Both Eyes Open

Kareem's microscope arrived in Coventry on a grey October Tuesday, and by bedtime he had looked at nearly everything in the house.

He had bought it with his Eid money. Under its lens, a hair from his head looked like a tree trunk covered in bark, and a pinch of salt became a heap of glassy cubes.

"Keep both eyes open," Ms Hartley, his science teacher, always said. "Shut one and you'll be squinting all lesson."

On Wednesday he tried the onion trick. He sliced an onion, eyes streaming, peeled the thin, see-through skin from inside one layer and added a drop of stain from the kit. There they were: rows of long, neat cells, packed like bricks in a wall, each with a tiny dark dot called the nucleus.

"You're made of cells too," Ms Hartley had said. "Trillions of them."

When he went back for a second slice, the knife slipped. A bright bead of blood swelled on his finger. Mum rinsed it under the cold tap and wrapped a plaster round it. "You'll live," she said, and kissed the top of his head, which he pretended to mind.

On Saturday he brought home a jam jar of murky water from the park pond. Mum made him wash his hands twice. One drop on a slide held a whole world. A creature shaped like a slipper zoomed across the light, rowing with hairs so fine he could barely see them. Then came a water flea, smaller than a grain of rice and clear as glass. Inside it, something fluttered, fast and steady: its heart, beating right in front of him.

On Monday, in Science, he peeled off the plaster. Underneath was a hard, dark scab, edged with new pink skin. "How does it know how to do that?" he asked.

Ms Hartley drew it on the board. "Tiny bits of cells called platelets gather at the cut and stick together. Threads called fibrin weave a net that traps blood cells, and that dries into a scab. Underneath, white blood cells fight germs, and new skin cells grow to close the gap. All without you lifting a finger."

"Apart from the one I cut," said Kareem, and the class laughed.

Then they counted their pulses for a minute. Kareem got seventy-two. Seventy-two times sixty minutes times twenty-four hours came to more than a hundred thousand beats a day.

"Your heart has its own natural pacemaker," said Ms Hartley. "It started beating before you were born, and you've never once had to remind it. It still amazes me."

That night, Kareem lay with his hand on his chest. Thud. Thud. Ms Hartley could explain every step, like the parts of a machine. So maybe nobody was behind any of it. Maybe it all just happened by itself. The thought felt huge and wobbly, and it wouldn't go away.

He found Mum in the kitchen with a cup of tea. "Can I ask you something weird?"

She listened while he explained. "That isn't weird. People have asked that for thousands of years." She fetched her Quran with the English translation, turned to Surah Fussilat and read, "We will show them Our signs in the horizons and within themselves until it becomes clear to them that it is the truth."

"Some scholars explained 'the horizons' as everything out there: the sky, the stars, the oceans," said Mum, "and 'within themselves' as the wonders of how a person is made." She tapped his finger. "You've been finding signs all week."

"So the Quran explains platelets?"

"No. It's a book of guidance, not a science textbook. Ms Hartley tells you how a cut heals, and that's brilliant. The Quran tells you to look, and to think about Who made it all."

Kareem thought of the leaflet in his microscope box, every lens and knob labelled. Knowing how the microscope worked didn't mean nobody had made it. It meant somebody had made it very carefully.

"Both eyes open," he said slowly. "One looking down the lens, and one still seeing the whole room."

Mum laughed. "One eye for how, and one eye for Who." Then she read the end of the ayah: "But is it not sufficient concerning your Lord that He is, over all things, a Witness?" She smiled. "Allah made all of it, and He sees and takes care of all of it. Every water flea. Every scab. Every heartbeat, even when you're fast asleep and not counting."

Back in bed, Kareem saw one star between the clouds, and the streetlight glinting on his microscope. Under the scab on his finger, new skin was quietly growing. "SubhanAllah," he whispered.

Then he closed both eyes, and his heart beat on, slow and steady, all through the night, without being reminded once.