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 always got it wrong the wrong way, so it looked like I had more time left, not less. 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. I only decided that because the clock kept making everything feel worse.

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 if you simply do not think about water, the thirst cannot find you. I explained the doctrine to Divya, with my dry mouth, in the heat.

"You are thinking about water right now," said Divya, who is always right. "You have said water four times."

I had. The whole idea fell apart the second I made it.

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. I went to check the mission clock on my arm and there was no mission clock on my arm, because I had rubbed it off hours ago. I did not need it. The gold light was the clock, and it had been there the whole time, and it does not go backwards.

Everybody came in off the road and sat down near food they were not allowed to touch yet. Ayah got back across the Causeway in time, the way he always tries to in the fasting month, sliding in from Singapore with the dust of the jam still on him, just before the dates came 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, drawn in the worst hour. The kitchen I could not quite see into. And no breeze to do it. Nenek had pulled it shut, so I would not have to look at the food.

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 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, out loud. Bigger. No hot jobs. No clock on my arm.

Nenek did not say anything. She reached over and pushed the next plate of buka a little nearer my hand, the way she had pushed the ikan nearer in the dark that morning. I took it. Neither of us said one word about the curtain.