Riza's footsteps came to a halt for a moment at the entrance to the Mathematics Faculty of Tokyo University. The autumn wind blew hard enough to send golden-yellow ginkgo leaves smacking against her cold face.
Riza pulled her coat tighter and watched the crowd of students passing by, their rapid Japanese conversations completely incomprehensible to her.
Being a graduate student in the mathematics department in a foreign country turned out to be nothing like the romantic scenes in a drama.
The reality hit brutally hard. As a scholarship recipient, Riza carried an invisible burden on her shoulders. She couldn't fail. She had to endure.
Yet the theory of culture shock she'd read about in the orientation guide had done absolutely nothing to prepare her for today's surprise.
Twenty minutes earlier, Riza had sat stiffly in the middle row of a cold, tiered lecture hall. At the front of the classroom, Professor Sato, a thickly bespectacled expert in functional analysis, had written a complicated series of partial differential equations across the wide blackboard.
The professor explained the theorem's proof in an extremely rapid cadence of formal Japanese, or keigo.
Riza's fingers froze above her notes. Her pencil hovered in midair. Armed with only basic Japanese, she suddenly felt like a rogue variable isolated inside a complicated equation with no way out.
Riza's brow furrowed sharply. Her breathing quickened. Before she left, alumni scholarship recipients had emphasized that classes in the international master's program at the Mathematics Faculty would be conducted predominantly in English. Besides, half the room was made up of international students from all over the world. So why did the professor at the front seem not to care at all, continuing to race through the lecture in his native language?
Riza massaged her temple, which had suddenly begun throbbing with pain. The class had been going for only half an hour, yet her head felt ready to explode from the pileup of calculus symbols and Japanese scientific jargon.
Suddenly, a tall foreign student sitting to her left gently nudged her arm. His face was already as pale as paper, and he pointed frantically at the blackboard.
"Can you help me? I don't understand the topic. I can't follow the lecturer's discussion," the man whispered pleadingly.
Riza turned to him, looking just as helpless. "Same here. The lecturer speaks so fast. My Japanese isn't very good either," Riza replied honestly, her voice nearly swallowed by the din of the lecture.
The man let out a resigned sigh, then leaned back in his chair with a frustrated expression. Riza could only wince inwardly. How could she possibly explain the complicated proof of the theorem when her own brain was struggling desperately to decipher every word rushing from the lecturer's lips?
While Riza was still wrestling with her overheated thoughts, the female student sitting to her right suddenly shifted a little closer. The woman studied Riza's tense expression for a moment.
"Are you from Indonesia or Malaysia?" the woman asked softly, her voice almost like a breath of wind.
Riza turned in surprise, then answered in a low whisper, "I'm from Indonesia."
The woman's eyes immediately lit up with relief, as though she'd just found a lifeboat in the middle of a sinking ship. "Oh, you're Indonesian too! I'm from Indonesia as well. Nice to meet you—I'm Keisya."
Riza flinched softly. A deeply genuine smile of relief automatically curved across her lips. "Nice to meet you too. I'm Riza."
That brief conversation, whispered softly amid the classroom's uproar, became the bond that tied their friendship together. Not merely because they came from the same homeland, but because the exhaustion, confusion, and burdens on their shoulders were so similar.
In this utterly unfamiliar place, finding someone who understood your struggle without needing many words was a precious sliver of warmth.
Before this, Riza had never guessed that the woman beside her was Indonesian. Keisya didn't wear a headscarf. Her wavy brown hair fell loose in a stylish arrangement. Keisya's facial features also had an exceptionally sharp mixed-heritage structure.
Her high nose, light brown irises, and porcelain-white skin would make anyone mistake her for a girl of European or American descent.
The wall clock in the front corner of the room showed exactly noon. Professor Sato stopped his chalk strokes, then turned around and straightened the stack of papers on his desk before ending the lecture with an analysis assignment that made the entire class murmur in resignation.
