The Forty Rules of Love: a novel of Rumi

Ella
NORTHAMPTON, MAY 17, 2008
Birds were singing outside her kitchen window on that balmy day in spring. Afterward Ella replayed the
scene in her mind so many times that, rather than a fragment from the past, it felt like an ongoing moment
still happening somewhere out there in the universe.
There they were, sitting around the table, having a late family lunch on a Saturday afternoon. Her
husband was filling his plate with fried chicken legs, his favorite food. Avi was playing his knife and fork
like drumsticks while his twin, Orly, was trying to calculate how many bites of which food she could eat
so as not to ruin her diet of 650 calories a day. Jeannette, who was a freshman at Mount Holyoke College
nearby, seemed lost in her thoughts as she spread cream cheese on another slice of bread. Also at the
table sat Aunt Esther, who had stopped by to drop off one of her famous marble cakes and then stayed on
for lunch. Ella had a lot of work to do afterward, but she was not ready to leave the table just yet. Lately
they didn’t have too many shared family meals, and she saw this as a golden chance for everyone to
reconnect.
“Esther, did Ella give you the good news?” David asked suddenly. “She found a great job.”
Though Ella had graduated with a degree in English literature and loved fiction, she hadn’t done much
in the field after college, other than editing small pieces for women’s magazines, attending a few book
clubs, and occasionally writing book reviews for some local papers. That was all. There was a time
when she’d aspired to become a prominent book critic, but then she simply accepted the fact that life had
carried her elsewhere, turning her into an industrious housewife with three kids and endless domestic
responsibilities.
Not that she complained. Being the mother, the wife, the dog walker, and the housekeeper kept her busy
enough. She didn’t have to be a breadwinner on top of all these. Though none of her feminist friends from
Smith College approved of her choice, she was satisfied to be a stay-at-home mom and grateful that she
and her husband could afford it. Besides, she had never abandoned her passion for books and still
considered herself a voracious reader.
A few years ago, things had begun to change. The children were growing up, and they made it clear that
they didn’t need her as much as they once had. Realizing that she had too much time to spare and no one to
spend it with, Ella had considered how it might be to find a job. David had encouraged her, but though
they kept talking and talking about it, she rarely pursued the opportunities that came her way, and when
she did, potential employers were always looking for someone younger or more experienced. Afraid of
being rejected over and over, she had simply let the subject drop.
Nevertheless, in May 2008 whatever obstacle had impeded her from finding a job all these years
unexpectedly vanished. Two weeks shy of her fortieth birthday, she found herself working for a literary
agency based in Boston. It was her husband who found her the job through one of his clients—or perhaps
through one of his mistresses.
“Oh, it’s no big deal,” Ella rushed to explain now. “I’m only a part-time reader for a literary agent.”
But David seemed determined not to let her think too little of her new job. “Come on, tell them it’s a
well-known agency,” he urged, nudging her, and when she refused to comply, he heartily agreed with
himself. “It’s a prestigious place, Esther. You should see the other assistants! Girls and boys fresh out of
the best colleges. Ella is the only one going back to work after being a housewife for years. Now, isn’t
she something?”

