the ground was holy
Come to prayer.
Come to flourishing.
Prayer is better than sleep. — the call to dawn prayer
Six in the morning, and the street had an alarmthat belonged to no one in particular. The mosque sat at the mouth of our road,loudspeaker bolted above the door,and before the light was honest the call came down,finding our windows the way water finds a slope. Allahu Akbar. God is greater.Greater than what, the sentence never says.It has never had to. And that last line belongs to dawn alone.Not noon, not afternoon, not dusk.Only the hour when it would sting. Consider the nerve of it.A whole street informed before six,by a man who rose before all of them,that what they are doing at this momentis the lesser of the two available options. Come to prayer, it said, and then,come to flourishing.I knew the sound of that word for thirty yearsbefore I learned it was a farmer's word.Falah. Soil broken openso that something can come up through it.The street was being called to be cultivated.Most mornings I slept through it, like everyone. I did not pray to that God.I woke to Him every morning of my childhood,which is its own kind of relationship. At the junction where our road met the main roadthere was a clay pot,and in the clay pot there was food.Palm oil. Kola. Something cooked that morningby somebody who got up early to cook it. Nobody moved it. Nobody discussed it.A street that agreed on nothingagreed on this without holding a meeting,walked around it,and went on to wherever it was going. I was small and I did not ask.You learn early which questions the air will take. Then the Celestial Church would come through,and I will tell the truth about this.They frightened me. White sutana to the ankle. Every one of them barefoot.A bell going ahead of them down the road,one note, then the next, patient as a pulse.They did not hurry and they did not look at us.Whatever they were walking towardwas not on our street and it was not us,and a child can feel that,and a child does not have a word for it,so the word he reaches for is other,and he stands closer to his mother. The shoes were the thing I could not get past.Grown men and women on that road,that road, with its broken bottles and its gutter,walking on it with the soles of their feetbecause they had decided it was holy ground.Moses at the bush. Take off your shoes.They had read it and then they had done it,which is a different order of belieffrom reading it and being moved. The traffic did what traffic does there,which is nothing, and went around. Most of my friends were Muslim.Most of the street was.On the days it fell that way I went in with them,and before anything else there was water. The kettle. The buta, plastic, with its long spout.Hands first, then the mouth, then the nose,then the face, then the arms to the elbow,the wet hand over the head and behind the ears,and last the feet, and in that order, and without pause.Not because the body is dirty.Because you do not come to the doorin the condition the road left you in. I did it too, badly, watching the boy beside me,one step behind him the whole way.And I stood where they stoodand put my head down when their heads went down. I would like to say that was devotion.It was not devotion.It was that we walked home together afterward,and I was not going to walk home alone,and so I prayed to somebody else's Godfor exactly as long as it takesto be a boy who has friends. On Fridays the school divided itself,the Christians in one hall, the Muslims up the stairs,and every Friday a few boys went up those stairswho had no business on them,and everyone knew why, and nobody stopped them.Not conversion. Company.The oldest reason anyone has ever entered a building. And I came home from all of itto a house that taught me there was one road,one name for God, one way of saying it,and that everything I had walked past on the waywas, in the kindest possible telling, an error. I believed the house.I was not a doubting child. I loved the house.I carry more of it than I admit in company. But a boy cannot unhear a bell.A boy cannot unsee a grown manwho has decided the earth is too sacred for shoes.A boy who has held the buta in his own two handsand poured for somebody elseknows what the water was for. And here is what I have never gotten around.Nobody on that road was pretending.The one who set the pot down at the junctionbefore the sun was properly up was not performing.The women in white were not performing,and the fear I had of them was mine, not theirs.My friends with their foreheads to the matwere not performing.The man on the loudspeaker at six in the morningbelieved every syllable he was shouting at usand he was shouting it for free. Devotion looks the same from the outsidewhichever door it walks through.I had seen it through every door on my streetbefore I was eleven,and I have not found a way to lay that downnext to what I was taughtso that both of them lie flat. Now I am a grown man in another country.I pray to Jehovah in a quiet room,in my father's words, in my father's cadence.I believe it. Most days I believe it entirely. And I have watched a hundred people kneelwith their whole hearts in a hundred directions,and not one of them wore the faceof a person getting it wrong. I have no position on this.I have a bell going down a roadand everything stepping aside to let it pass.I have a clay pot no one would touch.I have a boy going into a mosquebecause that is where his friends were.I have a voice at six in the morningcalling a sleeping street to be cultivated,and a man in that streetwho has spent his whole life sincetrying to grow something. Somewhere in that city this eveninga man is taking his shoes offbecause he has decided the ground he stands onis not ordinary ground. I have never been able to prove him wrong.I have never once tried. — tachi
next in the long tellings the year the factory stopped 