the first fast

This year I was going to fast the whole day. The whole thing, from the morning until the evening, no slipping, no sips, the full grown-up fast, and nobody was going to be allowed to call me too small for it ever again.

I have to tell you about sahur first. Sahur is the meal you eat in the dark before the sun comes up, so the day has something to run on. The whole house gets up while it is still night. Mak is in the kitchen. The light over the stove is the only light. Everyone is half asleep and nobody talks above a mumble, because the dark is still holding the street and you do not shout at it.

I was not half asleep. I was wide awake and ready. This was the start of my mission.

I ate like a person loading a ship for a long voyage. Rice. Then more rice. I drank water the way you fill a tank. Nenek watched me from her chair in the corner. Nenek is the smallest grown-up in the house and she runs the whole place from that chair without ever raising her voice. She did not say anything. She just pushed the dish of ikan a little nearer my hand, and then the water, and I took it as encouragement and loaded more in.

"You will be sick," said Kak Long, who is my big sister and was eating one biscuit with her eyes closed.

"I am carrying supplies," I said. "It is tactics."

Then the azan came for the dawn prayer, far off and then near, and the eating was over, the fast had begun, and I felt like a small soldier at the top of a very long hill, looking down it, full of rice.

I had a plan for the day. I had decided the way to beat a fast is to be so busy you forget your own stomach. Keep moving. Take the hot loud jobs. Fill every hour so full there is no room in it for thinking about food or water. I made a mission clock. I drew it on my arm. It counted down to buka, the meal at sundown when you finally break the fast, and I planned to watch the hours fall away like a hero.

The mission clock made it worse. I checked it every few minutes. I did the sum on my arm. And I am not good at sums when I am hungry, so I kept getting it wrong, and I kept getting it wrong in the cruel direction. I would work out that I had four hours left. Then I would check again and somehow have four hours and a bit. The clock on my arm was going backwards. I rubbed it off around lunchtime and decided a real soldier does not need a clock, which is a thing you decide when the clock is winning.

Lunch was the hard part. Lunch is when the whole kampung that is not fasting carries on eating, because the world does not stop for you, and the smells come over the fences and find you. Aiman went past with a packet of mee, openly, swinging it, asking did I want some, very kindly, the way a crocodile is kind to a chicken. I said no. I said it grandly. He shrugged and ate it slowly where I could see.

Kavi tried to help. Kavi only knows loud, and he used all of it to walk up and down outside the house announcing how hungry he was on my behalf, as encouragement.

"THIAE IS DOING SO WELL," shouted Kavi, "AND SHE MUST BE SO HUNGRY, I AM ALSO HUNGRY JUST THINKING ABOUT HOW HUNGRY SHE IS, IS THERE ANY MEE."

It did not help.

I had a doctrine about thirst. I had decided that thirst is only a thought, and that if you simply do not think about water, the thirst cannot find you. I explained this doctrine to Divya, with my dry mouth, in the heat, and Divya, who is always right, said, "You are thinking about water right now. You have said water four times." I had. The doctrine fell over the second I built it. You cannot not think about a thing by deciding very hard not to think about it. That is just thinking about it with extra steps.

By the afternoon I was not a hero on a hill. I was a small girl who had picked all the hottest jobs on the hottest day, and the busier I had made it to pass the time, the longer the time had got. The worst hour was the one before the light started to go, when I drifted toward the kitchen, where the buka food was already cooling, and my legs took me there without asking me.

The curtain across the kitchen doorway was drawn. It is never drawn in the afternoon. It was drawn now, just enough that I could not see the food, and the breeze was not doing it, because there was no breeze. I did not think much about it then. I turned around and went and sat on the step in the shade instead.

Then the light started to go gold. That is the sign. When the light goes from white to gold, buka is close, and the whole street feels it at once. Everybody comes in off the road and sits down near food they are not allowed to touch yet. The dates come out. You break a fast with one date, the way it has always been done.

Mak put a small plate in front of me. One date on it, dark and soft. I picked it up. I did not eat it. You wait. You wait for the azan, the sunset one, the one that says the day is done, and then everybody eats at the same second.

And I was sitting there, holding a date I was not allowed to eat yet, the whole street gone quiet over its own plates, when I looked up and saw Nenek watching me.

She had a look I cannot really draw for you. It was the look of somebody who is very pleased about a thing and would like very much for nobody to notice that they are pleased. She saw me see it, and she looked down at her own hands, fast, the way Nenek looks away from a thing she does not want named.

The curtain. The afternoon. The kitchen I could not quite see into in the worst hour. It had not been the breeze.

Nenek has done sixty of these. She knows the hour a first fast goes thin, and she knows the doorway it goes thin in front of, and she had drawn a curtain across it so a small girl would walk past instead of stopping. And she had wanted me never to know she did it.

Then the azan came.

The whole kampung ate at the same second. Every house. The makciks, the uncles, Atok in his chair, Kak Long with her phone face down for once, Mak, Nenek, the baby, me. The same date, the same minute, the same long breath out, all up and down the lane.

I ate my one date. It was the best thing I have ever tasted and it was also just a date. For one minute I was not the smallest one. I had crossed the same long white afternoon as Nenek, and I had the same date in my mouth as Atok, at the very same moment, for the first time in my life.

The instant the date was gone I started planning tomorrow. Bigger. No hot jobs. No clock. And no drawn curtain, because now I knew the hour and the doorway, and I could walk past them myself.

Nenek heard me planning. She made the small sound she makes, the one that might be a laugh and might be her clearing her throat. With Nenek you do not get told which.