Leila Aboulela - Minaret

've come down in the world. I've slid to a place where the ceiling is low and there isn't much room to move. Most of the time I'm used to it. Most of the time I'm good. I accept my sentence and do not brood or look hack. But sometimes a shift makes me remember. Routine is ruffled and a new start makes me suddenly conscious of what I've become, standing in a street covered with autumn leaves. The trees in the park across the road are scrubbed silver and brass. I look up and see the minaret of Regent's Park mosque visible above the trees. I have never seen it so early in the morning in this vulnerable light. London is at its most beautiful in autumn. In summer it is seedy and swollen, in winter it is overwhelmed by Christmas lights and in spring, the season of birth, there is always disappointment. Now it is at its best, now it is poised like a mature woman whose beauty is no longer fresh but still surprisingly potent.

My breath comes out like smoke. I wait to ring the bell of a flat; the number is written down in my notebook. She said eight. I cough and worry that I will cough in front of my new employer, implant in her the anxiety that I will pass germs on to her child. But she might not be the anxious type. I do not know her yet. The only time I saw her was last week when she came to the mosque searching for a servant. She had an aura of haste and grooming about her. Her silk scarf was rolled casually around her head and neck and, when it slipped and showed her hair, she didn't bother to tug it hack on again. A certain type of Arab woman - rich student, late twenties, making the most of the West ... But I still did not know her. She was not herself when she spoke to me. Few people are themselves in mosques. They are subdued, taken over by a fragile, neglected part of themselves.

I hope she hasn't forgotten me. I hope she hasn't changed her mind and put her little girl in a nursery or found someone else. And I hope that her mother, who has until now been the baby-sitter, has not extended her stay in Britain and made me unnecessary. St John's Wood High Street is busy. Men in suits and young women wearing the latest fashions get into new cars and drive off to good jobs. This is a posh area. Pink hues and the expanse that money blesses people with. The past tugs but it is not possessions that I miss. I do not want a new coat but wish I could dry-clean my old one more often. Wish that not so many doors have closed in my face; the doors of taxis and education, beauty salons, travel agents to take me on Hajj ...

When someone picks up the entry-phone, I say, Iny voice edgy with hope, `Salaamu alleikum, it's me, Najwa ...' She is expecting me, alhamdullilah. The sound of the buzzer is almost thrilling. I push the door open and enter to find everything in wood; the past preserved and cared for in good taste. This is a beautiful building, dignified and solid. Old, cautious money polished by generation after generation with love and care. Not like my father's money, sequestered by a government, squandered by Omar. I was silly too with my share, I did nothing useful with it. There's a mirror in the lobby. It shows a woman in a white headscarf and beige, shapeless coat. Eyes too bright and lashes too long, but still I look homely and reliable, the right age. A young nanny might be careless, all older nanny complains about her back. I am the right age.

The elevator is the old-fashioned type so that I have to yank the door. It clatters in the elegant quiet of the building. I reach to press the button for the second floor but find that the first button says one to three, the second three to four, and the third four to six. I try to work it out, stare at it but I am still confused. I decide to climb the stairs instead. A door slams above me; quick footsteps descend the stairs. When he comes within sight I see a youth who is tall and gangly with the start of a beard and curly hair. I stop him and ask about the elevator.

`It's the flat numbers, not the numbers of the floor.' He speaks English as if it is his mother tongue but the accent is not local. It is difficult guessing people's origins in London. If he were Sudanese, he would he considered light-skinned but I have no proof that he is.

`Right, thanks.' I smile but he does not smile hack.

Instead he repeats, You just have to press the number of the flat you want.' His eyes are liquid brown; they shine not with intelligence, not at all like Anwar's, but with intuition. Perhaps he is sensitive but not particularly bright, not quick and sharp like young people nowadays.

I thank him again and he ducks his head a little, shrugs his shoulders to adjust the strap of his bag. I have heard the saying that you can smell Paradise on the young. When he backs away and walks out of the building, everything goes back to normal again.

I ascend and open the door of the elevator to an elegant, vacuumed carpet, take hopeful steps towards the flat. I will take the little girl to the square across the road. I will take her to the mosque, time it so that I can pray with everyone else and afterwards feed the ducks in Regent's Park. It is very likely that the flat will have satellite TV and I will he able to watch an Egyptian film on ART and the news on al-Jezira. Last week I heard a talk and these were the lines that stayed with me, that touched me the most: The mercy of Allah is an ocean. Our sins are a lump of clay clenched between the beak of a pigeon. The pigeon is perched on the branch of a tree at the edge of that ocean. It only has to open its beak.