---

Ella wondered if, deep inside, her husband felt guilty about keeping her away from a career, or else
about cheating on her—these being the only two explanations she could think of as to why he was now
going overboard in his enthusiasm.
Still smiling, David concluded, “This is what I call chutzpah. We’re all proud of her.”
“She is a prize. Always was,” said Aunt Esther in a voice so sentimental that it sounded as if Ella had
left the table and was gone for good.
They all gazed at her lovingly. Even Avi didn’t make a cynical remark, and Orly for once seemed to
care about something other than her looks. Ella forced herself to appreciate this moment of kindness, but
she felt an overwhelming exhaustion that she had never experienced before. She secretly prayed for
someone to change the subject.
Jeannette, her older daughter, must have heard the prayer, for she suddenly chimed in, “I have some
good news, too.”
All heads turned toward her, faces beaming with expectation.
“Scott and I have decided to get married,” Jeannette announced. “Oh, I know what you guys are going
to say! That we haven’t finished college yet and all that, but you’ve got to understand, we both feel ready
for the next big move.”
An awkward silence descended upon the kitchen table as the warmth that had canopied them just a
moment ago evaporated. Orly and Avi exchanged blank looks, and Aunt Esther froze with her hand
tightened around a glass of apple juice. David put his fork aside as if he had no appetite left and squinted
at Jeannette with his light brown eyes that were deeply creased with smile lines at the corners. However,
right now he was anything but smiling. His mouth had drawn into a pout, as though he had just downed a
swig of vinegar.
“Great! I expected you to share my happiness, but I get this cold treatment instead,” Jeannette whined.
“You just said you were getting married,” remarked David as if Jeannette didn’t know what she’d said
and needed to be informed.
“Dad, I know it seems a bit too soon, but Scott proposed to me the other day and I’ve already said yes.”
“But why?” asked Ella.
From the way Jeannette looked at her, Ella reckoned, that was not the kind of question her daughter had
expected. She would rather have been asked “When?” or “How?” In either case it meant that she could
start shopping for her wedding dress. The question “Why?” was another matter altogether and had
completely caught her off guard.
“Because I love him, I guess.” Jeannette’s tone was slightly condescending.
“Honey, what I meant was, why the rush?” insisted Ella. “Are you pregnant or something?”
Aunt Esther twitched in her chair, her face stern, her anguish visible. She took an antacid tablet from
her pocket and started chewing on it.
“I’m going to be an uncle,” Avi said, giggling.
Ella held Jeannette’s hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. “You can always tell us the truth. You know
that, right? We’ll stand by you no matter what.”
“Mom, will you please stop that?” Jeannette snapped as she pulled her hand away. “This has nothing to
do with pregnancy. You’re embarrassing me.”
“I was just trying to help,” Ella responded calmly, calmness being a state she had been lately finding
harder and harder to achieve.
“By insulting me, you mean. Apparently the only way you can see Scott and me getting married is me
being knocked up! Does it ever occur to you that I might, just might, want to marry this guy because I love
him? We have been dating for eight months now.”
This elicited a scoff from Ella. “Oh, yeah, as if you could tell a man’s character in eight months! Your
father and I have been married for almost twenty years, and even we can’t claim to know everything about

---

each other. Eight months is nothing in a relationship!”
“It took God only six days to create the entire universe,” said Avi, beaming, but cold stares from
everyone at the table forced him back into silence.
Sensing the escalating tension, David, his eyes fixed on his elder daughter, his brow furrowed in
thought, interjected, “Honey, what your mom is trying to say is that dating is one thing, marrying is quite
another.”
“But, Dad, did you think we would date forever?” Jeannette asked.
Drawing in a deep breath, Ella said, “To be perfectly blunt, we were expecting you to find someone
better. You’re too young to get involved in any serious relationship.”
“You know what I’m thinking, Mom?” Jeannette said in a voice so flat as to be unrecognizable. “I’m
thinking you’re projecting your own fears onto me. But just because you married so young and had a baby
when you were my age, that doesn’t mean I’m going to make the same mistake.”
Ella blushed crimson as if slapped in the face. From deep within she remembered the difficult
pregnancy that had resulted in Jeannette’s premature birth. As a baby and then as a toddler, her daughter
had drained all of her energy, which was why she had waited six years before getting pregnant again.
“Sweetheart, we were happy for you when you started dating Scott,” David said cautiously, trying a
different strategy. “He’s a nice guy. But who knows what you’ll be thinking after graduation? Things might
be very different then.”
Jeannette gave a small nod that conveyed little more than feigned acquiescence. Then she said, “Is this
because Scott isn’t Jewish?”
David rolled his eyes in disbelief. He had always taken pride in being an open-minded and cultured
father, avoiding negative remarks about race, religion, or gender in the house.
Jeannette, however, seemed relentless. Turning to her mother, she asked, “Can you look me in the eye
and tell me you’d still be making the same objections if Scott were a young Jewish man named Aaron?”
Jeannette’s voice needled with bitterness and sarcasm, and Ella feared there was more of that welling
up inside her daughter.
“Sweetheart, I’ll be completely honest with you, even if you might not like it. I know how wonderful it
is to be young and in love. Believe me, I do. But to get married to someone from a different background is
a big gamble. And as your parents we want to make sure you’re doing the right thing.”
“And how do you know your right thing is the right thing for me?”
The question threw Ella off a little. She sighed and massaged her forehead, as if on the verge of a
migraine.
“I love him, Mom. Does that mean anything to you? Do you remember that word from somewhere? He
makes my heart beat faster. I can’t live without him.”
Ella heard herself chuckle. It was not her intention to make fun of her daughter’s feelings, not at all, but
that was probably what her laughing to herself sounded like. For reasons unknown to her, she felt
extremely nervous. She’d had fights with Jeannette before, hundreds of them, but today it felt as though she
were quarreling with something else, something bigger.
“Mom, haven’t you ever been in love?” Jeannette retorted, a hint of contempt creeping into her tone.
“Oh, give me a break! Stop daydreaming and get real, will you? You’re being so … ” Ella’s eyes
darted toward the window, hunting for a dramatic word, until finally she came up with “ … romantic!”
“What’s wrong with being romantic?” Jeannette asked, sounding offended.
Really, what was wrong with being romantic? Ella wondered. Since when was she so annoyed by
romanticism? Unable to answer the questions tugging at the edges of her mind, she continued all the same.
“Come on, honey. Which century are you living in? Just get it in your head, women don’t marry the men
they fall in love with. When push comes to shove, they choose the guy who’ll be a good father and a
reliable husband. Love is only a sweet feeling bound to come and quickly go away.”

