Stamped Dates, Hidden Lines
Where the sacred leaks through the secular
I tell people that my daughter graduated from high school on June 9th and will donate bone marrow to her father on June 17th, and they get a certain look. It’s the look of someone who believes they’ve just witnessed a moment of profound symmetry—a cosmic circle closing, one they feel uniquely qualified to name.
“What a gift,” they say, or “Isn’t that just the most—” and they pause, searching for the word that will adequately contain what they perceive to be the specialness of it all. “Profound,” they settle on, finally. “Isn’t that just the most profound thing?”
I have learned to smile when they say this. Not because I disagree, exactly, but because their need to name it, to wrap it in the language of closure and meaning, tells me they have misunderstood something fundamental about how time actually works.
It is June 13th today. Four days since graduation. Four days until the procedure.
The weekend before graduation, Zaynab and I went to get our nails done. She chose a French manicure with a thin gold line traced under the white tips—a detail so subtle it was almost invisible unless you were looking for it.
“It’s perfect,” she said, holding her hand up to the light to examine the technician’s work.
“Nice,” I said.
“And it goes with everything.”
The nail salon was one of those places that exists in perpetual fluorescent afternoon, where time moves differently and every conversation takes place at exactly the same volume. We watched other people’s hands being transformed into small works of art, and I found myself thinking about the rituals that surround transitions—the ways we prepare our bodies for events that are supposed to change us.
The gold line was so thin it disappeared entirely from certain angles. You had to turn your hand just right to catch it in the light. A reminder, maybe, that what’s subtle is often what’s truest—especially in how we mark time.
What people don’t understand when they talk about full circles and life cycles is that time, real time, doesn’t move in circles. It moves in interruptions. It lurches and stops and doubles back on itself like a film reel that has come loose from its sprockets.
Consider: on June 17th, Zaynab will undergo a medical procedure. In three months, she will start college. These events exist in the same temporal space, separated only by the arbitrary divisions we use to organize experience. We have convinced ourselves that the proximity of graduation and what comes next carries some special weight, some narrative significance that elevates it above the ordinary chaos of all the other dates circled on our calendar.
The truth is simpler and more disturbing: every date carries this weight. We just don’t usually notice.
At dinner a few nights ago, while discussing the logistics of Tuesday’s procedure, the concept of Shabbir’s “new birthday” came up. The doctors had mentioned it during our last consultation—not in any ceremonial sense, but biologically. June 17th will be the day his blood begins to remake itself with Zaynab’s cells, the day his body learns to recognize her marrow as its own. A third birth, forty-seven years after the first two.
“So now I’ll have three birthdays?” he asked.
Shabbir already has two birthdays—his actual birth date in India, and the one his parents claimed for official paperwork when they immigrated. In our community, this is more common than not. Paper time rarely matches lived time. Bureaucracies ask for dates; families tell stories. One marks the moment someone stamped a form. The other marks when the sky looked a certain way, or when the jackfruit tree was still flowering, or when the monsoon came early that year.
We joke that if we forget one birthday, we can always use the other—but it’s the joke of people who’ve always known that calendars are just guesses wearing suits.
“Three options,” Zaynab said. “If we forget two, we still have a backup.”
At dinner last week, Zaynab made Shabbir an offer.
“I’ll do the bone marrow thing,” she said, passing the rice without looking up, “but you have to play Scattergories with me afterward.”
She was cutting her chicken with the focused precision she brings to tasks she finds mildly annoying, which includes most dinnertime conversations that threaten to become Serious.
“I hate Scattergories,” Shabbir said.
“I know. That’s why it’s a good trade.”
“How is that a good trade for me?”
“Because you get my bone marrow,” she said, still not looking up from her plate.
Shabbir was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “I’m still not playing Scattergories.”
“Fine,” Zaynab said. “But I’m still doing the thing.”
“Good,” he said.
“Good,” she said.
This is how our family negotiates meaning: through banter that disguises the weight of what we cannot bring ourselves to say directly. The procedure was never conditional on boardgames. But the offer itself was a way of making the abstract concrete, of turning medical necessity into family mythology. This is how a story becomes myth: not through exaggeration, but through repetition. Through the careful conversion of crisis into routine.
He still refuses to play Scattergories.
Over the past few weeks, at various social gatherings, adults have been telling Zaynab how brave she is. This happens with the particular frequency that suggests people have been discussing her situation when she’s not around, working up the courage to say something meaningful when they see her.
“You’re so brave,” they say, with the kind of intensity usually reserved for war heroes or cancer survivors. “What you’re doing for your father—it’s just incredible.”
Zaynab has developed a standard response to this. She nods politely and says thank you, but I can see her testing the word against her own experience of what is actually happening.
“I don’t feel brave,” she told me yesterday. “I mean, I’ll be asleep the whole time. I won’t even feel it.”
This struck me as a more accurate assessment than all the adult pronouncements about courage and sacrifice. She has distilled the experience down to its essential components: anesthesia, unconsciousness, recovery. The drama exists mainly in other people’s imaginations.
