Call Towards Light

Dear diary,

It has been a while since I last spoke to you. And I don’t even remember very accurately where I last left you. Now that I have gotten some time, I reassure you that I will try my level best to be in touch with you regurlarly and share my thoughts and experiences with you.

Oh and by the way, I will be writing to you mostly from Swindon now although currently I am in London. Well, yes you have guessed it right. I am living with my husband now after my rukhsati last month. This shifting, along with the blessed month of Ramadan had made me extra busy.

It has been a total cultural shift for me in the past 3 weeks that I have spent over here. I think you will find it funny if I tell you that everything is so ‘English’, even the trees! From the moment I stepped out of the airport, I felt I have stepped into an English movie. I see ‘gorey’ in a majority now and I hear that British accent which I once used to hear in Harry Potter movies (before finally giving up watching  movies) I was too amazed on the road on our way from Heathrow Airport to Swindon when I saw a ‘horses in transit’ van and when my husband told me there were foxes on the fields that we were passing by.All the houses over here are like the ones which I used to draw when I was young. The ones with a triangle, rectangle and a square with two windows, a door and a chimney. I am sure you have memories of it and now I know where it came from.

Beautiful Swindon

Swindon is a beautiful small town which is almost an hour and a half drive away from London. Very clean, beautiful and green.  And yes very cold too. You should have expected that because coming from Karachi, 20 degrees would mean winter when it is actually summers over here! I don’t even know what I will do in actual winters. Doing the wadu will be a real test. May Allah help me.

The weather over here remains mostly cloudy and it drizzles and rains so often that people go inside their houses as soon as it rains. Nobody comes out to enjoy the rain although I love it when it rains and when it is cloudy. Rain is a blessing of Allah and this is the reason why there is so much greenery over here. Flowers would grow even on wild bushes every here and there.

Well, I could go on and on about such little things that I had been noticing. Like, the very well managed road system or the postal code system or the electronic signatory DHL system or the bin bag system, or the Tesco/ ASDA being the one stop shop system but I think you would get bored.  I will share in more details in my next posts soon inshaAllah.

picture taken at Swindon Jamia Masjid

Alhamdolilah there are quite a lot Muslims living here and we have our very own Swindon Jamia Masjid alhamdolilah. In fact, there are two other masjids too in this little town. This is my favourit-est place and I want to be an active muslim member of the community inshaAllah. I hope Allah makes me amongst His chosen slaves for the work of the deen (Ameen) With regular taraveeh in the masjid, I have made a few friends and one of them is even a Somalian. Her name is Halimah and she is 16. MashaAllah most of the women who used to come to the masjid are regular hijabis. It is a lovely feeling when you are standing next to a white or a black for the prayers and you know that the only way to be better in the eyes of Allah is not the colour of the skin but the taqwa in the heart. Just imagine for a moment that if Allah used the outer beauty to be the reason to love a person, some of us would never be able to achieve His love or at least ‘think’ so and there would be no motivation to improve our inner selves because outer beauty or the colour of the skin is not under our control. However, making our inner selves better, actually is! SubhanAllah, what a perfect way of our deen. Doesnt it make us fall more in love with it more and more?

Anyway, I think I have to go now. Like always, it was lovely speaking to you. More inshaAllah soon.

- Nida

p.s : I will be writing more letters to you and name those ‘Swindon diaries’ inshaAllah.