This Ramadan story from Key Ballah is beautiful

Her room in the basement smelt damp, she would sometimes burn incense over the smell, and so sometimes it smelled like chompa and dampness. It was our place though, to lay across her bed clicking through our phones and talking about things that Muslim girls had no business talking about.

Today was a chompa day, and we laid like we always did across her double bed our feet in shoob shoob, dangling of the edge. She laid on her back, her shirt lifted above her navel as she clicked through Instagram, while I twisted and and inspected her new navel ring.

There are somethings that women can do alone with each other that men believe they can’t, and closely inspecting your best friends navel, in her damp, chompa smelling basement bedroom, while her mother is upstairs pounding dough and her father is outside cutting grass, is one of them.

She asked if I had been fasting, I was too embarrassed to tell her that yesterday when no one was looking I’d drank two tall glasses of water, so I said yes. There was silence, she knew I was lying, just as I knew she’d be lying too, had I asked her the same question.

She continued to click and I continued to twist. Eventually she grew tired of my hands, she decided she’d had enough of my inspection so she slapped my twisting hand away and sat up. “You know,” she said after a few moments of looking like she was going to say something “it’s been me all along”.

I watched her for a few moments waiting for her to explain but she didn’t. “What does that even mean?” I asked her after waiting the appropriate amount of time for a dramatic pause. “ the shaitans are locked up and I’m still me.”

I opened my mouth to answer immediately, to put her at ease, to reassure her, but I knew it wouldn’t have made a difference all I could say was “me too”.

Key Ballahis a Toronto-based writer and Hip-hop enthusiast. She is the author of the poetry collection, Preparing My Daughter For Rain, she melts faith, love and her experiences of being a woman of color navigating the western world in her writing. This story was culled from her website www.keywrites.com

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