This piece is part of the Mehfil folio, which features original art by Jasjyot Singh Hans.

i don’t quite believe in God but i believe in music, in mast that words collect when we say them over & over, the way my khalas would sing damadam mast qalander like they did as girls, shoulders swaying, clapping to the beat. damadam mast qalander like runa laila herself, she was far from shy with her kajal and guitar riffs over sufi devotionals because when she said mast she meant mast, nothing but mast for hours. she wasn’t shy, never learned to love with her tongue curved inwards. i hear her all the time when i hum without thinking, her pulse never far — not pulse as in a heart but pulse as in the beat that’s always been there — the kind you remember years later when it still has its pace, divinely made.

ے

(no   one   knows exactly how it started other than as poem & eventually in lahore it became a song   &   they say the man that composed the  song  died in the slums of the same city where it found its beat — the city that’s always birthed music without meaning to — we’ve heard it in all ways since but it was runa   laila   who   thought:   why not add some masti, why not be disco devotional?)

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i remembered to listen long before nusrat and abida and yes, even runa, found me miles from home between coastline and mountains. some rememberings were all at once, like arooj’s version of hallelujah but most were patient, like how i’ve listened to girls just wanna have fun on the bus ride home – in march or september, details a blur other than pink giving way to blue at 6:47pm on a tuesday – just in time to blast a song to sing at red lights, to press rewind and listen again as you pretend the potholes in the liquor store parking lot won’t damage your tires, and then to find cyndi again months later when the a train whooshes onto the platform just as you run down the stairs. melody meets tunnel & slowly but surely, you remember to listen.

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i  don’t  quite   believe  in  God but if i did, i would believe God was every song all at once. the ones we haven’t found yet & the ones the birds knew to be music far before us, the kind they follow across the sky with seasons. often, i found music in car rides where i was cloistered in the back or on airplanes where lahore or new york came into focus just before we left them behind. no matter landscape or border, song strips everything down to vowels, vowels as in the shape breath takes when we make music of it, music as in the Divine composition of dunya.

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i don’t quite believe in God but    i   believe   in   prayer,   in   saying the same words as all the women before me, in looking down as i say them so my  eyes  look  closed   in   old understanding to children staring up at me, in believing in those words so steadfastly there is mast to pour myself into. between bodies of water &   women   who   lose   themselves in mast: this is how

i come to a faith.