Stranded on the Tube, one passenger finds a way to get a message through.
I was going to be late to Nessa’s house, where I was supposed to be reviewing with the others for our A-level chem exams. My hand went to the side pocket of my backpack, to the strap, to back down to my side again in a bizarre triangulation. The impulse was to text her, but I knew without looking I wouldn’t be getting any reception. The conductor’s voice looped over the intercom, apologizing, explaining. I let the garbled speech wash over me and made no attempt to decipher the muddled message.
A drop of sweat dripped down my spine. The air was thick and humid with the smell of too many bodies perspiring in the small space. A fat, balding man opposite me wiped the sweat from his eye and sighed heavily. A mother shushed her four-year-old son.
I unearthed my book, a biography on Rosalind Franklin, and flipped listlessly through the pages. Too hot, irritated, and overworked to read, I shoved the book back into my bag and looked around.
A woman in a hijab sitting in the middle of the car had her eyes closed and muttered something under her breath.
“Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdu lillaahi Rabbil ‘aalameen Ar-Rahmaanir-Raheem—”The carriage was so quiet I could hear a man in an adjacent carriage coughing. The speaker had gone silent, and the woman's lilting prayer, even whispered, was the only noise. Nobody looked at her or acknowledged it. They had all retreated into themselves, allowing exactly enough space to accommodate everyone’s body into the carriage and no more. It was a rule of self-preservation.
“—lyyaaka nasta’een Ihdinas-Siraatal-Mustaqeem Siraatal-lazeena an’amta ‘alaihim ghayril-maghdoobi ‘alaihim wa lad-daaalleen—”
I wondered briefly how she knew where Mecca was. Did it happen to align perfectly with how she was sitting? Did she choose her seat accordingly? Or was she just as lost and disoriented as the rest of us?
“Bismillah hir Rahman nir Rahim Qul Huwallahu ahad—”
Something, somewhere in the tunnel made a loud noise, like a mechanical part being readjusted. What did she have faith in? I wondered. I looked around the carriage again. A boy no older than ten had offered his seat to someone who looked like my mother; the only difference was her hair, shot through with silver. She took a seat.
I looked again at the woman, who, trapped in a dark tunnel, miles under the London streets, surrounded by strangers, had decided to pray.
“Allahussamad. Lam yalid wa lam yu-lad. Wa lam yakun lahu kufuwan ahad.”
I did not understand the prayer, or the meaning, or the motivation, but I could recognize the tone. It was the conviction I used when dissecting the solubility of a compound or the probability of an outcome. It was the gentle fascination that tinged my grandfather’s voice when he read an excerpt from one of his biographies. It was the tone someone uses when they have such unwavering, unequivocal belief in the seemingly unknowable actions that govern the rudimentary physics of our lives that for a second, just a second, there is no other choice except to let them carry you along. To believe in them.
And very slowly, the train began to move again.
