The Forty Rules of Love: a novel of Rumi

Ella
KONYA, SEPTEMBER 7, 2009
By his bed she was sleeping on a plastic chair when she suddenly opened her eyes and listened to an
unexpected sound. Somebody was saying unknown words in the dark. She realized it was the call to
prayer coming from outside. A new day was about to begin. But she had a feeling it would also be the end
of something.
Ask anyone who has heard the call to morning prayer for the first time and he will tell you the same
thing. That it is beautiful, rich, and mysterious. And yet at the same time there is something uncanny about
it, almost eerie. Just like love.
In the stillness of the night, it was to this sound that Ella woke with a start. She blinked repeatedly in
the dark until she could make sense of the male voice filling the room from the open windows. It took her
a full minute to remember that she was not in Massachusetts anymore. This wasn’t the spacious house she
had shared with her husband and three children. All that belonged to another time—a time so distant and
vague that it felt like a fairy tale, not like her own past.
No, she wasn’t in Massachusetts. Instead she was in another part of the world altogether, in a hospital
in the town of Konya in Turkey. And the man whose deep, steady breathing she now heard as an undertone
to the call for the morning prayer was not her husband of twenty years but the lover for whom she had left
him one sunny day last summer.
“Are you going to leave your husband for a man with no future?” her friends and neighbors had asked
her again and again. “And how about your kids? Do you think they will ever forgive you?”
And that is how Ella had come to understand that if there was anything worse in the eyes of society than
a woman abandoning her husband for another man, it was a woman abandoning her future for the present
moment.
She switched on the table lamp and in its soft amber glow inspected the room, as if to make sure
nothing had changed since she’d drifted off to sleep only a few hours ago. It was the smallest hospital
room she had ever seen, not that she’d seen many hospital rooms in her life. The bed occupied most of the
floor space. Everything else was placed in relation to the bed—a wooden closet, a square coffee table, an
extra chair, an empty vase, a bed tray with pills of varying colors, and next to it the book Aziz had been
reading since the beginning of this trip: Me & Rumi.
They had come to Konya four days ago, spending the first days in the city being no different from the
average tourists—visiting monuments, museums, and archaeological sites; stuffing themselves with the
local dishes; and taking pictures of every new thing, no matter how ordinary or silly. Everything was
going well until the day before, when Aziz, while having lunch at a restaurant, collapsed on the floor and
had to be rushed to the nearest hospital. Since then she’d been waiting here by his bedside, waiting
without knowing what to expect, hoping against hope, and at the same time silently and desperately
quarreling with God for taking back so soon the love he had given her so late in life.
“My dear, are you sleeping?” Ella asked. It wasn’t her intention to disturb him, but she needed him
awake.
There came no answer other than a fleeting lull in the rhythm of his breathing, a missing note in the
sequence.
“Are you awake?” she asked, whispering and raising her voice at the same time.
“I am now,” Aziz said slowly. “What is it, you couldn’t sleep?”

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“The morning prayer … ” Ella said, and paused as if that explained everything: his deteriorating health,
her growing fear of losing him, and the absolute folly that love was—everything encapsulated by those
three words.
Aziz sat straight up now, his green eyes unblinking. Under the wispy light of the lamp and surrounded
by bleached white sheets, his handsome face looked sadly pale, but there was also something powerful
about it, even immortal.
“The morning prayer is special,” he murmured. “Did you know that of the five prayers a Muslim is
supposed to perform every day, the one in the morning is said to be the most sacred but also the most
testing?”
“And why is that?”
“I guess it’s because it wakes us up from dreams, and we don’t like that. We prefer to keep sleeping.
That’s why there is a line in the morning call that doesn’t exist in the others. It says, ‘Prayer is better than
sleep.’ ”