Searching For Clouds

In Jannah, inshaAllah, I pray my home will be made of many rooms, each one holding a memory of those dearest to me.

One of those rooms will be a red-bricked house, part-dorm, part-home, where an Aunty with wide, hazel eyes and a permanently perplexed expression sits in the living room, teaching the neighborhood children Qur’an.

And inside that dorm-house will be one of the most special rooms of all: a room with five makeshift beds, like the dorm in Madeline. But instead of proper beds with headboards and students wearing matching yellow dresses, it’ll be five twin mattresses on linoleum floors, our uniforms (black abayas and white hijabs) hung neatly behind the door or crumpled on the floor by the foot of the bed, pale pink walls, a window with dusty velvet maroon curtains. Textured oil paint canvases drying in the corner that still smudged days after being set to dry (“what on EARTH” one of us will mumble, getting paint on her socks as she walked past), blue Qur’an books with our colorful notes and highlighters with caps found under forgotten crevices (“I got you guys an extra pack of pens”), and snack shelves from our weekly walks to the gas station (“anyone have an extra bag of chips because I am not feeling Aunty’s pasta today”).

And it’ll be the five of us, as if nothing changed, braiding each other’s hair and sharing jokes and dreams and stories, talking about the deepest reflections (“girl stop talking with your hands”) and the silliest rishtas (“crusty brown guys”), and horror stories (“someone play ruqya bruv”) and makeup and fashion tips (“ok but which one is more ME?”) and planning our next downtown Toronto trip (“so if we’ll take the GO train, then we have to take this bus to get there and then that bus to get here”) or walking-to-the-theatre-and-sneak-in-shawarmas trip (“but will we get back in time before curfew?”) as we fold in each other with laughs and eye-rolls and hugs and pinches between pauses.

Each with our own color and insanity but when quilted together, we felt infinite.

Then we will get up in shifts—one of us of us will go downstairs to feed the raccoon in the backyard we named Abdul Hameed who feasted on our leftovers, one of us will go to the kitchen to brew some magnificent concoction (“careful don’t leave a single crumb or drop behind”), and the rest of us will tie our hijabs and wear our comfy flats and traverse the neighborhood trails only to kick off our shoes and wade barefoot and knee deep in the cool creeks and climb trees, our knees getting scratched, which we cover up with whatever Dollarama bandaids we find in the cupboards when we get home. 

In the evening we will pray Maghrib together (“your qalqala was on point when you were reciting”), memorize our Juzz lessons, sometimes together, sometimes separate, squint at the fridge to make sense of the scribbled cleaning schedule and bribe each other to switch (“I’ll mop today if you vacuum, deal?”). We’ll belt out random tunes (“bro you’re actually good good”), and then randomly test each other and ask what’s the singular for this word and the plural for that, revise the tafseer and recite our Arabic grammar charts, and then scurry to our beds with our phones and laptops for an hour or so before our Wi-Fi curfew ends and Aunty pulls the internet plug for the night. 

In the morning we will grumble about someone’s obnoxious alarm and fight over who’s taking long in the washroom and get ready and fumble with our abayas and hijabs (“does anyone have an extra pin?”) as we tumble with chaos out the door, one of us grabbing ziplock bags of cereal, an entire case of muffins and grapefruits with kitchen knives. Someone will grab some bread and slices of cheese (“did you check the expiration date?”), the other, our blue Juzz books and backpacks as we will plead with Aunty (“please-don’t-leave-we’re-coming”), as she slowly inch-reverses the car down the driveway while we try to leap inside. And in the car we will revise our Qur’an lesson and argue and sing and sleep (and when the car jerks, one of us will yell “skurt, skurt!” And we’ll burst into laughter).

And when the five of us enter our Qur’an school doors, the carpets are plush (“save me a seat I’m coming!” “hurry up shawty”) among girls and aunties and habaryars who feed us and love us, mistaking us for sisters and we wouldn’t have it any other way as we sit with our Qur’an and our highlighters and pens where we heal and learn, cry and grow.

