Lockdown Ramadan: One globe-trotter’s homebound holy month

A year ago, I welcomed the month of Ramadan by following the scent of charred meat wafting through the damp tropical air of Zanzibar. Most of the residents of the tiny archipelago off the coast of Tanzania are Muslim, and with the holy month colliding with the tempestuous beginning of Zanzibar’s rainy season, historic Stone Town was sodden with heavy cloudbursts and largely devoid of tourists. 

On one particularly sticky evening, during a brief dry spell between storms, I joined a maze of locals snaking through the open-air Forodhani Market on Stone Town’s seafront. The , orcall to prayer, rang out meal to break the fast: soul-warming bowls of from one hawker, Zanzibar “pizzas” glistening under the fluorescent lights of another, cups of freshly pressed sugarcane juice to wash it all down. A few nights later, a lovely woman named Nassra invited me to her house for , where I joined her family for a bountiful Zanzibari feast.