You're alone, you're in love, you're with me,
And till dusk, full of yearning, I'm with you, I'm with you

- Alexander Blok

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"Meet my son, Sangeen."

Hurairah holds out the newborn to him in his arms, grinning so wide Mikael is afraid his skin might split. He places the flower bouquet at Larmina's feet on the bed and takes the boy from him, careful with his touch. His heart melts at the sight.

"Show him to me too, baba!" Zimal pleads excitedly and he lowers the baby to her. She watches him with big eyes and a stupefied expression.

"You have a brother now, angel," Mikael murmurs to her.

"Baby?" She touches his cheek and he smiles. Zimal grins. "He likes me!"

Mikael chuckles and feather kisses his nephew's nose, then his forehead, before handing him back to Hurairah.

"Congratulations on becoming a father."

Hurairah lets out a giddy laugh. "I'm still getting used to the feeling. It's euphoric."

Mikael walks towards Larmina who has been watching them with glossy eyes and a soft smile on her face. He leans down to kiss both of her cheeks.

"Congratulations, khwagy (sweetheart). Mother would've been so happy."

"I know," she whispers and sniffs, pressing her palm to his cheek. "But I've you."

"Always."

"I wish baba..." Larmina trails off.

Mikael pulls away, remaining passive at the mentioning of their father and not responding to his sister's statement. Larmina gives him a sardonic look and he only smiles weakly, squeezing her hand reassuringly.

He stays a while longer with his family before excusing himself and going to the hospital lobby, approaching the attendant at the desk.

"Hello, I'm looking for Dr. Humayun. Is she on the duty today?"

"Hello, please give me a minute." He checks her schedule on his computer before replying, "She's in OT right now, cardiothoracic department."

"Ok, thank you."

"If you've any message for her, leave it with me and I'll forward it to her."

He thinks for a moment, then pulls out a pencil from his jacket pocket and puts it on the desk. "Kindly give it to her."

The attendant gives him a perplexed look but doesn't say anything. Mikael offers him a smile and turns away, walking out of the hospital door into the late evening air.

He lets the cool breeze caress his face and looks up at sky. Tonight, the clouds are few and the stars are bright, the moon shining bewitchingly among them. He pockets his hands and makes his way towards the park on the other side of the road. At this hour, it's empty and quiet.

He sits on one of the swings, rocking him back and forth gently, tangled in his musings. Fate is testing him with many things at once: with his daughter's condition, his fractured relationship with his father, and with his wife's rejection of him. He doesn't know how everything will disentangle itself, neither if things will play in his favor, but he knows once Banafsha finds the truth about him, nothing will be the same. And he doesn't know how long he can pretend naive with her.

He takes out Shirin's photo from his wallet, lovingly tracing her face. "There's a lot going on, and there's a havoc within me. I'm living through every day like this, but I don't know how long I can go on." He pauses, staring into her eyes in the picture. "I wish you were here with me." He exhales wearily. "I wish for a lot of things."

He looks at the sky again, a dark canvas with brilliant adornments. The universe is enthralling, created to cage hearts, to be admired, to learn from. The universe is filled with the signs of God-- he's not alone.

"The stars are beautiful tonight, aren't they, malika (queen)?" He press the photo to his heart.

"How bad is it that I envy a gone woman?" A voice from behind him asks and his body ignites in reaction to it. He turns around and finds Banafsha standing a few feet away from him. "She's quite lucky to have someone love her so much even after so long."

"You've nothing to be jealous of, doctor," Mikael replies smoothly. "I'm sure you are quite special yourself."

She smiles at him but it's hollow, apathetic, showing him she hasn't taken his words into consideration. "I would like to know the feeling someday."

Banafsha comes to sit beside him on the empty swing, mimicking him and rocking herself back and forth.

"What is it like?" She looks at him. "Love, I mean."

"Intense."

"How intense?"

"I don't know. I don't think it has a limit to be defined."

She fixes his eyes. "Do you still love your late wife?"

