 6 am, as she typically is whenever she hears from Selin, and by 7 am she will have breakfast ready for herself and her mother who lives in the apartment upstairs. Her father usually skips breakfast, since he heads out very early to the lamp store he owns.
She prays fajr before she returns to bed at 5:50 am. This time she falls asleep, too tired to take off her prayer scarf or her socks.
7:14 am and she’s up one minute before her alarm. By 7:30 am, breakfast is ready, tea brewing over the stove top, eggs soft-boiled and cooling in cold water, bread toasting over the pan. She calls her mother and asks her to come down for breakfast. Her mother shows up with poğaças left over from last night.
“I put too much salt,” her mother complains. “If I put a teeny little bit less, they would have been fine.”
Esma doesn’t eat any. She can barely eat anything. “My stomach isn’t great,” she answers her mother. Then, after checking her inbox on her phone for the sixth time, she eats two big poğaças.
They are too salty, she thinks but doesn’t say anything.
It’s the afternoon when a new email from Selin pops up:
Hey,
Let me introduce you to him. I set up a meeting for you two to meet. My office. Thursday at 1. See you then?
I’m in the same building as before. We moved the office to the fifth floor.
That’s the thing about Selin. She won’t ask you what to do, she’ll tell you what to do. She has... conviction. It’s very annoying. And very appealing. That’s the reason Esma was happy Selin represented her in the divorce more than a decade ago. Even though she got little child support, she always thought Selin was a good lawyer.
Esma thinks through the job opportunity for a moment. Technically, she is happy with her freelance clients, whom she mostly found through an online freelance platform, growing her network over the years. A fulltime job would be different, of course; the pay would be more stable and it could count towards retirement.
Thursday. That’s the day after tomorrow. She replies to Selin, saying she’ll be there.
Thursday morning, after another night of little sleep, Esma prints two copies of her CV. She doesn’t know who this guy is or what the job is exactly, but she believes it’s better to find out in person. After printing out her CV, she finds a typo, so she fixes it and prints two more copies.
She lays out a long, pink skirt on the bed, along with a white blouse, a pink blazer (slightly darker shade, she doesn’t have a matching set in this color), a gray, pink, flowery hijab, and her white hijab bonnet. She adds in a gray, faux leather purse with a faux gold chain to complement the outfit. It’s too flowery, too eager, she thinks.
By 11:30 am, she’s decided on a navy set. Selin often wears navy; it’s one of her favorite colors—at least, that’s what Esma always thought. A navy blazer, a gray-navy long skirt, along with a light blue-white, button-down shirt, and a turquoise hijab with a navy bonnet. She doesn’t have a purse that matches the color scheme, so she settles on her faux leather black purse.
After finalizing her outfit and ironing her scarf, she moves onto makeup. Staring into the bathroom mirror at her fifty-year-old face (soon to be fifty-one, but who’s counting?), she feels worse than earlier. What is she thinking?
She examines the double circles under her eyes, her sulky white cheeks. Selin liked her full cheeks—the once full, perky cheeks. You have a nice round face. Those were her exact words, from some years ago when they had met up for coffee in her office. Now, even when Esma loses a few kilos every now and then, her cheeks shrink but stay weighed down, sulking in a naturally sad expression. Skinnier but still droopy.
Well, she is not even slim anymore. For all of her adult life up until the last decade, she weighed fifty kilos. Nothing more, nothing less. And then the surgeries happened. One surgery in particular, the one where they removed her womb. She cried almost as much as she had when Granny had died.
In front of the bathroom mirror, Esma pulls up the hem of her shirt and gives out an exhale. When relaxed, her abdomen looks like she swallowed a giant light bulb upside down. No, even better, she resembles an old lady, pregnant with her second child, second trimester, whose stitches from the first C-section never recovered.
Except she can never be pregnant again; she is wombless, hence the stitch marks.
She sighs and pulls down the hem, adjusts the corners of her shirt. The sad relief is that she knows no one will ever have to see her stitched belly. Except for doctors and surgeons, maybe, Allah forbid.
She tightens her hijab bonnet, washes her face, and puts on concealer under her eyes. She adds foundation—it’s been a while since she’s worn foundation, so the liquid is a bit thicker than usual. For some reason, the concealer and the foundation always contrast in color; it’s as though she can never pick the right shade. Too light to add color to her skin, too light to conceal her dark circles, always off the mark.
