The Forty Rules of Love: a novel of Rumi

Ella
NORTHAMPTON, JUNE 3, 2008
Beach Boys tunes streaming through their open windows, university students drove past, their faces
sporting early-summer tans. Ella watched, numb to their happiness, as her mind reverted to the events of
the past few days. First she had found Spirit dead in the kitchen, and although she’d told herself many
times to be ready for this moment, she was seized by not only a profound grief but also a sense of
vulnerability and loneliness, as if losing her dog had the effect of throwing her out into the world all by
herself. Then she found out that Orly was suffering from bulimia and that almost everyone in her class
knew about it. This brought a wave of guilt to Ella, leading her to have doubts about her relationship with
her younger daughter and to question her record as a mother. Guilt was not a new element in Ella’s
repertoire of feelings, but this loss of confidence in her mothering was.
During this time Ella started exchanging multiple e-mails with Aziz Z. Zahara every day. Two, three,
sometimes up to five. She wrote to him about everything, and, to her surprise, he was always prompt to
respond. How he could find the time or even an Internet connection to check his e-mails while traveling in
remote places was beyond Ella. But it didn’t take her long to become addicted to his words. Soon she
was checking her e-mail at every opportunity—first thing in the morning and then again after breakfast,
when she came back from her morning walk and while she was making lunch, before she went out to run
errands and even during them, by stopping at Internet cafés. While she was watching her favorite TV
shows, chopping tomatoes at the Fusion Cooking Club, talking on the phone with her friends, or listening
to her twins rant about school and homework, she kept her laptop on and her mailbox open. When there
were no new messages from Aziz, she reread the old ones. And every time she received a new message
from him, she couldn’t help breaking into a smile, half gleeful, half embarrassed by what was taking
place. For something was taking place.
Soon exchanging e-mails with Aziz made Ella feel that she was somehow breaking away from her staid
and tranquil life. From a woman with lots of dull grays and browns on her life’s canvas, she was turning
into a woman with a secret color—a bright, tantalizing red. And she loved it.
Aziz was no man for small pleasantries. To him, people who had not made their heart their primary
guide to life, who could not open up to love and follow its path the way a sunflower follows the sun, were
not really alive. (Ella wondered if this might put her on his list of inanimate objects.) Aziz didn’t write
about the weather or the latest movie he had seen. He wrote about other things, deeper things, like life and
death, and above all love. Ella was not used to expressing her feelings on such issues, especially to a
stranger, but perhaps it took a stranger to make a woman like her speak her mind.
If there was a trace of flirtation in their exchange, Ella thought, it was an innocent one that might do
them both good. They could flirt with each other, positioning themselves in distant corners within the
infinite maze of cyberspace. Thanks to this exchange, she hoped to regain a portion of the sense of worth
she had lost during her marriage. Aziz was that rare type of man a woman could love without losing her
self-respect. And perhaps he, too, could find something pleasing in being the center of attention of a
middle-aged American woman. Cyberspace both magnified and mellowed offline behaviors, providing an
opportunity to flirt without guilt (which she didn’t want because she already had too much) and an
adventure without risks (which she did want because she never had any). It was like nibbling on
forbidden fruit without having to worry about the extra calories—there were no consequences.
So maybe it was blasphemy for a married woman with children to write intimate e-mails to a stranger,

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but given the platonic nature of their relationship, Ella deduced, it was sweet blasphemy.

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