Elif Shafak is one of Turkey’s most acclaimed and outspoken novelists

Ella 
NORTHAMPTON, JUNE 3, 2008
Beach Boys tunes streaming through their open windows, university students drove past, their 
faces sporting early-summer tans. Ella watched, numb to their happiness, as her mind reverted to 
the events of the past few days. First she had found Spirit dead in the kitchen, and although she’d 
told herself many times to be ready for this moment, she was seized by not only a profound grief 
but also a sense of vulnerability and loneliness, as if losing her dog had the effect of throwing her 
out into the world all by herself. Then she found out that Orly was suffering from bulimia and 
that almost everyone in her class knew about it. This brought a wave of guilt to Ella, leading her 
to have doubts about her relationship with her younger daughter and to question her record as a 
mother. Guilt was not a new element in Ella’s repertoire of feelings, but this loss of confidence 
in her mothering was. 
During this time Ella started exchanging multiple e-mails with Aziz Z. Zahara every day. Two, 
three, sometimes up to five. She wrote to him about everything, and, to her surprise, he was 
always prompt to respond. How he could find the time or even an Internet connection to check 
his e-mails while traveling in remote places was beyond Ella. But it didn’t take her long to 
become addicted to his words. Soon she was checking her e-mail at every opportunity—first 
thing in the morning and then again after breakfast, when she came back from her morning walk 
and while she was making lunch, before she went out to run errands and even during them, by 
stopping at Internet cafés. While she was watching her favorite TV shows, chopping tomatoes at 
the Fusion Cooking Club, talking on the phone with her friends, or listening to her twins rant 
about school and homework, she kept her laptop on and her mailbox open. When there were no 
new messages from Aziz, she reread the old ones. And every time she received a new message 
from him, she couldn’t help breaking into a smile, half gleeful, half embarrassed by what was 
taking place. For something was taking place. 

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Soon exchanging e-mails with Aziz made Ella feel that she was somehow breaking away from 
her staid and tranquil life. From a woman with lots of dull grays and browns on her life’s canvas, 
she was turning into a woman with a secret color—a bright, tantalizing red. And she loved it. 
Aziz was no man for small pleasantries. To him, people who had not made their heart their 
primary guide to life, who could not open up to love and follow its path the way a sunflower 
follows the sun, were not really alive. (Ella wondered if this might put her on his list of 
inanimate objects.) Aziz didn’t write about the weather or the latest movie he had seen. He wrote 
about other things, deeper things, like life and death, and above all love. Ella was not used to 
expressing her feelings on such issues, especially to a stranger, but perhaps it took a stranger to 
make a woman like her speak her mind. 
If there was a trace of flirtation in their exchange, Ella thought, it was an innocent one that might 
do them both good. They could flirt with each other, positioning themselves in distant corners 
within the infinite maze of cyberspace. Thanks to this exchange, she hoped to regain a portion of 
the sense of worth she had lost during her marriage. Aziz was that rare type of man a woman 
could love without losing her self-respect. And perhaps he, too, could find something pleasing in 
being the center of attention of a middle-aged American woman. Cyberspace both magnified and 
mellowed offline behaviors, providing an opportunity to flirt without guilt (which she didn’t 
want because she already had too much) and an adventure without risks (which she did want 
because she never had any). It was like nibbling on forbidden fruit without having to worry about 
the extra calories—there were no consequences. 
So maybe it was blasphemy for a married woman with children to write intimate e-mails to a 
stranger, but given the platonic nature of their relationship, Ella deduced, it was sweet 
blasphemy.