Her favorite part is the eyeliner. Her daughter often tells her she’s doing it wrong, but what can she do? She’s not a model after all.
“Mom, you need to do it equally on both sides,” Pelin says, “that’s the whole point.” But even when Pelin herself does her mother’s eyeliner, Esma doesn’t think each side looks equal. Mother and daughter, they’re both flawed, but Esma knows that Pelin is too young, too proud to admit it, as she is with many things.
Looking at her full makeup face, the blue eyeshadow, the clumpy mascara, the uneven eyeliner, Esma thinks of wiping it all off. She even put on nude lipstick and she never wears lipstick outside. It’s too much, she thinks, and wet wipes her mouth. She’ll think I’m a clown.
Picking up a cotton ball, she puts on toner and wipes away most of the eyeshadow and the edges of the eyeliner. Now the eyeliner looks incomplete. She wipes her entire upper eyelid, puts on blue eyeshadow again, lines her waterline, and leaves the bathroom.
Once her hijab is properly wrapped around her head—no wrinkles, no slips—Esma puts her printed copies in her purse and leaves for the bus station. She arrives twenty minutes early in Nişantaşı and walks around in her heels on the sidewalk for about five minutes, then decides it’s better to go up and wait inside.
“Here to see Selin Hanım,” she says to the assistant. Gesturing over the phone, the assistant points Esma to the chairs in the lobby. About thirty minutes later, someone walks in the lobby.
It’s her.
When Esma sees Selin, she doesn’t know how she’ll get up and stand in her heels. Her legs are shaking. Every single time she sees her, it feels the same.
“Hi, Esma Hanım,” Selin smiles in her dark violet lipstick, her black eyes gleaming. “Long time. How’re you doing?”
She extends her hand to Esma who manages to get up and shake her hand. Selin’s hair is shorter now, shoulder-length, and she no longer has the perm she had years ago; Esma loved those curls, but straight hair suits her too, as everything does.
“Indeed,” Esma says. “Good, thank you. Nice to see you.” She avoids Selin’s eyes as she says this—she can’t look her in the face, it’s embarrassing.
“Why don’t we move to my office? Elif, get us two cups of coffee, one plain, one very sweet.”
She remembers. Very sweet. Esma fills with happiness for a brief moment, before she wants to run out from the fire exit and never come back into this building again.
“Your friend is coming, too?” Esma asks as they move into the office and Selin gestures for her to sit on one of the chairs in front of her desk.
“No, I tricked you so you’d come see me.” Selin pauses close to Esma, facing her as she says this, opening her black eyes so wide that Esma forgets to breathe. Selin’s laughter breaks the silence. “Of course, he’s on his way. He’ll be here in a few. So tell me, what’s new with you?”
As Selin sits behind the desk, Esma shares what she practiced in front of her wardrobe mirror many times in the past two days. Same old routine, she is busy with her clients, work is going well.
“How are your parents?” Selin asks.
It surprises Esma that she asks this; Selin only met her parents once, very briefly, outside the courtroom after the custody trial. Still, it’s generic enough of a question for her to ask.
“They’re doing well. In the same building as me still. Good to be close.” Esma stares at the empty chair across from her as she talks, moving her gaze to Selin’s desktop and back to the chair. She doesn’t know how to look at Selin’s gorgeous face. How does a woman not age?
“What’s new with you?” Esma continues. “Hope all is well?”
She listens to Selin’s reply expectantly. Will Selin mention the marriage? She checks Selin’s hands: no ring. But Esma found out about Selin’s new husband a while back. A Facebook search sufficed. Even though they’d never been Facebook friends, Selin’s posts were publicly viewable. She perused each of the 107 wedding pictures so many times that she had dreams with the new husband in them. Nightmares where Esma would meet her new attorney and it would turn out to be him in a full black wedding suit. They’re both lawyers, they must be a good fit, she thought. Good for her.
Yet, Selin mentions nothing of her husband. She goes on about how busy her cases are; how she’s tired of ending people’s marriages, dealing with custody fights, no-lunch workdays. Classic Selin, Esma thinks. Fifteen years and the same complaints, as if she hasn’t been a divorce attorney for more than twenty years now.
When Selin’s friend, Emir Bey, arrives, Esma feels relieved. She is here for the job after all. Emir Bey sits across from her, so she no longer has to stare at an empty chair. Emir Bey is polite and he talks a lot; Esma doesn’t need to contribute much.