And I’ll keep coming back to this room.

Over and over and over again. 

I wish someone shook us by the shoulders and told us, one of the very best moments of your life with the five of you together in one room who are still figuring parts of your absolutely messy lives, are these, so cherish it, drink every second and don’t swallow, don’t breathe, don’t blink, or you’ll miss it.

Because the next time you will all get on a call again, after weddings, where some of you could make it and some of you tried but couldn’t, and jobs and babies and oceans travelled (“I’ll come visit you. When? Soon inshaAllah…”) and cathartic moves and dreams fulfilled and dreams withered, will be when you carry each other’s broken hearts full of shock upon hearing that one of you is gone.

And it’ll break the five, I mean four, of us in a million pieces.

Four, not five.

Inna lillahi wa inna ilahi raji’oon.

Her name meant “clouds,” and all of us said that her name was so befitting, that she provided shade and rain and bursts of light and comfort, sometimes a gorgeous storm, and she drifted and disappeared and came back again to shade and rain and light and comfort. Surah Taha was her favorite surah, and we will miss hearing her recite those verses, and tear up when we think about when she told us if she ever had a son she’d name him Taha.

“I remember when she would make everyone laugh, her bubbly personality…” I read the condolence text, a message among tens of others that mirrored the same, classmates and aunties and habaryars who grieved along our side. I forwarded them over to one of us four-not-five roommates as she collected them to send like mementos over to her mother: Please know that your daughter was so, so loved, by every single soul she gave water and shade to. 

She was the funniest, the most magnetic of us, the one with the most dynamic and infectious personality, who gave everyone the deepest and most unrestrained belly laughs. The one who pulled every part of you in a warm embrace, who was the freest of free spirits. 

“I remember when the five of you came into the cafe when we met before marriage, and all the questions she asked me with a fierceness in her eyes. How protective she was of you,” my husband told me, his voice heavy, before he wiped his eyes and walked away to compose himself before the children saw. 

“I remember when we gave her a ride and she talked the whole way in the back seat, making us laugh,” another roommate’s husband said, a coarseness in his voice. 

When did “I remember when…” become something so heavy, like clouds bursting at the seams? 

One of us will message our Qur’an teachers, and they too will be enveloped in shock and sadness. 

One of us will call the Aunty who housed us. She will be teaching the neighborhood children Qur’an just as she used to, as if nothing changed, when her phone rings. She, too, will be enveloped in shock and sadness, lightning and thunder and rain. 

One of us will drive nine hours to the janaza, the rest of us on video call as we grieve across lands and oceans. She will weep as she tells us her three-year-old’s nails still hold dirt where he helped bury our fifth, the girl made of clouds. She will tell us through muffled tears that she had kissed those hands over and over again, grateful her little boy helped put her sister to rest. All four-not-five of us will look at the skies from different corners of the world where we reside and see clouds overlapping, some heavy with rain. 

Who knew that as we sat across from one another years ago with our heads in each other’s laps that one of our children would help throw dirt over one of our graves? The thought haunts us and makes us nauseous. 

“She brought us together again, after all these years,” one of us whispered on the phone as the four-not-five of us grieved and reminisced together, cried and prayed together, in the middle of the night when we couldn’t sleep, after scrolling through our last message with her, our hearts full of regret and guilt and I-wish-I’s. 

“I wish she was here.”

To the girl made of clouds who watered potted plants when no one was watching, may Allah (SWT) prepare for you the biggest garden that was being watered and grown all this time, just for you. May you always smile and never grieve, never hurt.

To the girl made of clouds, your sisters are making du’a for you and can’t wait until all five, not four, of us will reunite in that room in Jannah inshaAllah, climbing back on those makeshift beds, opening up the snack cupboards, taking out those Dollarama canvases and expensive oil paints that got absolutely everywhere, where one of us will recite an ayah and the other will finish it, where we will laugh and tease and giggle with tears rolling down our cheeks again. Ameen.

Save a seat for us, Sahab. 

We love you in this life and the next.

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