He shrugs, holding Shirin's photograph still in his hands. "We don't learn to forget some people, doctor. We just make peace with their memories."

"You're one great husband," she praises him. "Species like you are rare," she adds jokingly. He gazes at her silently and she tilts her head. "What?"

He shakes his head. "Nothing."

Only if Banafsha knew the truth. Only if she had given him that chance and then said the same to him, he would've treasured her compliment.

"So, you were looking for me to return my pencil?"

"You dropped it in my car that day I gave you a ride home," he tells her.

"It was just a pencil, but thank you, Mr. Idris."

A smirk slowly crawls up his lips at her calling him by his surname. "Call me Mikael, doctor."

"Then call me Banafsha, Mikael."

His heart gallops at her name-- at the command in her voice. He stills his swing, his concentration orbiting around her like a mad planet. A flame burns his soul despite the chill of the night, everything around him becoming stagnant. Banafsha stops swinging too, those big orbs paralleling his stare. He swallows.

How can he call her by her name? Her name reminds him of his bride in red wedding dress, standing in the middle of the night on the rooftop, heedless to the pouring rain and biting cold, waiting for him only to tell him she doesn't want to be with him. Her name brings back bitter memories. And just like that, the flame blazing within him withers and extinguishes like a candle blown out by the wind.

"I figured you like pencils," he changes the topic. "I've seen you carrying them with you."

"I actually do like them." She reaches into her over-all pocket and pulls out two, one of them which he has just returned to her. "I can't explain it, but they make me feel easy when I'm reading a book or studying my notes, otherwise I feel anxious. Is that silly?"

He chuckles lightly. "No, it's cute."

She starts swinging again slowly. "Why were you at the hospital though? You surely didn't come only because of a pencil."

"My sister gave birth to a boy," he tells her, a tender edge to his tone.

"Ah, congratulations to the family, and to you on becoming an uncle."

He grins at her. "Thank you."

She gives him a lingering look. He arches an eyebrow and leans towards her.

"Doctor?"

"I'm just wondering."

"What?"

"How your dimple makes you look so boyish," she mentions informally. "How it advantages you into cheating your age."

"You hurt my feelings." He fakes being upset by her comment, placing a hand over his heart. "Do you see me as an old man?"

"Thirty something?" she makes a guess.

"Thirty-four," he replies. "But I turn thirty-five in a few months."

"And yet you look twenty something, and I'm twenty-eight, and who knows? Maybe you look younger than me." She sighs dramatically. "Youth is a blessing, or in your case dimples are."

He laughs heartily at her statement and she stops the swing again, leaning slightly towards him.

"But do I give you an honest compliment?" she asks in a hushed voice.

He bites his lip and inches closer. "You'll fluster me, doctor."

"You weren't so shy on the stage during your lecture. I thought crowd has a greater impact."

"It's different with you."

Silence fills the air between them as their gazes battle. She doesn't ask him for the meaning of his words, and he's glad she hasn't-- he has no explanation for his feelings. He watches her part her lips, trying to say something but unable to. Banafsha blinks, and the space between them seems to shrink. She doesn't tear away her eyes from him.

"Tell me the secret then," he asks calmly, trying to ease the building up tension between them.

She looks to him like everything sinful-- silk, seduction, and blind destruction. She looks to him like an uncompleted painting, too meticulous for the artist to continue. Maybe he shouldn't be staring at her for so long; someone so beautiful ruins the beauty of everything else around them-- it can be dangerous. And sometimes he wonders, how many men must have desired to belong to her? Some may better than him. And yet, it's him she's with-- it's them being together.

"You know," she says and his attention fixates on her, "your eyes are captivating, irresistibly so. I've always found blue eyes cold, but yours aren't."

"You like my eyes, doctor?" he asks teasingly. "Careful, I might take it for something else."

She cannot hide back her smile, amused, shaking her head at him. "I shouldn't give you false hope then."

"You're a mood killer." He pouts and she laughs, covering her mouth with their back of her hand. And for the first time, those impenetrable orbs warm enough to give way to her true emotions-- he sees the conflict brewing there, and her sadness threaded with half-born happiness. His heart aches for her.