From time to time, Selin turns over to Esma and praises her: “Emir’cim, Esma is one of a kind. She’s very disciplined, I’ve known her for more than a decade now. She has years of experience working as an administrator in an educational capacity. Esma, you were the director for that tutoring center in Fatih a while back, right?”
It’s about half an hour in and Esma doesn’t know what she’s doing there. She likes her proofreading job; it’s flexible and pays enough for her, considering it’s been years since Pelin asked her for money. Still avoiding Selin’s direction, Esma can barely concentrate on what Emir Bey is saying. She mostly nods along. Emir Bey talked a bit about the job earlier; it’s a principal position at a K-12 school in Beşiktaş. Even if Esma got the job, she would have to commute on two buses every day.
What Esma wonders but is not sure how to find out is if Emir Bey or the school would be okay with having a hijabi principal. She doesn’t know anyone hijabi who works as a principal in schools except for the religious imam hatip schools. She wonders if Selin knows she would never take off her hijab for a job.
Is Emir Bey aware of the fact that Esma doesn’t have a bachelor’s degree from a formal institution? She got into college during the anti-hijab era, so she couldn’t go, but now people seem to have forgotten about those times. She found out from experience that her distance education degrees often don’t receive respect from employers.
“I look forward to staying in touch,” Emir Bey says as he stands up, ready to leave.
“Likewise,” says Esma, standing up and shaking his hand. Then she gathers up the courage to turn to Selin at once, facing her beautifully marked cheekbones and her shiny hair. “Thank you, Selin Hanım, for the coffee.”
Selin looks slightly surprised to see her getting up to leave—or Esma would like to think she does. Esma picks up her purse and follows Emir Bey out, holding her breath until she makes it out of the lobby, and into the stairwell, and after ensuring no one is around, she starts crying.
One of the few skills Esma mastered in life is to wail in silence. She holds it in until her stomach cramps painfully, as she did in Selin’s office, and when she can, she lets it out quietly. She had plenty of practice with this during her marriage; her ex-husband could never bear her crying. She’d quickly learned that silent crying meant fewer broken items and fewer bruises. By the time she was divorced, living with her daughter, she had already made this a habit. It had become the only way she ever cried.
On the bus back home, Esma texts her daughter: Pelin are you free? I need to talk to you. When she gets home, she sends another text: It’s about Kerem. I went to see him today.
In less than a minute, her phone is ringing. It’s Pelin. “Mom, are you okay?”
“Yes, yes, I’m just… You know, every time I see him, it’s the same.” She sighs on speaker as she changes out of her skirt into sweatpants. “It doesn’t do me good.”
“Wait, why did you see him? I thought that book was closed.”
Esma tells Pelin what happened. She includes most details, with a tiny change: the name substitution. Pelin has always been her confidante, but there are things even Pelin can’t know, things Esma wishes she herself didn’t know. Oftentimes she wishes this so much that she believes that she doesn’t know, and if she doesn’t know, she isn’t, and sometimes this way of thinking gives her peace.
Pelin is disappointed that she went to see Kerem. Of course she is, Esma thinks. Why did she go? Selin didn’t even have her ring on; she must have done that on purpose. Why did Esma still go to see her, after fifteen years of a seemingly professional friendship, solely based on semi-flirty “meetings” strictly conducted in Selin’s office and under her terms?
And then she remembers. What she felt today in that moment when Selin was very close to her face in her office, and what she felt the first few months after meeting Selin, feeling Selin’s eyes on her body every time they got together to discuss the case. The way Selin’s eyes lingered on her breasts—the breasts that caused her so much backache and so much shame throughout her life, the breasts she prayed would fall off her body, the breasts her ex-husband found “fat.” For the first time in her life, she’d felt like a real woman under her gaze.
Esma sits on the sofa and vents to her daughter, wiping the blend of eyeshadow and mascara from her face every once in a while as tears roll down her cheeks. She needs to pray zuhr, but she doesn’t want to hang up.
Once again, Pelin reminds her that she needs to meet other men and “give love a chance.” Esma sighs. Pelin simply doesn’t understand her. Esma’s beautiful, strongheaded, twenty-eight-year-old daughter has no clue what it’s like to be an old lady who has never been loved, never been courted. Yes, Esma has been on some arranged blind dates with middle-aged men recommended by her circles, and yes, she has tried, and no, they’ve all been horrible candidates, talking about their ex-wives obsessively and barely asking any personal questions about her. She never liked any of them, and none of them really chased her, either. Saying no through their mutual friend so she wouldn’t have to confront them, Esma managed to end things pretty quickly with each one.