Riza exhaled the long breath she'd been holding in her chest. The classroom suddenly filled with the scraping of chairs and the noise of students beginning to pack up. Riza slowly closed her notebook and put her pencil case and laptop into her bag. Her schedule was fairly light today, so she could go straight back to the dormitory.
"Are you going straight back to the dormitory, or do you have something else to do, Sya?" Riza asked as she straightened her slightly rumpled headscarf.
Keisya, who was putting her stationery into her backpack, looked up. "I still have one more abstract algebra class at one, Za. I won't be done until this afternoon. My schedule is killer today. I'm seriously exhausted."
Riza chuckled softly at the ridiculous expression on her new friend's face. "Two difficult classes, huh? Okay, I'll head out first. My classes are done."
"Got it, Za! Be careful on your way," Keisya called warmly, waving.
They parted ways in the courtyard of the Mathematics Faculty building. The midday air felt quite hot, even though the autumn breeze still carried a chill that prickled their skin.
It was almost time for Dhuhr prayer. Riza decided to make a brief detour, turning her steps toward a uniquely designed building with a small green dome that stood gracefully a few dozen meters before her dormitory complex.
The building was a local mosque, sweetly hidden beneath the shade of maple trees. To Riza, the mosque was the best refuge from the noise and scattered stress of Tokyo. She often stopped there simply to stretch her tired legs, reflect, and fulfill her religious duty without having to put it off.
One thing Riza was deeply grateful for was that the campus environment was fairly welcoming. In this small mosque, the call to prayer was allowed to drift through the air via a gentle internal speaker system. The congregation was warm too, ranging from local Japanese converts, immigrant workers, and international students to several families from Indonesia.
Riza had barely set foot on the stone steps in the mosque courtyard when a voice suddenly broke through the midday silence.
Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar...
Riza's steps stopped at once. Her body froze in place.
The call to prayer echoing through the mosque that afternoon... was different. Vastly different. The voice was so clear, flowing softly yet powerfully, with madd articulated so precisely and a melodic cadence so deeply moving.
Each vibration of the melody seemed to possess an unseen hand that gently squeezed Riza's chest, sweeping away all the academic exhaustion that had just piled up in her mind. In an instant, the hairs on her arms stood on end.
Without realizing it, Riza touched her wildly thudding chest. The corners of her eyes suddenly grew warm and wet with emotion. In the midst of this cold, unfamiliar foreign country, the ringing call to prayer felt like a warm embrace greeting her soul.
"MashaAllah..." Riza murmured softly, her lips trembling.
Driven by overwhelming curiosity, Riza hurried up the steps. "Is there a new muezzin? Why is his voice so beautiful?" she wondered, her heart pounding.
Riza knew exactly who the regular muezzin at this mosque was. Usually, the duty fell to a very elderly South Asian man. The old man was deeply devoted to calling the adhan, even though his voice had grown hoarse and tremulous with age. Ever since Riza had first discovered this mosque, no one else had ever taken his place.
However, Riza had indeed been absent for the past week because she was on her period.
"Maybe it really is a new muezzin... or just a traveler who happened to stop by?" Riza continued guessing as she removed her shoes at the shoe line.
This was what made Riza unique. She wasn't a woman who easily fell to her knees or became dazzled by a man's physical attractiveness. A handsome face had never possessed the power to tear down her emotional defenses.
But when it came to a voice—like the recitation of holy verses or a call to prayer that seeped all the way into her heart—her curiosity would be completely awakened. Riza would find out who owned that voice, regardless of whether the man behind it was handsome or plain.
To Riza, her simple logic was perfectly clear. If a man was blessed with such a beautiful, heartfelt voice when invoking God's name, then he must possess a beauty of soul that shone through in his life.
Still breathing lightly and with her chest throbbing warmly from the echo of the call to prayer that had just ended, Riza stepped inside, carrying a great question that had now taken deep root in her heart.
... .... To be continued