Stolen, Sacred Hours
The beauty of jetlag is that it opens up a space in your life that is normally closed. It is 5 am (yesterday it was 4:30 am when I awoke, the day before 4 am). Dogs are barking in the distance. The Bosphorus outside my window is a band of deeper black except where the illumination of a large school has turned the water into a swathe of marigold silk. The hills beyond the strait are seeded with pinprick lights, some orange, some white, like the last glimmers of a fireworks display.
The call to prayer has begun, an intimate conversation at this time of day, without the competing cacophony of the city’s hundreds of muezzin, taxis, boats, and seagulls. At this hour of the morning, the muezzin seems to speak to me alone. He has a rich, mellow voice and takes his time, unfurling ropes of gentle sound through the night air. When his voice falls away, other calls to prayer echo him in the distance.
Soon there will be the stages of dawn. In the meantime, as I did the night before and the one before that, I will prepare my coffee. In the stolen jetlag hours, such sights, sounds and actions become heightened, made precious by the fragility of the moment. Tomorrow I will rise at 6 am. And then it will be gone.
6:20: A faint pink wash, growing ever deeper, outlines the Asian hills on the far side of the strait, eclipsing the lights. The water is still a dark ribbon, a passing ship noticeable only by its moving stern light. The school’s illumination has just switched off, leaving a misty gray gap where all night there had been gay color.
I imagine how this shore looked to Kamil Pasha in 1887. His house was on the Beshiktash hill, not far from here. He would have had a similar view from his window. But there would have been many fewer buildings, no lamps left on all night. Except for the sheet of light laid across it by the moon, the world at night would have been pitch black. But the muezzin would have unfurled his intimate call to prayer before dawn and then the hills of Asia would have appeared to Kamil as they do to me now, the Bosphorus a light gray ribbon in a misty gray landscape, tinged with apricot.
6:45: The red tiled rooftops of my neighborhood unfurl below me. The pace of ships passing has quickened. Everything is muted by mist, the quiet punctuated by the raucous laughter of gulls stretching their wings. So many shades of gray. The Bosphorus is tarnished silver. In the background a faint grumble of traffic, a ship’s engine. High up, two jets draw white lines across the sky. Birds chatter and trill in the tree across the street. I turn out the lights in the room and refill my coffee cup. An enormous ginger cat on its hind legs has pressed itself against the patio door and is rattling the panes.
7: The color of the sky has gathered and thickened between the hills directly across the strait; a deep apricot stain so intense it seems alive.
7:10: I see a brilliant disk, still partially obscured by trees, rising from behind the hill. Another moment and I have to look away.
8 am: The Bosphorus is gone, swallowed in a pearly mist, its place marked only by the silhouettes of tankers gliding by like stately brown ghosts.
Discussion Area - Leave a Comment