Plus, she knows they all want young girls. She thinks of Selin’s charismatic husband; he must be in his forties like Selin. And no, she wouldn’t give love a chance in the sense that Pelin suggests it; that kind of thing is not appropriate for Esma. She sees all those young couples these days with the messed up morals, holding hands in public and making out at bus stops. Even some hijabi girls do it, think about that!
Esma made that mistake once. She was in Selin’s office, right after they had a long, fun conversation gossiping about their weird family members and their dream jobs when they were kids, and Selin got up to come next to her chair, holding Esma’s hand to make her get up, and embraced Esma. Esma didn’t know what to do; instinctively she hugged her back, and for a brief moment she forgot about her faith. She forgot about everything. It was only Selin’s hands rubbing her back, caressing the outline of her ribs over her shirt, going up and down her spine, sending a warm shower of delight inside her core down her legs. She found her own hands squeezing tightly around Selin’s full waist, feeling her body heat, smelling her perfume-infused sweaty neck. Every time she thinks of Selin, she recalls that mindless, joyful feeling, that sensation in her body, and then, as usual, she is filled with utter guilt.
Never again, she vowed to herself that day when she left Selin’s office shortly after their embrace. She should have never allowed that to happen. Perhaps that’s why she can’t get over Selin, because she committed something sinful with her, because she was tempted into disobedience through her. Is that enough of a reason?
Esma gets off the phone with Pelin and makes herself green tea. She turns on the TV, but she’s too lost in reflections to pay attention. The background noise soothes her.
Esma doesn’t know why she follows Selin’s cue like a stray kitten every time Selin asks to see her. Many things about Selin, like her habit of complaining, her arrogance, the way she cuts people off mid-sentence, her lack of punctuality—most things about her are reprehensible. And the fact that she is a woman, a woman! That should have stopped these feelings years ago. Esma has sinned enough in her life; she doesn’t need this to be added to her record.
By early evening, Esma has managed to get more editing done on the in vitro fertilization article. She needs to deliver this by the next morning. Esma checks her inbox to see if there is any email from the client. There’s none, only one email from Selin. Esma holds her breath before opening it.
Hi Esma’cım,
Emir was very impressed with you. So was I. It’s been very nice seeing you. We didn’t have a chance to talk much... Let’s catch up one on one soon. Come by my office anytime.
Looking forward to seeing you again.
All my best,
Selin Karacı
Attorney
Nişantaşı, İstanbul
Under the dusty screen of her laptop, Esma’s hands stay fixed on the keyboard. The cool surface of the keys contrasts with the heat raging through her body. Electricity charges her fingertips, running against every joint, from her knuckles to her wrist, up through her elbows and shoulders, rocketing towards the ceiling of her skull. It bounces up and down: a scorching chaos inside her head. She gets up from the table. Not knowing where to go, she sits on the edge of the sofa. Feeling too heavy for her neck to stabilize, her head swings up and down in millimetric movements. Her heart throbs on the tips of her burning fingers.
Esma has moved down from the sofa, sitting against it now, on the rough texture of the rug. She only realizes how long she’s sat there, listening to her heart pulse in different parts of her body, when she hears the isha adhaan, the nighttime call to prayer. She missed the maghrib prayer.
She has countless things to say to Selin. It’s not only in her head, she knows; it’s never been in her head. Selin put these things in her head—Selin is a player, as Pelin put it, lacking morals and faith and everything that keeps a human on the right path in this mortal world.
When they first met, when Esma first walked into her office, why did Selin act so standoffish, only to invite Esma in for “a social chat” (that’s what she’d called it) after their second meeting about the case? Why did Selin cancel all of her appointments after Esma’s, not finding the one-hour slot enough, telling her she’d enjoyed talking to her so much that losing a client or two would have been fine? And for the love of Allah—this was the one thing that could drive Esma insane—what made Selin tell her, seven months into knowing each other, that she was “the reason Selin woke up with a smile every day,” that Esma was “a very special friend”?
The moments that drew Esma closer to Selin, the things she’d forbidden herself from remembering, all come back to her, one by one, as she sits on the rug in the dark living room the sun had abandoned.