---

When she finished talking, Ella turned to her husband. David had clasped his hands in front of him,
slowly as if through water, and was looking at her like he’d never seen her before.
“I know why you’re doing this,” Jeannette said. “You’re jealous of my happiness and my youth. You
want to make an unhappy housewife out of me. You want me to be you, Mom.”
Ella felt a strange, sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, as if she had a giant rock sitting there. Was
she an unhappy housewife? A middle-aged mom trapped in a failing marriage? Was this how her children
saw her? And her husband, too? What about friends and neighbors? Suddenly she had the feeling that
everyone around her secretly pitied her, and the suspicion was so painful that she gasped.
“You should apologize to your mom,” David said, turning to Jeannette with a frown on his face.
“It’s all right. I don’t expect an apology,” Ella said dejectedly.
Jeannette gave her mother a mock leer. And just like that, she pushed back her chair, threw her napkin
aside, and walked out of the kitchen. After a minute Orly and Avi silently followed suit, either in an
unusual act of solidarity with their elder sister or because they’d gotten bored of all this adult talk. Aunt
Esther left next, mumbling some poor excuse while chewing fiercely on her last antacid tablet.
David and Ella remained at the table, an intense awkwardness hanging in the air between them. It
pained Ella to have to face this void, which, as they both knew, had nothing to do with Jeannette or any of
their children.
David grabbed the fork he had put aside and inspected it for a while. “So should I conclude that you
didn’t marry the man you loved?”
“Oh, please, that’s not what I meant.”
“What is it you meant, then?” David said, still talking to the fork. “I thought you were in love with me
when we got married.”
“I was in love with you,” Ella said, but couldn’t help adding, “back then.”
“So when did you stop loving me?” David asked, deadpan.
Ella looked at her husband in astonishment, like someone who had never seen her reflection before and
who now held a mirror to her face. Had she stopped loving him? It was a question she had never asked
herself before. She wanted to respond but lacked not so much the will as the words. Deep inside she
knew it was the two of them they should be concerned about, not their children. But instead they were
doing what they both were best at: letting the days go by, the routine take over, and time run its course of
inevitable torpor.
She started to cry, unable to hold back this continuing sadness that had, without her knowledge, become
a part of who she was. David turned his anguished face away. They both knew he hated to see her cry just
as much as she hated to cry in front of him. Fortunately, the phone rang just then, saving them.
David picked it up. “Hello … yes, she’s here. Hold on, please.”
Ella pulled herself together and spoke up, doing her best to sound in good spirits. “Yes, this is Ella.”
“Hi, this is Michelle. Sorry to bother you over the weekend,” chirped a young woman’s voice. “It’s just
that yesterday Steve wanted me to check in with you, and I simply forgot. Did you have a chance to start
working on the manuscript?”
“Oh.” Ella sighed, only now remembering the task awaiting her.
Her first assignment at the literary agency was to read a novel by an unknown European author. She
was then expected to write an extensive report on it.
“Tell him not to worry. I’ve already started reading,” Ella lied. Ambitious and headstrong, Michelle
was the kind of person she didn’t want to upset on her first assignment.
“Oh, good! How is it?”
Ella paused, puzzled as to what to say. She didn’t know anything about the manuscript, except that it
was a historical novel centered on the life of the famous mystic poet Rumi, who she learned was called
“the Shakespeare of the Islamic world.”

