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M’s hangry. It’s the first time I’ve seen it. So far, my mellow man has barely expelled a sweat bead when I lost my loaded Oyster card, broke the knob off the cooker hob, (that’s a whole other story), and was worse than useless when trying to direct him from his mum’s house to mine when he dropped me off for my first post-marital stay. In my defence, how the hell was I supposed to know which junction to come off the motorway? It’s not like I drive from Droylsden to Manchester on a regular basis. It’s not like I drive much at all. If I can avoid it, I will.
It’s not that M is being particularly short with me, but my female intuition tells me all is not well. There is a very obvious giveaway, too - it is the first day of Ramadan. This usually hits me like a ton of bricks, except on this occasion, because I’m exempt due to it being that time of the month.
I am trying my best to be discreet with my chicken burger and chips, while M is doing his best to ignore the smell that’s wafting his way. Yes, I’m having a burger and chips during Ramadan while M is starving, not that I’m milking my situation or anything. I could’ve gone for something less delicious, however I was feeling hormonal and in need of comfort. Actually, I wasn’t hormonal, I was just hungry. I could’ve opted for a sandwich but it just didn’t feel right. I told M I don’t need to get the burger, when I first presented him with my food-based dilemma. His exact words were: “Why not? Go for it! I would if I wasn’t fasting.”
You could say I was coerced.
With 20 minutes to go until Iftar time, M looks a bit miffed, as well as famished. He’s got the true fasting face – brittle lips, parched skin. Silent, brooding annoyance. If this is what he’s like on day one of Ramadan, I dread to see what the next 29 days have in store. Or 28, depending on the sight of the moon. I hope me sitting this week out won’t irk him further. After all, getting your period is a valid exemption, so he can’t moan.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says, avoiding eye contact.
“Can I help with anything?” This is most definitely not a rhetorical question. I even put my burger down to prove my willing.
“No. You might as well finish eating.”
I watch M carefully fold the semicircle of pastry over the keema, which he made the night before, to create a triangle. I have no idea why he doesn’t use the ready-made spring roll pastry that mum swears by. It’s shaken up the whole samosa-making routine at home. Before that, she was also making dough from scratch, kneading and folding, only to get about 20 samosas at the end of all her hard work. Once auntie Jusna showed mum the way forward, she never looked back. That’s one thing I do have to thank my auntie for. Yet here is my M, toiling away like an early 90s housewife, carefully cutting through the centre of each circle with a butter knife. Maybe he doesn’t know there’s a better way? Maybe I can enlighten him?
“You know, it would be a lot easier if you use spring roll pastry. And the samosas would taste nicer.”
“I’ve had spring roll ones before. I prefer these, to be honest with ya. These are the ones my mum makes.”
He still doesn’t look at me and focuses on his folding. Who knew he was so precious about pastry?
Okay, I need to pull my finger out, put my burger down (again) and at least seem to be helping. I go to the kitchen and rinse off some medjool dates we bought up from M’s mum’s house. She insisted on sending us with broken basmati rice for the standard kisuri dish, and a dozen tins of chickpeas.
After rinsing the dates, I stir the pot of kisuri, which is bubbling away nicely on the hob. It would be good to add some ghee to silken up the dull yellow, soupy rice. The textures a bit off. Then I remember, in this makeshift and make do home we are temporarily living in, there’s not even a block of butter. We only have margarine. It will have to do.
“Can you check that it’s not sticking to the bottom?” M says as he notices I’m actually helping.
I scrape the wooden spoon across the bottom of the pan, pushing along the hard bits of rice that have indeed gathered at the bottom. Never mind.
15 minutes to go until it’s time to open the fast.
“Shall I make a salad?” That’s a stupid question, as we have nothing to go with salad. It’s not like we’re having curry and rice.
Then to my surprise, M says: “Oh yeah. Good thinking Batman. I bought tomatoes earlier for that very reason. I totally forgot about them as I was getting too involved in samosa making.”
I jump at the chance to add value to the situation.
We only have one crappy knife that is too blunt to be a butchers knife and too sharp for anything else. The tomatoes are a little soft when I cut through them and they just squash down rather than slice open. The seeds ooze out the sides. Oh well, it will be a salsa. I then roughly dice a cucumber, before getting to work on my least favourite task, peeling an onion.
M comes over at the sound of my sniffling. He takes the knife from my hand and finishes off the chopping, leaving his half-folded samosa laid out like an unfinished book on the coffee table.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“Yeah, I’m fine. It’s just these onions. They got the better of me.”
