I had dinner at The Pelican on Friday night. Those of you who know me well know this is my typical Friday routine. Tara and Sami are the Pakistani couple who own The Pelican. It’s a small place in Downtown Lake Worth, very easy to pass by unnoticed should you be driving down Lake Avenue, with just a few tables and a counter and shutters that open into the restaurant on cool nights. They’re only open for breakfast and lunch typically, but on Friday nights, they turn off the TV and the overhead fluorescents, switch on the spotlights and occasionally some Indian music and serve amazing dinners fragrant with the spices of their homeland.
This past Friday I went, knowing it would be the last dinner I’d have there for a while, for they’re never open for Friday night dinner during Ramadan. When it’s Ramadan, which began here on Saturday evening this year, Tara and Sami and their family fast all day, from sunrise to sunset. They break the fast each evening after sunset with a delicious meal, and during Ramadan, they like that meal to be at home, rather than at the restaurant, and I admire that they close up for this monthlong observance (even though I’ll miss those dinners).
Ramadan is the month when Mohammad received the revelations of the Quran. Its observance is one of the five pillars of Islam, and observance includes not just fasting but also increased prayer and charity and a general focus on goodness.
The start of Ramadan is based on the sighting of the crescent moon and so its beginnings each year are never concrete, and it can vary slightly from place to place. Even over the course of the month, it is fascinating, I think, that even the times of fasting each day vary, for it truly reflects the sun’s journey, now that the solstice has passed, toward the southern sky and helps us appreciate the ever changing shift in daylight hours. In Karachi, Pakistan, which could be where Tara and Sami are from, on the first day of Ramadan the sun rose at 4:17 AM and set in the evening at 7:26 PM. By the end of Ramadan, the amount of sunlight will have decreased by 24 minutes, mostly in the morning, as the sun rises later and sets earlier in the day. Ramadan is a lunar observance, but by its end we are that much closer to the balance of the autumnal equinox and the next solstice at Midwinter.
Ramadan may be a month of fasting, but the meals that break the fast each evening can be really wonderful and very celebratory. I remember an NPR story from many years ago about Ramadan in Iran; the foods that were being described, even over the radio, sounded so good, I wanted to taste them all. Some of these meals, they said, can last through the night. It is a month of patience, humility, and spirituality… but also a month of good food. “Ramadan Mubarak!”
I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I shot the image above at the Morocco pavilion at Epcot a few years back. How very uninspired of me, to get my cultural experience about a place like that through a whitewashed corporate experience. Nonetheless, family lore says that my maternal grandmother’s lineage holds a distant mix of Italian and Moroccan, so I was pretty fascinated with what I saw there, even if it was Disneyfied.