Your husband is a stupid man. Who’d leave a woman like you? Eyes on her breasts. Anyone would be lucky to have you.
Esma’s face reddening, eyes averting Selin’s gaze.
But men, you know men don’t know how to take care of a woman. Voice lowered, sultry. Women, we know each other better. Only we know what women need.
The case was completed within months, but Selin and Esma met up regularly for about two years. These meet-ups almost always took place in Selin’s office, mainly because she preferred it there, and Esma didn’t question it, as she wouldn’t have been comfortable meeting elsewhere. The way Selin stared into her own brown eyes intently at times, the way Esma looked at Selin’s face, into her black eyes radiating confidence and mischief; that would have given away more than she wished to whomever was around them.
Although they did go out to lunch three times, and to grab tea once at a cafe near the office and twice outside the courthouse, those meetups felt different; they weren’t as intimate. Selin was reserved and reticent, more willing to talk to others than to Esma, concentrating on her food or beverage meticulously, sometimes looking as though she was too lost in thought to notice if someone tapped her on the shoulder.
Once, Selin invited Esma to her house for a teatime gathering. Selin had said it was her mother’s turn to host the monthly gathering with her friends, but there was some construction going on in her mother’s apartment, which meant they were going to host it at Selin’s place. There was going to be a lot of food, Selin had added with a chuckle, and lots of old women, so she could use some young company.
The invite excited Esma, but she felt uncomfortable. An all-women gathering would have meant Esma could take her scarf off when she went there, and a small part of her thought that was exactly what Selin had intended to happen. Technically, it wouldn’t have been a sin to be scarfless when there was no man around; at the end of the day, normal women wouldn’t have been affected by such a thing as seeing her hair. But she was painfully aware of the abnormality of what was hanging in the air every time she saw Selin, so she declined the invite.
It was shortly after this that they had the embrace in Selin’s office. The next time they met up, Esma told her that she couldn’t. Not anymore.
Selin didn’t ask what or why. She simply said, I understand.
Esma leans her head back over the edge of the sofa. Her head is spinning. This is the first time she let herself remember this much—even though she knows the memories periodically replay at the back of her mind, influencing her everyday decisions like smiling more appropriately in public or remembering to ask for repentance every time she makes dua to Allah.
The clock over the wall to her left shows that it’s past eight in the evening. She knows that it’s time to get up. Once and for all, she needs to close this book. She knows what she needs to do.
Esma heads to the dinner table and types out a reply to Selin:
Thank you for the connection. Emir Bey can contact me directly with any updates.
She pauses. She knows there won’t be any updates—the whole thing feels like such an obvious ploy now that she can’t help feeling like a fool.
By the way, I saw that you got married. I didn’t get to say congratulations. I wish you and your husband a very happy future together.
Sincerely,
Esma Tenekeli
“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.” - Helen Keller
She goes to the bathroom and washes her face. She even uses makeup remover, stripping the plastic cover off the unopened bottle her daughter had bought her a few months back. Bismillahirrahmanirrahim, she whispers—in the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. She washes her face three times. She washes her hands, her forearms up to her elbows, three times. She wets the inside of her ears, running her fingers around their outer arc. It’s sunnah, not required, but she wants to follow the Prophet’s example better; she wants to do things right.
She wets the back of her neck, the cool water startling her heated head. Then she holds onto the sink and lifts her right leg up, landing her bare foot inside the sink, and turns the faucet back on. As the cold water washes away the dirt beneath her foot, she marvels at the way her toes wiggle under the running faucet. Alhamdulillah, she whispers when she’s done washing both feet. The coolness beneath her soles refreshes her body. The heat is now replaced with the gratitude of finding God in the tiniest, most fascinating of his creations.
In the bedroom, she ties her prayer scarf around her head, making sure no hair is slipping out from the sides. She puts on a long-sleeved cardigan and wears her loose skirt over her sweatpants, as the pants are a tad tight.
As usual, she lays down the pink velvet prayer rug according to the qibla, towards Kaaba. She does this whole ritual five times every day at dedicated hours, and a lot of the times it does feel like a mere habit—a mindless physical task, almost. But today, at this moment, she feels called to do it. As she stands at the bottom of the prayer rug, she sets her intention for the prayer, combining the missed maghrib and isha together, and begins with Allahu Akbar—Allah is the greatest.
