and then our exile

day-o!

we were enjoying a quiet evening. i came upstairs triumphant, with ten more pages of the formatted and edited translation of uprooting - 130 more, and it is ready for publication. noor had just mixed a huge batch of cookies, babaji was making kababs, usman was eating rice at the kitchen table, ammi was doing dishes. it became time for iftar, maghrib, we went downstairs to pray. usman nestled his cheek against my shoulder, quiet, until we began salah.
when he began squirming. i set him down, and he made a beeline for the stairs. from the musallah we could hear him push a chair over to the counter. i picked short suwar, and immediately we were done raced up to the kitchen - to a three-year-old standing on a chair, poised over a huge bowl of cookie dough. mm mm! he pointed at the bowl, enthusiastic, his mouth so full he could not speak.

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Good is an absolute...the modern world does not deal in these. how many people it excludes, then, so much loss! the wasteland - is there an alternative?
by this i mean those it can claim as its own, not those who are versed in its ways.