It’s midnight and I am wondering whether to grab a few winks of sleep before suhour, but then I decide it’s a bad idea.
The last time I went to sleep after setting the alarm for 3am, I got up in a panic when the parrot on the tree outside my window started squawking loudly as daylight was breaking, and I knew the day would be a long one as I had missed my early-morning breakfast.
“Never miss your suhour,” say the doctors, who warn of some really terrible things that would happen to me and my kidneys, liver, heart, skin and all the vital organs. “You cannot be productive without your suhour,” they say.
“Hydrate yourself well as the days will be hot and humid and you could lose your electrolytes,” the doctors say. What the heck are electrolytes? I wonder, thinking of my old car battery where the mechanic would fill acid water and ammonia or whatever, in the cells when I went for a tune-up at the garage after every 3,000 kilometres.
To add to my woes, my fellow mediapersons gloat at my distress: “Ramadan fasting hours to go on and on and on for 14 hours this year,” screams one headline. “This will be the hottest Ramadan in ages, ha, ha” shouts another newspaper headline, gleefully pointing to a graphic from the weather bureau showing temperatures hovering around 50 degrees Celsius and other gruesome details such as dust flurries and haze hitting the spot where I live.
When I don’t wake up for suhour, I have to forego my morning tea, and without tea I am helpless like a baby. I turn into a zombie, walking in a daze and mumbling to myself. My palate turns dry and I start to lisp and words get stuck in my throat.
At an interview, I let the person ramble on and on. It becomes difficult to concentrate, my mind flits around all over the place and eventually boomerangs back to food and drink. I believe it is inhuman to allow other people to eat when I am fasting. “Would you like a cup of tea,” says the chattering chap suddenly, and I silently scream, “YES”!
Come Ramadan and all the editors turn into sadists and print gorgeous pictures of food and advise people where they can go for iftar. The food writer describes how the chef came to her table and carved the meat, “that had been baked in the oven till it was soft enough to melt in the mouth”. The writer eats and eats and salivates about the food, but I still cannot turn away from the page because on the table beside her are trays and trays of delectable desserts.
The day-light hours stretch on and on and make me realise that this is how eternity would be like. A few minutes before the evening call for prayer, the time to break the fast, everything seems to stop in its tracks and the second hand does not move.
Patience, they say, is a good virtue to have, but at times like this I completely lose it. “Move it,” I shout to the vehicle in front of me as I zip on the highway heading for home. Luckily, the windows are down and the radio is on loud, so there is no way the driver ahead of me can hear me, sitting in his massive truck that is masquerading as personal transport.
The injunction not to delay ending the day’s fast is taken very seriously in this part of the world. The scene on the roads becomes a variation of the Hunger Games as motorists rev up, dreaming of the iftar repast waiting at home.
