Living Smells and the Call to Prayer

all of my nerves are putting feelers out into the world. i'm finally galvanized again, eyelids pinned back and gaping, fingerprints lit up like tiny golden threads spreading and spiraling out.

there are the smells:
moist, underground odors and garbage throbbing like something alive in the damp heat; the wash of arabian perfume as a veiled woman walks by; spiky meat smells slithering down a murky alley; the clean smell of sand; a confusion of spices swimming around hazily after the market stalls have closed: cardamom, saffron, curry, frankincense, cinnamon. black-mustached men huddle together under a date tree, their sweat bleeding out like raw onions.

it's Ramadan. in the afternoon, the workers pass out one by one along the dusty highways, panting for water. they work under the sun without food and water and they pass out. they do it for the alchemy of turning dirhams into rupees. in the villas, the dignified men in their bone-white dishdashas lay down with their black-robed wives to sleep away the afternoon and forget the fast. to lay motionless and forget about their hot bellies.

everything strains for sunset, iftaar, a taste of something.

when it comes, it comes like a bruised mango, sloppy, sticky-sweet and pulsing with over-ripe heat. we stand there, bathed in over-ripe heat and look out over Khalid Lagoon. as if from out of the water, the voices begin to moan. they rise, loop slowly and descend. the call to prayer comes drenched in sweat and fatigue, rolling around from one mosque to another, unfurling like damp black feathers, like 10 different smells, body odor, cinnamon, garbage, meat. like 10 different smells battling for sense.

we just stand there, confused and sweating, our boiling organs twisting and turning, our nerves putting out spindly feelers into the half-dark.