One week to go...

Insya Allah next week we will be celebrating Eid.
Alhamdulillah so far I have not ponteng puasa. There’s a lot of headaches and vomiting but since iftar is at around 5.00 p.m., I found no real reason not to fast. If I get to fast for the whole month this year, it’ll be a first for me since I hit puberty, and that’s kind of cool.

But cool or otherwise, I haven’t khatam the Quran. I initially hoped that I could khatam twice this year seeing that I have no off-day from reading the Quran, but I guess I’m just too lazy kot… I definitely have been spending too many mornings under the blanket on the futon until near midday…

The Malaysian group of students who came for semarak Ramadhan on the 1st of Ramadhan had another semarak Ramadhan program last weeked. It was good to be around Malaysians, speaking Malay, eating iftar and sahur together, chatting and laughing. It was especially great being able to perform terawih in a group while Ujai was being looked after by some other girls. After endless nights of praying alone on the ladies floor, I must say that it definitely felt good to be in a jemaah.

This past month, there were a few occasions on which we had iftar with others. Rafi, a Pakistani working in an Indian restaurant in Ueno offered to cook on Fridays at the mosque. His cousin, Islam, too has his day off on Fridays, so he joined us having iftar at the mosque too.

Ella, an Indonesian married to Abdullah, a Japanese-American lives about 10 minutes away and just delievered a beautiful baby boy named Muhammad Raihan. They held a small kenduri kesyukuran during iftar the second Sunday in Ramadhan at the mosque. Then, last Sunday, as consolation for preventing hubby and I from attending an iftar invitation in another mosque, one of the regular attenders of the mosque called up his friend and cooked up some beriyani for iftar at our mosque. So there – those were the days when hubby get to have his iftar with something different from my usual iftar stuff. Usual means mostly porridges – bubur lambuk, bubur bilis, bubur udang, bubur sosej, bla bla bla. On one occasion when he requested to have nasi lemak for iftar, I prepared the nasi lemak, but he cooked the sambal, since I could not stand the smell of simmering oil.

Anyway, with the coming of Syawal, soon we will be seeing an end of the porridge time... At least I hope so...