---

“Oh, it’s very … mystical.” Ella chuckled, hoping to cover with a joke.
But Michelle was all business. “Right,” she said flatly. “Listen, I think you need to get on this. It might
take longer than you expect to write a report on a novel like that.… ”
There was a distant muttering on the phone as Michelle’s voice trailed off. Ella imagined her juggling
several tasks simultaneously—checking e-mails, reading a review on one of her authors, taking a bite
from her tuna-salad sandwich, and polishing her fingernails—all while talking on the phone.
“Are you still there?” Michelle asked a minute later.
“Yes, I am.”
“Good. Listen, it’s crazy in here. I need to go. Just keep in mind the deadline is in three weeks.”
“I know,” Ella said abruptly, trying to sound more determined. “I’ll make the deadline.”
The truth was, Ella wasn’t sure she wanted to evaluate this manuscript at all. In the beginning she’d
been so eager and confident. It had felt thrilling to be the first one to read an unpublished novel by an
unknown author and to play however small a role in his fate. But now she wasn’t sure if she could
concentrate on a subject as irrelevant to her life as Sufism and a time as distant as the thirteenth century.
Michelle must have detected her hesitation. “Is there a problem?” she asked. When no answer came,
she grew insistent. “Listen, you can confide in me.”
After a bit of silence, Ella decided to tell her the truth.
“It’s just that I’m not sure I’m in the right state of mind these days to concentrate on a historical novel. I
mean, I’m interested in Rumi and all that, but still, the subject is alien to me. Perhaps you could give me
another novel—you know, something I could more easily relate to.”
“That’s such a skewed approach,” said Michelle. “You think you can work better with books you know
something about? Not at all! Just because you live in this state, you can’t expect to edit only novels that
take place in Massachusetts, right?”
“That’s not what I meant …” Ella said, and immediately realized she had uttered the same sentence too
many times this afternoon. She glanced at her husband to see if he, too, had noticed this, but David’s
expression was hard to decipher.
“Most of the time, we have to read books that have nothing to do with our lives. That’s part of our job.
Just this week I finished working on a book by an Iranian woman who used to operate a brothel in Tehran
and had to flee the country. Should I have told her to send the manuscript to an Iranian agency instead?”
“No, of course not,” Ella mumbled, feeling silly and guilty.
“Isn’t connecting people to distant lands and cultures one of the strengths of good literature?”
“Sure it is. Listen, forget what I said. You’ll have a report on your desk before the deadline,” Ella
conceded, hating Michelle for treating her as if she were the dullest person alive and hating herself for
allowing this to happen.
“Wonderful, that’s the spirit,” Michelle concluded in her singsong voice. “Don’t get me wrong, but I
think you should bear in mind that there are dozens of people out there who would love to have your job.
And most of them are almost half your age. That’ll keep you motivated.”
When Ella hung up the phone, she found David watching her, his face solemn and reserved. He seemed
to be waiting for them to pick up where they’d left off. But she didn’t feel like mulling over their
daughter’s future anymore, if that was what they’d been worrying about in the first place.
Later in the day, she was alone on the porch sitting in her favorite rocking chair, looking at the orangey-
red Northampton sunset. The sky felt so close and open that you could almost touch it. Her brain had gone
quiet, as if tired of all the noise swirling inside. This month’s credit-card payments, Orly’s bad eating
habits, Avi’s poor grades, Aunt Esther and her sad cakes, her dog Spirit’s decaying health, Jeannette’s

---

marriage plans, her husband’s secret flings, the absence of love in her life … One by one, she locked them
all in small mental boxes.
In that frame of mind, Ella took the manuscript out of its package and bounced it in her hand, as if
weighing it. The title of the novel was written on the cover in indigo ink: Sweet Blasphemy.
Ella had been told that nobody knew much about the author—a certain A. Z. Zahara, who lived in
Holland. His manuscript had been shipped to the literary agency from Amsterdam with a postcard inside
the envelope. On the front of the postcard was a picture of tulip fields in dazzling pinks, yellows, and
purples, and on the back a note written in delicate handwriting:
Dear Sir/Madam,
Greetings from Amsterdam. The story I herewith send you takes place in thirteenth-century Konya in Asia Minor. But I sincerely
believe that it cuts across countries, cultures, and centuries.
I hope you will have the time to read SWEET BLASPHEMY, a historical, mystical novel on the remarkable bond between Rumi,
the best poet and most revered spiritual leader in the history of Islam, and Shams of Tabriz, an unknown, unconventional dervish full of
scandals and surprises.
May love be always with you and you always surrounded with love.
A. Z. Zahara
Ella sensed that the postcard had piqued the literary agent’s curiosity. But Steve was not a man who
had time to read the work of an amateur writer. So he’d handed the package to his assistant, Michelle,
who had passed it on to her new assistant. This is how Sweet Blasphemy ended up in Ella’s hands.
Little did she know that this was going to be not just any book, but the book that changed her life. In the
time she was reading it, her life would be rewritten.
Ella turned the first page. There was a note about the writer.