The Forty Rules of Love: a novel of Rumi

Ella
NORTHAMPTON, MAY 24, 2008
Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Being a big believer of this saying, every morning,
weekdays and weekends alike, Ella made her way to the kitchen. A good breakfast, she thought, set the
tone for the rest of the day. She had read in women’s magazines that families who regularly had a proper
breakfast together were more cohesive and harmonious than those in which each member rushed out the
door half hungry. And though she firmly believed in this research, she had yet to experience the joyful
breakfast the magazines wrote about. Her breakfast experience was a collision of galaxies where every
member of her family marched to a different drummer. Everyone wanted to eat a different thing at
breakfast, which was entirely against Ella’s notion of eating together. How could there be unity at a table
when one nibbled toasted bread and jam (Jeannette) while another chomped honey-puffed cereal (Avi)
and a third waited patiently to be served scrambled eggs (David) and a fourth refused to eat anything at
all (Orly)? All the same, breakfast was important. Every morning she prepared it, determined that no
child of hers would begin the day munching on candy or some other junk food.
But this morning when she entered the kitchen, instead of brewing coffee, squeezing oranges, or toasting
bread, the first thing Ella did was to sit at the kitchen table and turn on her laptop. She logged on to the
Internet to see whether there was an e-mail from Aziz. To her delight, there was.
Dear Ella,
I was so happy to learn that things have improved between you and your daughter. As for me, I left the village of Momostenango
yesterday at the crack of dawn. Strange, I stayed here only a few days, and yet when the time came to bid farewell, I felt sad, almost
grieved. Would I ever see this tiny village in Guatemala again? I didn’t think so.
Each time I say good-bye to a place I like, I feel like I am leaving a part of me behind. I guess whether we choose to travel as much
as Marco Polo did or stay in the same spot from cradle to grave, life is a sequence of births and deaths. Moments are born and
moments die. For new experiences to come to light, old ones need to wither away. Don’t you think?
While in Momostenango, I meditated and tried to visualize your aura. Before long, three colors came to me: warm yellow, timid
orange, and reserved metallic purple. I had a feeling these were your colors. I thought they were beautiful both separately and together.
My final stop in Guatemala is Chajul—a small town with adobe houses and children with eyes wise beyond their years. In each
house, women of all ages weave magnificent tapestries. I asked a granny to choose a tapestry and said it was for a lady living in
Northampton. After giving it some thought, she pulled a tapestry from a huge pile behind her. I swear to God, there were more than
fifty tapestries of every possible color in that pile. Yet the one she chose for you was composed of only three tones: yellow, orange, and
purple. I thought you might like to know about this coincidence, if there is such a thing in God’s universe.
Does it ever occur to you that our exchange might not be a result of coincidence?
Warm regards,
Aziz
P.S. If you want, I can send you your tapestry via mail, or I can wait till the day we meet for coffee and bring it myself.
Ella closed her eyes and tried to imagine how the colors of her aura surrounded her face. Interestingly, the
image of herself that popped up in her mind was not her grown-up self but her as a child, around seven
years of age.
Many things came flooding back to her, memories that she thought she had long left behind. The sight of
her mother standing still with a pistachio green apron around her waist and a measuring cup in her hand,
her face an ashen mask of pain; dangling paper hearts on the walls, bright and sparkly; and the body of her

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father hanging from the ceiling as if he wanted to blend with the Christmas decorations and give the house
a festive look. She remembered how she had spent her teenage years holding her mother responsible for
the suicide of her father. As a young girl, Ella had promised herself that when she got married, she would
always make her husband happy and not fail in her marriage, like her mother. In her endeavor to make her
marriage as different from her mother’s as possible, she had not married a Christian man, preferring to
marry inside her faith.
It was only a few years earlier that Ella had stopped hating her aging mother, and though the two of
them had been on good terms lately, the truth was, deep inside she still felt ill at ease when she
remembered the past.
“Mom! … Earth to Mom! Earth to Mom!”
Ella heard a ripple of giggles and whispers behind her shoulder. When she turned around, she saw four
pairs of eyes watching her with amusement. Orly, Avi, Jeannette, and David had for once all come to
breakfast at the same time and were now standing side by side inspecting her as if she were an exotic
creature. From the way they looked, it seemed they had been standing there for a while, trying to get her
attention.
“Good morning, you all.” Ella smiled.
“How come you didn’t hear us?” Orly asked, sounding genuinely surprised.
“You seemed so absorbed in that screen,” David said without looking at her.
Ella’s gaze followed her husband’s, and there on the open screen in front of her, she saw Aziz Z.
Zahara’s e-mail shining dimly. In a flash she closed her laptop, without waiting for it to shut down.
“I’ve got a lot of reading to do for the literary agency,” Ella said, rolling her eyes. “I was working on
my report.”
“No you were not! You were reading your e-mails,” Avi said, his face serious, matter-of-fact.
What was it in teenage boys that made them so eager to detect everyone’s flaws and lies? Ella
wondered. But, to her relief, the others didn’t seem interested in the subject. In fact, they were all looking
somewhere else now, focused on the kitchen counter.
It was Orly who turned to Ella, voicing the question for them all. “Mom, how come you haven’t made
us any breakfast this morning?”
Now Ella turned to the counter and saw what they had seen. There was no coffee brewing, no
scrambled eggs on the stove, no toast with blueberry sauce. She nodded repeatedly as if agreeing with an
inner voice that spoke an undeniable truth.
Right, she thought, how come she had forgotten the breakfast?

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