Paimana

Salam,

By late afternoon the room gathers an ochre radiance that slides across the boards and rests beside the kitchen table, and there the cup does its small work again, leaving a pale ring that returns as faithfully as a tide. That circle is a summons. I see the old figure at once, the serpent with its mouth to its tail, the body teaching me how an ending inclines back into its own beginning. The mind answers with a sentence I have carried through so many rooms:

إِنَّا لِلَّهِ وَإِنَّا إِلَيْهِ رَاجِعُونَ
Innā lillāhi wa innā ilayhi rājiʿūn
Surely we belong to God, and surely to Him we return.

You would have smiled at how the grammar of that verb holds a bend. On days like this I follow it. I move between facing the ache and facing the small tasks that let a house keep its shape, the alternation becoming a kind of orbit I can live inside.

I learned the most practical lesson in a laundromat. Your voice still arranges the sequence in my head. Three rinses, teen martaba (تین مرتبہ), paakiizgii (پاکیزگی) in three movements. First for what anyone can see, second for what has gone into the weave, third for what hides where only God can enter. The drum turned sleeves over themselves. Water wrote a circle inside a circle. Cloth remembered where it had been and accepted a beginning again. I carried the warm cotton home and understood that cleansing is a grammar for remembrance. It does not cancel what has occurred but rather teaches the fabric its willingness to be touched again.

If I write to you about circles, it is because the body already knows them. In a quiet theater that needs no audience, a cell keeps faith with the whole through autophagy. A membrane curves inward, LC3 marks the cargo, the autophagosome meets the lysosome, and a patient ministry of enzymes returns what can be used to the common economy. When another cell approaches its hour, phosphatidylserine turns outward and makes a simple request. Bridging proteins such as Gas6 and Protein S help a neighbor read the message through MerTK and related receptors. That act of receiving a life at its finish has a name, efferocytosis, and it keeps tissue from turning into a gallery of unfinished farewells. The nervous system practices the same courtesy at the level of meaning. Microglia patrol. C1q and C3 lay a thin thread over synapses that can be released. Exuberance becomes sense. Attention gets its path through its own forest. I think of these labors when the day threatens to scatter me. Renewal is given to a series of mercies that feel like letting go and feel like work.

You remember the tree that keeps visiting. Shahtoot ka darakht (شہتوت کا درخت)under the Doha sun, branches lowered by mulberries that stain the fingers into truth. I told you that story beside a bed that had run out of ordinary time, and you listened as if taste could travel by voice alone. The berries return on their own calendar. Their pulp insists that longing and sweetness share a single root. I stand again beneath that shade and carry the stain forward without embarrassment, because a true mark can be a witness.

The house has learned the coil as well. After a season of burning, everything settles into a light film of raakh (راکھ). There is ash in the crease of a pillowcase and along a turmeric rim the cloth has not dared to wipe away. The walls remain themselves and also hold a smoke that has decided to stay. The spoon still draws a small orbit in the cup. The hand steadies. The serpent that has been busy all day folds itself and rests. On certain mornings the lesson arrives through the hands alone, haath (ہاتھ), rinsing dishes or peeling fruit or folding shirts you will never wear again, each touch a way of learning the world without you, each movement a quiet return to a shape the day can hold. And when I must sort what remains, I practice chhantna (چھانٹنا) the way you taught me. Grain from husk. Memory from fabric. Reverence from possession. Love from keeping. The pile that goes back into the drawer is lighter and more faithful. The pile that leaves does not feel like betrayal but the housekeeping every living thing performs when it chooses its life again.

Lift the gaze for a moment and the emblem widens without losing tenderness. Stars spend what they are. In the spending, heavier gifts are forged. Dispersion becomes matter that will later enter a pulse. At the centers of galaxies, a mouth of gravity gathers what drifts near, and that taking shapes the neighborhood by jets and winds that regulate the births of stars. Some astronomers draw the range of size as a ring and place us near the hinge where head meets tail. I keep that diagram beside the ring on the table. Both ask for the same posture, a humility that pays attention and a willingness to feel part of a circle rather than apart from it. Light itself offers another kindness. Depending on how it is asked, it keeps the traveling form of a wave or the punctual answer of a particle. In that complementarity two true accounts live beside each other without quarrel. The circle widens enough to carry both.

Writing brings all of this near the skin. A draft that once felt complete becomes food for a later voice. The page consents to another turn. Warmth returns to the work. I set sentences out like clothes and let the day teach me how to sort. Sometimes the recognition arrives in a circle too. A scientist once saw a snake turn toward its own tail and woke with a ring he could draw on paper, a solution that made space for closure and breath at once. I think of that story when a paragraph that has wandered for weeks quietly finds its shape. The ouroboros does not live only in carved gold or alchemical margins. It has a desk and a sink and a stove. It eats what a day has finished and returns it as fuel for what is becoming.

There is another sentence I place where the light can touch it.

اللَّهُ نُورُ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ
Allāhu nūru s‑samāwāti wal‑arḍ
God is the Light of the heavens and the earth.

Light travels and returns. Even after it moves on, the eye holds an afterimage long enough to guide the next step. Vision finishes the sentence that illumination began. The heart keeps a similar outline. Perhaps that is why the cup’s ring calms me. It is a small promise that an inside still exists, that there is a boundary that holds without harming, that crossing from one side to the other still happens by consent and care.

When I am tired I go back to the simplest catechism you gave me. Three rinses, said without drama. First for what anyone can see, second for what remains, third for what only God can enter. I follow that order when I clean a room that has carried too much of a single season. I follow it when I read my own pages. I follow it when I tell the truth to myself about how love continues to live in me. The repetitions do not cancel each other. They teach the same lesson in different textures until the body understands the coil without argument.

Evening gathers. The pale ring dries into the wood and begins to look less like a stain than a witness. I pour tea. The surface steadies. The circle holds without tightening. The house, which has carried smoke, starts to breathe with something like gratitude. I close the notebook and turn toward the prayer that is nearest to my throat.

كُلُّ نَفْسٍ ذَائِقَةُ الْمَوْتِ
Kullu nafsin dhā’iqatul‑mawt
Every soul shall taste death.

Taste is an intimate verb. It suggests reception and it suggests nearness. Perhaps this is what the ouroboros has been explaining all along, in kitchen light and in galaxies, in autophagosomes and in black hole winds, in mulberries that stain and in ash that lingers, in the rinse that restores and in the sifting that keeps faith with what remains. To be taken in is how we are taken up. To allow the circle is how we are kept.

If you were here I would place your cup on the table so the wood could learn your circle again. The room would arrange itself around that small moon of tea, and we would let the hour complete itself without hurry. Until then, I will keep the serpent in the cup and the ring in the wood and the science in the marrow and the prayer on the tongue, and I will return to you in these orbits that carry us, again and again, to the beginning.

آپ کی خاموشی کا مخاطب 

Wassalam,

Raza

Glossary:

teen martaba — تین مرتبہ — three times; thrice

paakiizgii — پاکیزگی — refined purity

shahtoot ka darakht — شہتوت کا درخت — mulberry tree

raakh — راکھ — ash; residue after burning

haath — ہاتھ — hand

chhantna — چھانٹنا — to sift; sort carefully

Aap ki khamoshi ka mukhatib — آپ کی خاموشی کا مخاطب — The addressee of your silence.”