One day, he stopped by to get groceries from a mini-mart in Bangsar and as he walked to his car, his arms full of bags, he heard the sound of the evening azan, the Maghrib prayer coming out loud and clear over the speakers from the nearby mosque. He bowed his head and a calm came over him. He opened the car boot, placed all the bags neatly, locked the car and walked across the road to the mosque.

He washed his hands, face and feet, finished the wudhu’ and entered the cool, silent mosque. He joined a line of men performing the prayers and remembered what his Tok had taught him all those years ago. There were three rakats for the Maghrib prayer and he remembered the familiar prostrations his grandmother performed with him over and over again. When he said the last Allahu Akhbar, he felt a peace come over him, a calm serenity, and he imagined Alba’s newborn face, and the awe he felt when she was born. And it was this thought that filled him when he walked back across the road.

It is God’s will. It is God’s will.

Alba has returned to God.

Omar did not think himself religious, nor spiritual. He had often wondered what his faith meant to him. That he was half Malay and half English meant that he had grown up in the most liberal household with parents who ate and drank everything, celebrated Christmas, Hari Raya and even the occasional Wiccan celebration. Once his mother took him and Lulu to a Beltane celebration, which happened on May Day, deep in the Norfolk countryside. He remembered women and men in long flowing cloaks, children wearing flower necklaces who ran freely on the large open field, a bonfire and a maypole which they all took turns dancing around. There was much feasting and chanting and some kind of ritual in a circle, which involved wands—Real ones, Omar! said his mother—and the invocation of the four archangels by a tall man with long black hair. His father had probably last set foot in a mosque when his Tok died, and was not a man who lived by any kind of religious code or creed.