“Maybe bravery is just doing something that needs to be done,” I said.
“Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe people just need it to be braver than it is.”
On graduation day, Zaynab wore her white dress under her black gown. She had gotten dressed at her friend Kangyi’s house with Ria and Carolina, and they had coordinated their outfits weeks in advance for the TikTok video they planned to make afterward.
When I saw her at the ceremony, the white dress was invisible beneath the graduation gown, but I knew it was there—the way you know someone is wearing jewelry under their clothes or has painted their toenails inside closed shoes. It was preparation for what came after the official moment, evidence of a parallel ceremony that would unfold in her own vernacular.
During the ceremony itself, sitting in Constitution Hall listening to names being read in alphabetical order, I found myself thinking about the white dress underneath the black gown, about the gold line traced under her French manicure. About all the small ways we prepare for transformation without knowing if transformation will actually come.
This is when I started thinking about other calendars entirely—about the ones that don’t track progress so much as presence.
The lunar calendar that shapes our religious life moves according to different principles than the Gregorian one we use to structure our secular lives. It follows the moon rather than the sun, which means it gains eleven days each year on our solar calendar. This creates a kind of temporal drift, a slow but constant slippage between sacred time and ordinary time.
I have always found this slippage comforting, the way it refuses to let religious observance settle into the same dates year after year. Ramadan migrates through the seasons—sometimes falling in winter when the days are short and the fasting is easy, sometimes in summer when nineteen hours without water becomes a form of endurance training. The unpredictability seems intentional, a reminder that time is not a container we fill but a current we enter.
Five times a day, we stop what we are doing to pray. Not because we have scheduled prayer into our day planner, but because the day planner is interrupted by prayer. The call to prayer doesn’t care if you are in a meeting or on a deadline or in the middle of your daughter’s graduation ceremony. It cares only that you remember, for five minutes, what you are doing here.
This is time that refuses to be neutral.
Three days ago, Zaynab asked if she could get a third ear piercing.
“For what occasion?” I asked.
“No occasion,” she said. “I just want one.”
This was vintage Zaynab—the way she can state her desires with perfect clarity while simultaneously making it clear that explaining them would be beneath her dignity.
“Where?” I asked.
She pointed to the upper part of her ear. “Here. Just a small one.”
“When?”
“After the thing on Tuesday. When I’m recovered.”
I waited for her to elaborate, to connect the piercing to the procedure in some meaningful way, but she had already moved on to scrolling through her phone, apparently considering the conversation closed.
Later, I found myself thinking about this exchange, about the way she had situated the piercing in time—after Tuesday, but not because of Tuesday. As if she understood something about marking time that I was still trying to figure out. Not a commemoration, exactly. Just a way of marking that she was here.
The night of graduation, we luxuriated in our newly installed backyard hot tub, admiring the fireflies lighting up our neighbor’s tall trees. The water was exactly the right temperature, and the air smelled like the distant promise of summer storms.
“Next week,” Zaynab said.
“Next week,” I agreed.
“Then what?”
This struck me as the most honest question she had asked in weeks. Not about the procedure itself, but about what comes after. What fills the space between Tuesday and September, between the thing we’re doing and the thing that comes next.
“I don’t know,” I said.
She held up her hand, and the gold line under her French manicure caught the light from the house, glinting almost invisibly against the dark water. You had to know it was there to see it.
The concept of barakah suggests that blessing multiplies quietly, without announcement, in the spaces between more obvious forms of grace. In conversations about bravery that aren’t really about bravery. In white dresses worn under black gowns. In the refusal to play Scattergories even when your daughter is making elaborate bargains. In stories that run alongside the stamped dates.
Maybe this is what Zaynab understands that I am still learning: that time is not neutral, but it is also not dramatic. It is simply dense with possibility, dense with the weight of what we choose to mark and what we choose to let be.
Tuesday will arrive, and with it the marrow transfer, the ice chips, the recalibrating of the body’s clock. Shabbir’s blood will begin its quiet transformation. Zaynab will rest. And we’ll find ourselves in a space that’s unfamiliar—not yet recovery, not quite the next chapter. Just the strange middle: between summer and September, between one version of our family and whatever is coming.
But tonight, in the hot tub, with the fireflies and the promise of storms, we are living in the space between events. And that space turns out to be exactly the right size for what we actually have: each other, the water at exactly the right temperature, and the knowledge that some things reveal themselves only when the light hits them just right.
June 17th will be many things. A medical procedure. A new birthday. Close enough to Father’s Day that it hums with its echo. For now, though, it is still just a date on the calendar, holding its weight quietly, waiting for us to notice what we’ve always known: that time moves not in circles but in accumulations, not in completion but in continuation.
The fireflies blink on and off. The water holds us. Somewhere, a neighbor laughs. Zaynab’s nails catch the light.
Beautiful. Haunting in your weaving together the ordinary with the sublime. Continued prayers for your family.
So beautiful- thoughts and writing 😘sending a lot of prayers your way 🤲🏻