M pushes the chopping board further away from me, moving the offending onions from my eyeline.
“It’s not the same, is it?”
“What?” I have no idea what he’s talking about. I think the hunger is making him delirious.
“It’s not the same as fasting at home, with all your family. Using your own stuff, instead of eating from plates that don’t have deep rims so you can properly line up your food. Or using non-stick pans that are peeling away.”
I didn’t realise that M noticed the peeling pans. They’d been bothering me since I cooked that chickpea curry on my first day here.
“It’s not that, but it’s -”
Suddenly, it comes to me. The warmth of the table. Everyone staring, hungrily, at the food, waiting to dive in during the last few minutes. Dad calling mum to come out of the kitchen because it’s nearly time to eat. Mum shouting back: “Okay, okay, I’m finishing frying! I be one doing hard work? What your problem?”
Then the constant debate about which timepiece is most accurate, as the various clocks and watches in our house can’t agree. Mum refusing to believe our smart phones therefore insisting on turning on the Bangla channel to wait for the call to prayer, to verify that it is indeed time to eat. Us all looking up from our plates as we notice that dad has started eating a couple of minutes ahead of time. None of us having the heart to correct him because he’s... well... dad. Then, a few minutes of precious silence. While we all eat, slowly and mindfully, savouring every mouthful. Being very aware of the hours that passed between this and our previous meal. Everything tastes better after fasting. The dates are the sweetest thing ever experienced. The samosas are golden, crispy and hot to bite. The watermelon is like pure, refreshing nectar. The silence seems to go on for hours. And then, the moment when we stop eating to take a deep, long breath. The time we briefly turn our faces from the fried deliciousness. At that moment, having drunk the most refreshing glass of water, we realise that we can’t eat another thing. That we don’t want any more, we have had everything we need.
There is something magic about Ramadan. Every single place I’ve worked, colleagues have always asked the same question, even though their motives have been different. Some out of pity, others have wanted to verify our sanity, while some would see this colossal feat of fasting for all the daylight hours, as an inspiration. No matter what the reasoning behind the question, the question itself remains the same: “How do you do it? How do you go without food and water for so long?”
My answer never changes. I would say: “The thing is, I am the biggest foodie. I could eat all day. So, if I can do it, anyone can. I don’t know how, there’s just some magical pool of motivation that you get during Ramadan which makes it possible, yet physically impossible any other time of the year. It’s the feeling that you’re in it together, like there’s some collective magic happening, something that makes the hours tick by.”
I feel like I’m missing the magic right now. Being on my period and not being able to fast and M having to start the first day of Ramadan by himself is hard on him and harder on me. I feel like I’m missing out on the party, which is ironic as when I am fasting, I’m banging on about how hungry I am. M’s right. This time, it is different. Not just because I’m not fasting but because I miss my family.
“Yeah. It isn’t the same. But we’ll make our own little family.”
M comes closer. “I know. I feel the same. This time of year, I do miss sitting with everyone and having nice food. Once we get our place, we’ll make it our own. We can have people round, too. We’ll probably need to start thinking about that soon as Greg will be back from his sabbatical. We can pick somewhere better suited for us, where we can get halal food when we don’t feel like cooking.”
“On that note... I think it’s time.” I gesture towards my phone.
The familiar chaos begins. I quickly throw a date in his mouth, while taking the rest to the table. I load up the yellow rice with a side of salad and curried chickpeas.
“Crap! I haven’t fried any samosas!” M looks over at his abandoned project.
“Don’t worry. Just start eating a bit. And then we will do it. Together.”
M obediently listens. After having a few mouthfuls of rice, he takes the rest of his plate to the cooker to finish what he started.
He lowers the pastry delicately into the oil. It’s spits up at him in anger. I hover next to him, with a kitchen tissue covered plate, ready to spring into action. We have a conveyor belt of sorts. M is doing the deep frying while I pass the uncooked samosas and pat the oil off the freshly-fried ones.
Twenty minutes later we are done. After the chaotic start to the first day of Ramadan, we get to sit down in silence and savour the moment. The familiar feeling returns. The feeling of fullness, of satisfaction. This isn’t just induced by the heady taste of hot keema samosas. Without realising, M and I have created our own Ramadan routine. Our own way of doing things.
And what have I learnt from today? Well, when it comes to men, or at least M, silence can be golden. They don’t have to fill the space with words. There’s not always something wrong. And if there is, the answer almost always lies in either curry or a samosa.