Last Friday already. Jum’atul Vida. Alvida Juma. The Farewell Friday.
I still can’t believe how I missed it. That time when you realize how just those the criticality of those five minutes and of the probability of just one auto rickshaw agreeing to go in the direction of the mosque. Well, this adds another first to Ramadan this year. One which I’m definitely not happy about.
After salvaging the missed Juma prayer, on the way back, the auto rickshaw driver broke into a conversation after I asked him about why there weren’t enough mosques here (of course, I had just missed a prayer, and I was looking for reasons to console myself; accessibility and distance seemed like good excuses at that time), and he rattled off five mosques within a two kilometers radius. Even told me a story about how he missed a Juma prayer stuck in traffic on the other side of the road, while he could see the prayer in progress.
I asked him to keep the change, to get something for his kids at Iftar. He wasn’t keen to keep it, but I insisted, and now I’ve been thinking if I hurt his self-respect.