“It’s more than believing in one God, more than tawhid,” I replied without elaborating. At the time I thought that no one should ever explain belief until they were asked to, or perhaps inspired to, but without any particular expectation, for I hated when others did that to me. It could have been dawah, but how could I have taught Islam or demonstrated it through my behaviour when I myself didn’t know everything it entailed? There was a lot more to Islam than what most people knew, including other Muslims.
In response to my prolonged taciturnity, he said, “Everything will be fine. It’s all the same God. We will be married soon, one day.”
“Inshallah,” I said.
Then his face lit up. “We could always elope, like they do in those silly Indian movies you make me watch, with your favourite, Shahrukh Khan, whatever his name is.”
I pushed him away. “Stop! It’s not funny. I am being serious.”
I didn’t consider elopement because at the time I didn’t see myself ever without my family.
Bhav clutched my hands quickly then brought me closer to him again. “Think about it. We will run away.”
“Well,” I played along, “even if we ever considered it, we have very little money. Where would we go? How would we even afford food?”
“Don’t worry,” Bhav said, softening his voice then raising it again. “I will sing and play an instrument, maybe a trombone, or maybe the tabla to keep this story culturally reflective.”
“Well, you do have a soothing voice. Maybe I can dance or say my poetry. We’ll need to go somewhere with subway or metro stations where we can perform for money,” I said.
“But, well, mmm,” Bhav looked around, “we’ll be easily found if we run away to a city that has a subway.”
“Maybe we can flee and hide in a small town,” I suggested, beaming.
“I’ll milk cows and become a farmhand, and you can sew clothes,” Bhav said.
“Oh, you mean like what they do in Elmira or Ayr, Ontario.” I was genuinely excited. “You know though … you’re the only real cow around here.”
I giggled and then Bhav leaned in to whisper, “You’re the only cow I love.”
“Are you calling me a god damn cow? What’s wrong with you? You never call a woman a cow!” I exclaimed.
To which Bhav cackled, “Cows are sacred in some cultures.”
I placed a peck on his cheek. “But in all seriousness, if we did elope, this would be a rather poorly planned plan. We need to be more strategic.”
“Well, what if we went somewhere, like Estevan, where I could find work in the Bakken?” Bhav said.
“What’s the Bakken?” I asked.
“It’s where men go to die,” he replied.
“Now why would we want that?” I asked.
Bhav looked at the single leaf that was slowly falling from the nearby tree. “Because you deserve better.”
“Better how?” I inquired.
“Better to elope with someone rich. Maybe all those doctors and engineers your family would rather set you up with. They could take care of you better. Yes, better to elope with someone rich,” Bhav declared with certainty and a tinge of sadness.
“Rich in love, though?” I raised one of my eyebrows.
“Richly foolish,” he said.
“I don’t like that plan,” I stated, pushing Bhav away. I turned my back to him then stomped across the field.
“Wait, wait,” Bhav called out, then ran to catch up to me. He caught my hand with his, ensured they were intertwined. “Okay, fine,” he said. “We will stick with the small-town idea, since you like small towns so much.”
“Yes,” I said, my face glowing again. “Our babies will be named after the towns we hide in.”
“There’s a town called Drinkwater, Saskatchewan. If we live there, we’ll definitely be motivated to stay hydrated.”
“We’re not going there.”
“Why not? What do you have against water? What about Booger Hole in West Virginia?”
“Okay, what the hell? Is there really such a place?”
“Maybe Intercourse, Pennsylvania.”
“Okay, we are definitely going to hell.”
Bhav and I plunked down on the grass and continued to think of silly town names. He turned his face toward me, staring for a good two minutes. “Your parents would be right, if they were to disagree,” he finally said.
“Why? About us? Our differences?”
“About you, overall.”
“What do you mean?”
“In any case, you deserve more. You always do.”
I rolled over and put my head on Bhav’s chest.
“Will you speak with Abbu? Please let me know as soon as you can,” I asked. “I have an inkling that I will lose you and —”
Bhav brought his palm over my lips. “I will talk to him. I mean, I’ll certainly be scared, nervous. But I have to. I love you, after all. I’d like to do this the proper way.”
We lay on the grass that day, wrapped in each other, in both dread but also hope that everything would be okay.
Before Bhav could speak to Abbu, Abbu learned about him when he found one of the Polaroids of Bhav and me on my bedroom floor. Its usual home was between the last two pages of my Moleskine journal, the ones unblemished, preserved for future tales. The Polaroid had a white frame around our supple faces; our bodies were snuggly embraced.
When Abbu found it, he called me calmly into the room. He sat on my lavender bedsheets, and I on the wooden chair across from him, the one that chirred from its right back leg whenever I moved. Rays of sunlight seeped through the window slats and across the chestnut floor. Behind Abbu, a half-open wall closet with overflowing clothes. The pale white walls. I pressed myself into the chair’s cross rails.
“Who is he?” Abbu asked.
I looked at the Polaroid in his hand. In it, I had burgundy hair and was wearing a floral peplum shirt. Bhav had on a plaid shirt and backward baseball cap. Glasses resting on his nose. Neither of us were completely smiling.
Abbu started waving the photograph. His hand was gripping the corner so tight it darkened to red. The photograph fluttered back and forth,
“Who is he?” Abbu repeated.
