238693456934

illness, in which case she prayed more often. His father prayed mainly on Fridays, under normal
circumstances, and only sporadically during the week. Saeed would see them preparing to pray, and
see them praying, and see their faces after they had prayed, usually smiling, as though relieved, or
released, or comforted, and he would wonder what happened when one prayed, and he was curious to
experience it for himself, and so he asked to learn before his parents had yet thought of teaching him,
and his mother provided the requisite instruction one particularly hot summer, and that is how, for
him, it began. Until the end of his days, prayer sometimes reminded Saeed of his mother, and his
parents’ bedroom with its slight smell of perfume, and the ceiling fan churning in the heat.
As he was entering his teens, Saeed’s father asked Saeed if he would like to accompany him to the
weekly communal prayer. Saeed said yes, and thereafter every Friday, without fail, Saeed’s father
would drive home and collect his son and Saeed would pray with his father and the men, and prayer
for him became about being a man, being one of the men, a ritual that connected him to adulthood and
to the notion of being a particular sort of man, a gentleman, a gentle man, a man who stood for
community and faith and kindness and decency, a man, in other words, like his father. Young men pray
for different things, of course, but some young men pray to honor the goodness of the men who raised
them, and Saeed was very much a young man of this mold.
By the time he entered university, Saeed’s parents prayed more often than they had when he was
younger, maybe because they had lost a great many loved ones by that age, or maybe because the
transient natures of their own lives were gradually becoming less hidden from them, or maybe
because they worried for their son in a country that seemed to worship money above all, no matter
how much other forms of worship were given lip service, or maybe simply because their personal
relationships with prayer had deepened and become more meaningful over the years. Saeed too
prayed more often in this period, at the very least once a day, and he valued the discipline of it, the
fact that it was a code, a promise he had made, and that he stood by.
Now, though, in Marin, Saeed prayed even more, several times a day, and he prayed fundamentally
as a gesture of love for what had gone and would go and could be loved in no other way. When he
prayed he touched his parents, who could not otherwise be touched, and he touched a feeling that we
are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too
will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every
human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each
carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another, and out of this Saeed felt it might be
possible, in the face of death, to believe in humanity’s potential for building a better world, and so he
prayed as a lament, as a consolation, and as a hope, but he felt that he could not express this to Nadia,
that he did not know how to express this to Nadia, this mystery that prayer linked him to, and it was
so important to express it, and somehow he was able to express it to the preacher’s daughter, the first
time they had a proper conversation, at a small ceremony he happened upon after work, which turned
out to be a remembrance for her mother, who had been from Saeed’s country, and was prayed for
communally on each anniversary of her death, and her daughter, who was also the preacher’s
daughter, said to Saeed, who was standing near her, so tell me about my mother’s country, and when
Saeed spoke he did not mean to but he spoke of his own mother, and he spoke for a long time, and the
preacher’s daughter spoke for a long time, and when they finished speaking it was already late at
night.
• • •