Ramadan in a Non-Muslim Office
My colleagues learned my sunset, and one by one, kept it with me.
The first person to notice I was not eating was Kevin from accounts, and he handled it with all the composure of a man defusing a bomb with oven mitts on.
"You're not doing the pizza?" he asked, at the all-hands lunch, holding a paper plate that was bending under three slices. It was my second week at the company and the first day of Ramadan, a combination I do not recommend, like starting a marathon during a house move.
"I'm fasting," I said. "Ramadan. No food or water until sunset."
Kevin looked at his plate, then at me, then at his plate again, doing math that clearly hurt. "No water?" he said... "Not even water?" And then, because he is Kevin, he sat down next to me anyway and did not eat until he thought I was not looking, which was somehow one of the kindest and least effective gestures I have ever witnessed.
I had done Ramadan my whole life, but always inside a scaffolding built for it. In my parents' house the whole day bent toward the meal at sunset: my mother's lentil soup, the fried things arriving in waves, my father pretending he was not watching the clock, the dates set out on the blue plate that only came out for that month. Fasting there was easy the way swimming downstream is easy. What I had never done was fast alone, in a new city, on the fourteenth floor of a glass building where the kitchenette smelled like microwave popcorn from ten until four.
The first week was quiet suffering with a badge on a lanyard. The 3 p.m. slump hit like weather. I would read the same email four times, and the words would slide around like fried eggs on a plate. Somebody's leftover birthday cake sat in the kitchen for two days, and I developed a personal relationship with it. There was a 5:30 meeting that season, and sunset was at 5:52, and I would sit there watching the sky go orange behind the projector screen, nodding at slides about quarterly targets while my whole body listened for a horizon.
I did not want to make it anyone's problem. That is the thing about fasting at work that no one tells you: the hunger is manageable, the thirst is harder, but the negotiation with your own visibility is the real labor... Do you explain? Do you disappear at lunch and let people think you are antisocial? I chose vagueness, which protected exactly no one and confused everyone.
Priya from design broke the seal.
She stopped at my desk one afternoon, week two, and said, without any preamble, "What time is it today?"
"What time is what?"
"Sunset. I looked it up but the sites disagree and I figured you'd have the correct one." She had a sticky note ready. She wrote 5:54 on it in her tidy designer handwriting and stuck it on the edge of her monitor, facing out, where she could see it from her chair. "Okay," she said, and walked off, as if she had just updated a project timeline.
The sticky note changed things, in the small viral way that office behavior spreads. Dave, my manager, a man whose entire emotional register lived inside calendar invites, quietly moved the 5:30 meeting to 2:00. He never mentioned it... The invite just slid up the calendar one Tuesday like furniture rearranged in the night. When I thanked him, he looked genuinely alarmed and said, "Room conflict," which was a lie, because I checked, because I am like that.
Then the dates appeared.
A small box of them, the good Medjool kind, left on my desk with no note. I never found out who it was... I have a suspicion that it was Margaret, sixty-something, who ran the front desk and once told me she had been to Istanbul in 1988 and never emotionally returned. Whoever it was had done research: dates are what my family breaks the fast with, what most of us break it with, and there they were, sitting on my keyboard like a password to somewhere.
I called my mother that night and told her about the meeting that moved and the sticky note and the dates. She was quiet for a second... and then she said, "So the fast is working," which annoyed me, because I did not understand it yet, and because she was right in a way that took me the rest of the month to catch up to.
Belonging is not people sharing your faith. Belonging is people learning your sunset and then, without being asked, arranging their day so it does not trample yours.
By the third week, iftar at my desk had become a small, unofficial event. Not every day... But two or three evenings a week, whoever was still in the office at sunset would drift over around 5:50. Kevin brought clementines once, announcing, "These are for the thing," unable to say iftar but fully committed to it. Priya would call out the time from her sticky note like a tiny muezzin in ballet flats. I would eat a date and drink the first water of the day, which after sixteen hours tastes like something invented that morning, and somebody would inevitably say, "I don't know how you do it," and I would shrug, feeling, for the first time since moving to that city, like a person with a place.
What I could not tell them, because it would have taken too long and gotten too tender for the fourteenth floor, was that they had accidentally rebuilt something.
The month is not really about hunger. It never was.
It is about the day bending toward a shared table, and I had assumed that table was gone, left behind in my parents' dining room with the blue plate. Instead it had reassembled itself out of office furniture and near strangers, and I wrote about that on one of those wired late nights after the night prayers, filling pages about the family table I missed and the odd, fluorescent-lit one I had been given, and about how memory does not stay in the rooms where it was made. It follows you into elevators. It learns new addresses.
On the last day of the fast, sunset came at 6:11.
Six of them stayed. Six. On a Friday.
Margaret closed the front desk early. Dave brought sparkling juice in real glasses that he had bought at lunch, price stickers still on the bottoms. We stood at the window on the west side of the floor, the whole city laid out and going gold, towers catching the last of it, lights coming on across the skyline in little rows like someone was setting a very long table.
Priya watched the sky, checked the sticky note, watched the sky again. "Now," she said, softly, like it mattered.
And it did.
I ate the date. I passed the box around, and every one of them took one, chewing solemnly, like it was communion, and in whatever way any of us understood, it was.
I have an old poem from that spring, unfinished, about beginning again in a place that owes you nothing and gives you something anyway. I have never gotten the ending right. Maybe because the ending is not an image at all. It is a sticky note in tidy handwriting on the edge of someone else's monitor, facing out, with tomorrow's sunset already written on it.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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