The afternoon sun was sinking behind the minarets of
Istanbul, casting long shadows across the narrow streets where mothers worked
in kitchens redolent with the scents of spice and anticipation. Fatima Erdem
wiped sweat from her brow as she stirred the lentil soup, thick and aromatic.
The hunger gnawed at her insides like a living thing, but that was Ramadan for
you. That was the point. The sacrifice made the reward all the sweeter.
(Hunger is a patient beast. It doesn’t announce itself with
fanfare—it creeps and it crawls and it whispers, until it’s the only voice you
can hear.)
In the adjacent room, her children arranged plates on the
dining table, their small fingers careful with the delicate ceramics passed
down through three generations. Little Mehmet, only seven, placed napkins
beside each setting with a seriousness that made Fatima smile despite her
parched throat. His sister Ayla hung paper lanterns from the ceiling—red and
green crescents that swayed in the breeze from the open window.
“How much longer, Anne?” Mehmet asked for perhaps the
twentieth time that day, his dark eyes wide with the particular agony only a
hungry child can express.
“When we hear the cannon, hayatım,” Fatima replied, same as
always. “The cannon knows when it’s time.”
And that was the thing about the Ramadan cannon—the Ramazan
Topu, as they called it here. There was something primeval about waiting for
that distant report, that man-made thunder that signaled release. Something
that reached back into the dusty corridors of time and touched a place in the
lizard brain that said: listen for the signal, wait for the sign.
* * *
Across town, in a weathered stone building that had
witnessed the fall of an empire, Sergeant Osman Demir prepared the ancient
cannon with practiced hands. Sixty-two years old, with forearms like gnarled
oak branches and a neatly trimmed white beard, Osman had been firing the Iftar
cannon for nineteen years. Before him, his father had done it for twenty-seven.
The responsibility was a sacred trust.
He checked his watch, then the official sunset time written
in his small notebook. Eight minutes remaining. He thought of his wife at home,
setting the table with the blue-patterned plates they’d received as wedding
gifts. His grandchildren would be there tonight, fidgeting in their chairs,
eyes darting to the window every few seconds.
(We’re all waiting for something, aren’t we? All ears
pricked for that sound that says now or run or it’s time.
The world turns on these moments of collective anticipation.)
The old brass cannon gleamed in the fading light, polished
to a dull sheen by generations of hands just like his. The mechanism was
simple—almost primitively so—but there was power in that simplicity. There was
truth in it.
“Time is a circle,” his father used to say as they prepared
the cannon together. “We stand in the exact spot where men stood two hundred
years ago, doing exactly what they did, for exactly the same reason.”
Osman adjusted the charge, careful not to overdo it. The
cannon’s voice needed to be heard across the city, needed to reach the faithful
waiting in their homes and mosques and courtyards, but it mustn’t be too
loud. That had happened once, in ‘97, when a replacement had packed too much
powder. Windows had shattered along the waterfront. A child had been cut by
flying glass. The man was never asked to return.
The cannon had a job. It spoke once, at exactly the right
moment, with exactly the right voice. No more, no less.
Four minutes now.
* * *
In the square of the Blue Mosque, a crowd had gathered,
their faces turned toward the horizon where the sun was melting into the
Bosphorus like a dissolving aspirin tablet. The faithful mingled in the
courtyard, speaking in hushed tones as if excessive volume might somehow delay
the coming signal.
Among them stood Howard Thurman, an American tourist who’d
stumbled upon this gathering by accident while searching for his hotel.
Disoriented by jet lag and the winding streets, he’d found himself swept along
in the gentle tide of people moving toward the mosque.
“It’s the custom,” an elderly man explained to him in
halting English, his eyes crinkling at the corners with genuine warmth. “We
wait for the boom, then we eat. First time in Istanbul?”
Howard nodded, finding himself oddly moved by the collective
anticipation surrounding him. Back home in Manchester, New Hampshire, people
lined up for movie premiers or Black Friday sales, but this was different. This
was ancient. This mattered.
“It started by accident,” the old man continued, eager to
share the history with this interested foreigner. “In 1821, soldiers were
testing cannons. The boom came at sunset during Ramadan. People thought it was
the signal to break fast.”
(The best traditions are often born of coincidence, aren’t
they? The universe conspires to create meaning from chaos, and
we—pattern-seeking creatures that we are—latch onto it with both hands.)
The old man—Ahmet was his name—pointed to his wristwatch. “One
minute now. Listen carefully.”
Howard felt a sudden tightness in his chest, an unexpected
anxiety. He wasn’t fasting, wasn’t even Muslim, yet he found himself holding
his breath, straining his ears for this signal that meant nothing and
everything all at once.
* * *
Sergeant Osman Demir watched the second hand of his watch
tick into position. The moment had arrived. With a steady hand that belied his
racing heart—because no matter how many years he did this, the responsibility
never weighed lighter—he struck the match and lit the fuse.
The short string hissed and sparked, a tiny serpent of fire
crawling toward destiny.
Three.
Two.
One.
* * *
The cannon’s voice rolled across Istanbul like the wrath of
God, a single, perfect note that penetrated walls and windows, that bounced off
ancient stone and modern glass, that reached into every corner where the
faithful waited.
In Fatima’s kitchen, Mehmet let out a whoop of joy. In the
Blue Mosque courtyard, Howard Thurman flinched, then laughed at his own
startled reaction. And across the city, a million parched throats prepared to
take that first, blessed sip of water.
The cannon had spoken. The fast was broken. Life would go
on—until tomorrow, when they would all wait again for that primordial sound
that connected them to their ancestors across the vast, unknowable gulf of
time.
Because some traditions don’t just mark time—they conquer
it.
And in Istanbul, as in Cairo and Dubai and Jerusalem, the
cannon’s echo would reverberate long after its sound had faded, carried forward
in the memories of children who would grow up to tell their own children: Listen
for the signal. Wait for the sign.
The hunger is temporary. The cannon is forever.
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