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Ummumma's blue prayer rug was so soft that I loved to sleep on it as a child. But I never could. Just as I would make myself cosy on its velvet skin,  someone would almost always ask me to move away. When Ummumma was doing her namaz in her long silky white makkana, I would sit right next to her on her prayer rug and copy what she was doing. When she brought herself down and kissed her forehead on the ground, I would do the same, closing my eyes and smiling inside. But when I open my eyes from sujood, I am on my father's green prayer rug, shedding tears heavily. There is wetness on its green skin from my tears, right next to where the kaaba has been stitched on it. When I bring myself up to recite a few verses, my tears and breathlessness weigh me down, and I am on the ground again, crying. Ummumma's old metal trunk box with her white neriyath  and her old Quran with its black torn cover and her white makkana both wrapped inside her blue prayer rug remain. Her tears in prayer wettened the same soil that mine did too. But how do I prove those stories that only the soil knows?

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