Her hands are tied above her left breast, feeling her heartbeat as she silently recites the Arabic surahs, letting the rhythm of the mesmerizing Quranic text sync with her breath, giving her life at every inhale and cleansing her soul at every exhale. When she bends down and places her hands on her knees for ruku, her head swings with blissful dizziness. Allahu Akbar. She reaches sajdah, her forehead lying on the velvety texture of the rug, her hands on either side of her head, knees folded under her abdomen.
Throughout four decades of praying, sajdah has always been where she felt the most secure, the most forgiven. Pressing the weight of life onto her forehead, she surrenders. All of the tension in her body flows through her temples towards her forehead, thereby making contact with the ground, beneath which lies earth, the ultimate place that awaits us all. Sajdah is when Esma feels closest to Allah, and therefore, closest to herself.
After six more raka’ahs, repeating the standing, ruku and sajdah positions, she sits for her final sitting. As she recites the Rabbana duas in the final part of the prayer, she thinks over their meaning, which she’d learnt years ago. “Our Lord… Protect us from the punishment of the fire.” She doesn’t speak Arabic but she’d memorized the meanings of common surahs when she was in her teens—when she was a younger, better Muslim, committed to living life on the right path, as was intended for her by Allah.
Oh my Allah, she thinks, forgive me for leading on a married… person. Forgive me, God, forgive me for thinking such things. Such unsayable things. For feeling such absurd feelings. Allah’ım, spare me from your punishments, in this world and in the next.
God knows. God knows all that we think, feel, do. But she still can’t say it. Especially not in his presence, not to his face, so to speak. Every prayer, she stands in God’s presence—she’s allowed into his presence. She can’t be disrespectful like that.
After the prayer, Esma embraces her face with two open hands and makes her duas, wishing health and prosperity for those suffering around the world, peace for nations in war, and forgiveness for everyone, the believers and disbelievers alike. She gets up and folds the prayer rug, not with the usual rush but in a tranquil, steady manner, and puts it away in the drawer. She goes to the bookshelf and picks up her Quran.
She replies to Pelin’s text that asks how she’s doing: I’m okay. I can’t believe I led on a married man. How disgusting…
Don’t beat yourself up, Ma, pops up on her phone. She feels a tinge of warmth spread over her cheeks. If on the other side Allah asks her what good she’s done in the mortal world, she can at least answer that she raised a compassionate girl.
She sits down on the sofa with the Quran on her lap and starts reciting in Arabic, beginning from where she left off last time, reading the word-by-word translation on the right side after each surah. First, she recites it quietly, moving her lips but keeping her voice so low that it’s somewhere between a whisper and a loud breath. Then she switches to reciting it out loud. The viscous syllables of the Quranic Arabic vibrate down her throat. In these recitation intervals, she appreciates not understanding but simply experiencing. How such a difficult language one does not speak can feel so familiar—for Esma, that’s one of the wonders of faith.
The translations of the surahs have her pen marks next to them—some stars, some question marks. No words, just marks. Although she was never that into reading regular books, when she was younger, Esma used to annotate the Quran as she read the translations. She was curious then, devoted to analyzing each verse. Since the literary genius of each word was so involved, she’d need to read extensive tafsir published by scholars to get her questions answered. For every annotation, she’d read dozens of different tafsirs, over and over again, each differing in small ways, until one felt right—the puzzle piece that had been missing. Most pieces fit into the bigger picture, and for those that didn’t, she knew there was a greater reason why—a reason beyond her reason.
A starred verse in the story of Joseph highlights the significance of divine mercy. She used to star such verses because they gave her hope, while verses around the eternal fire and hell made her weep. Nowadays, the latter feels expected; normal, even. But she’d like to believe that God’s mercy is greater, so she keeps finding herself reading these starred lines, even when it feels like admiring the stars knowing she’ll never be able to reach them.
She slows down the recitation as her throat gets dry, and stops after finishing up the last surah. Then she goes to the page she’d bookmarked by folding its corner, the surah of An-Naba. She reads from the beginning, yet there’s one line that strikes her every time, the eighth ayah.
“And we created you in pairs.”
No star next to the translation, no mark. The verse has always been too precious for her to stain with ink. No questions, no tafsir needed; the ambiguity is what’s beautiful about it.
And we created you in pairs. In pairs, not husband and wife, not man and woman; simply, in pairs. Whomever you choose to pair with—in pairs.