Her features gradually sober up and she becomes serious. Glancing away from him, she gazes up at the sky instead, until seconds stretch into long minutes before she speaks again.

"That day when I came to your lecture, I wasn't expecting what you delivered there. It got so overwhelming that I had to leave before you could finish."

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to--"

"No," she shushes him, craning her neck back to him. "You were only doing your job. The fault is with me. I'm not so brave to embrace the truth; I've been running away from it all my life-- from the change."

He doesn't say anything in response and she continues.

"Zoraiz must've told you the family we belong to. Both my father and my older brother are in politics, at very high and powerful posts. Growing up, I was always given the life I wanted and I extracted as much as I could from what was offered to me, never a question asked about where everything was coming from. So you can say that I've been in oblivion all my life, just trying to enjoy what I could."

She starts swinging again, seemingly trying to fill the silence with something, staring into space now and not making eye contact with him. But Mikael listens to her attentively.

"When I was in college, everyone in my class would circle around me, both teachers and students. It felt good, you know? Being valued so much. I thought everyone liked me, that they wanted to be in my place." She pauses, looking into space, and he doesn't try interrupting her, sitting still on his swing. "Then one day this girl, I've forgotten her name because I never payed much attention to anyone, she approached me. And she said to me: no one likes you, Banafsha, but only for the favors they could get from you. That people talked ill about me and my family behind my back. That the only ones who liked me were the bad boys in the class, who more lusted than liked me, because I was beautiful but only apparently. That after all, bad men go after bad women. And that someday I would end up with one such man, because no good man would ever want me. That this is the way of God to teach people like us who are in control-- we must suffer too for making the ones below us suffer."

She looks back at him and smiles brokenly, and it breaks his heart. It takes everything in him not to reach out to her and hold her in his arms. He wants to says something to make her feel better but his tongue feels numb in his mouth.

"I came home and told this to my mother," she adds. "And she said that those less fortunate than us envy those who are more blessed than them. She said that I shouldn't be bothered by such hate, because it's common. But I still learnt one thing: behind the facade, no one ever loved me. I never had a true friend, except one who too I lost when she married my brother. That I was never truly loved. Never loved. Not by my family who were always too busy with their own lives, neither by my friends who had their own selfish causes to be with me."

"Doctor," he calls her in a lulling manner. "That's not true. I'm sure you're loved plenty."

"You don't know that," she denies. "I may have been bad, but not immodest. Why should I deserve any such man? And so I decided to stay single than marrying one and suffering for the rest of my life. But my parents noticed my rejection to every other proposal, and ironically after-thirty is old for a woman, so they put a price to my dreams: marriage." Her shoulders drop in dejection. "And thus, I lost to them."

"You haven't lost until you've given up, doctor," he reasons soothingly, smiling at her gently. "Have you even given your husband a chance?"

His heart skips a beat at his own suggestion as he looks at her hopefully.

"If he turns out to be how I fear it, then I don't want to be with him."

"And if not?"

"If he's actually a good man as everyone has been saying, then I don't deserve to be with him."

"Why not?"

"Because my family will devour him, and it won't be long before he becomes one of them. This was the condition for our marriage: he must become part of our circle." She kicks a stone on the ground mindlessly. "Then why must I risk it when none of us could benefit in the end?"

"Why don't you just believe in God and give love a chance?"

"I don't think I'm destined to find it."

"You cannot be sure."

"Oh well, I am. I know my circumstances. I'm just not good enough for it. I've never had it before either, generally speaking," she reasons unenthusiastically.

"Who said you aren't good enough to be loved?" He reaches out to grip the chain of her swing, stopping her movements and tugging her slightly to himself. She meets his eyes and his gaze sinks into her pupils, quietly whispering, "I actually find you pretty lovable, doctor."

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رمضان مبارك / Ramadan Mubarak

Here's to the month of blessings. Remember me in your prayers (:

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