Before the sun had set and the children had come back home, Ella placed a bookmark in the manuscript and put Sweet Blasphemy aside. Curious about the man who had written the novel, she went online and Googled “A. Z. Zahara,” wondering what would pop up but not expecting much. To her surprise, a personal blog appeared. The colors on the page were predominantly amethyst and turquoise, and on top of the page a male figure with a long white skirt whirled slowly. Having never seen a whirling dervish before, Ella took a careful look at the picture. The blog was titled An Eggshell Named Life, and beneath it there was a poem with the same title:
Let us choose one another as companions!
Let us sit at each other’s feet!
Inwardly we have many harmonies—think not
That we are only what we see.
The page was full of postcards from cities and sites all around the world. Underneath each postcard there were comments about that particular place. It was while reading these that Ella came across three pieces of information that immediately drew her attention: First, that the A in A. Z. Zahara stood for Aziz. Second, that Aziz regarded himself as a Sufi. Third, that at the moment he was traveling somewhere in Guatemala. In another section there were samples of the photos he had taken. Most were portraits of people of all colors and stripes. Despite their stark differences, they resembled one another in one curious respect: All the people in all the portraits had something visibly missing. For some the missing element was a simple thing, like an earring, a shoe, or a button, while for others it was much more substantial, like a tooth, a finger, or sometimes a leg. Underneath the photos it read:
No matter who we are or where we live, deep inside we all feel incomplete. It’s like we have lost something and need to get it back. Just what that something is, most of us never find out. And of those who do, even fewer manage to go out and look for it.
Ella scrolled up and down the Web page, clicked on every postcard to enlarge it, and read every comment Aziz had made. At the bottom of the page, there was an e-mail address, azizZzahara@gmail.com, which she wrote down on a piece of paper. Next to that she found a poem by Rumi:
Choose Love, Love! Without the sweet life of
Love, living is a burden—as you have seen.
It was while reading this poem that a most peculiar thought flashed across her mind. For a fleeting moment, it felt as if everything Aziz Z. Zahara included in his personal blog—the pictures, the comments, the quotations, and the poems—were written for her eyes only. It was a strange and slightly supercilious
thought, but one that made perfect sense to her.
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