Ahmad Saidullah, a policy research consultant, has worked as an editor and a lexicographer in Ontario, Canada. “The Guest” is taken from his unpublished first novel Fifteen Sketches of Rumi. In 2006, Ahmad won second prize in the CBC Literary Award, Canada’s top literary award, for another selection from Rumi. His work has appeared in enRoute, Academic Matters:  The Journal of Higher Education, Drunken Boat (where he was a finalist in their Panliterary Awards), Altar Magazine, and L Magazine, which featured him as a New Voice in fiction, as well as on CBC Radio One. He is working on another novel and a poetry cycle.