“Farashkhaane se Shabana…Sehrish aapka intezaar kar rahi hain. Baraaye meherbaani unse miliye.”
“Sehri? Who is supposed to ‘meet’ Sehri now? Aren’t we here for Iftar?”
Mosques, traditionally, have been considered to be centers of congregation for matters of religion. In recent years, there has been some bemoaning over the loss of its status as a community center. While there is some truth to this, one needs to pay just a wee bit of attention to the announcements being made over the mosque’s PA system when it isn’t the muezzin using it to perform his duty.
Sundays at Jama Masjid during Ramadan are a time when you actually start to question why you decided to leave the comfort of a dastarkhwaan spread in the cosiness of your living room. But we love chaos, don’t we? Till the time we don’t part the shoulders of patiently sitting brothers in order to cross from between them to reach a clearing where we can just about spread our dastarkhwaan, till we don’t get squeezed into a space where doing sajda during Asr means compressing your spine into an arc which rises at least a couple of feet above the ground, we don’t get the feeling of being Muslim enough.
Such was the case on this Sunday. The PA system was a paging system which was acting as the conduit for facilitating all manners of social interactions at a time when you would just be running late to join someone’s dastarkhwaan for Iftar.
By the way, hearing all the lost and found kids announcements being made at Jama Masjid that evening (and each Eid at the Eidgah, all my life) I’ve been wondering if the world had actually given serious importance to the mosque PA system, then there’s a good chance that Manmohan Desai may never have been as huge a success.