How could I put into words then that Bhav was both peace and dissonance?
∞
One day a boy from the military came to visit his lover, who went to my high school. His name was Wasif and her name was Priya, although at the time I noticed them I didn’t know who they were. I saw them at the front entrance, where I was waiting with some friends before the school bell rang. Wasif was wearing camouflage pants, and I’d learn later that he had served in Afghanistan. Priya ran toward him with outstretched arms. He had flowers in his hands for her. His eyes saw only her until he noticed me looking at them, and that was all it took.
Soon after, Wasif tracked down my number by contacting friends of my friends who knew him. I started to receive calls from mysterious telephone numbers. A ring, silent whisper, then dial tone. The calls came late in the evening when Ammu and Abbu were on our corduroy sofa in North York, Abbu reading a book and Ammu watching her latest Hindi soap opera. First Ammu picked up. Nothing, then the dial tone.
“This is strange,” she said.
Another call. “Who is this and what do you want?” Abbu shouted.
Then one day I picked up, and the mysterious entity said, “Hi, do you know who this is?”
The voice was nonthreatening, monotone, and frankly, quite plain.
“No, I don’t,” I replied.
“I saw you that day in the hallway, at the front of the school. I was the one with the roses. I was hoping we could get to know each other.”
It was Wasif.
“Um,” I said, “okay. Nice to meet you, but I am not interested really in anything.”
“Who is it?” Abbu asked.
“No one. Just a friend,” I answered, afraid of his reaction if he knew there was boy on the other end of the line. So it continu
ed, almost every day, this stranger calling my family home. When I hung up, he would call again, which would seem further suspicious to Ammu and Abbu.
I decided to talk to him, but in a platonic way, to stop him from phoning again. This didn’t work; instead, it encouraged him to keep calling.
Until, one day, Priya found me in the hallway where all the overachievers sat. She moved like a thunderous cloud, slowly and with a certain dimness. Trailing behind her were a handful of girls, all of them also with firm faces.
She hovered over me. I hunched over my notebook, my eyes squinting at the floating algebra equations on the page. I kept my head down and away from Priya’s disgruntled face. I peeked at her flaring nose. A petite girl with shoulder-length hair. Suddenly, I remembered that we had already crossed paths. It was a school event I had organized as president of the South Asian Club. The event was about fashion, so we had all been dressed up. Priya in a cream lengha, and I believe I was wearing a black-and-gold gharara. She hated her plain black heels; I had overheard her say this in the girls’ washroom. I went up to her and handed her my gold pair. I asked her what her size was, and she grinned. I had thought then that she was quite beautiful. This stranger was wearing my sandals, and I hers, but on this day, in the present, she seemed unable to travel in my shoes. Priya pounded her fist into the locker I was leaning back on. I managed to keep still.
“My boyfriend tells me you are coming onto him. What kind of a whore are you?”
I looked up, my eyebrows scrunched and my throat dry. I had no idea what she was talking about. I had done no such thing.
“Stay away from him,” she threatened.
All my other classmates in the enriched program did not blink. I shrugged my shoulders then looked away.
After this initial threat, it just got worse. Every day, I found Priya almost everywhere: in the hallways, the lunchroom, at the front entrance, and in the parking lot. Her and her crew of other girls, who echoed everything she said.
“Porn star,” they yelled out. By this time, I was as confused as ever. I had never watched porn; I didn’t really understand what the accusation meant, and how the association could have been made.
Okay, I thought, how plain stupid.
After school one day I was in the subway with a bold, intelligent classmate who I admired and was excited to befriend. I loved her attitude and her flair. We were talking about the details of an upcoming assignment when I saw a growing shadow from behind. I didn’t know it was Priya running toward me in silence, her pace frantic. As usual, my reaction was measured, until I felt her hands grip my back, grabbing my shirt, pulling me, and my feet slipping backward and closer to the yellow danger line of the subway platform. The train was coming into the station. All I saw was the constant yellow beam of the train headlight in the distance. Was it my lungs or my still-beating heart that was in my throat? With the growing fire in the pit of my stomach, and its smoke starting to cloud my pupils, I shrieked aloud then held my breath, prepared to die and be forgotten — like Islam’s veiled Divine Feminine, who removes jealousy and envy from hearts as she belongs to each and every person — all within that split second, when my friend pushed me out of her arms and away from the platform’s edge.
My friend stepped toward Priya, who looked utterly disappointed with her slouching shoulders and quivering lip.
“Stay the hell away from her.”
“This isn’t over,” Priya said, then left.
By then I had had enough, of her and this ridiculous rumour that manifested itself in whispers, snickers, and odd looks.
Porn star.
Me?
Porn star.
The fathomlessness of it all, the cartoonish aspect of the lie, the laughable randomness were what kept my anger at bay. I didn’t know then that the hate I saw in Priya’s eyes that day on the subway platform was a thing that gets women killed, by men and other women who were threatened by men. I guess she had amplified and esteemed me to the level of mistress, even though we were still just teenagers in high school. I didn’t know then that she had not only tried to push me over the yellow danger line of the subway platform, but had made the decision that her freedom, her life, meant less to her than my death. That she’d not only wanted to kill me but had tried to kill me. That she’d thought to dispose of me, toss me like a napkin over the subway platform, only because I had looked at somebody. That I’d been standing alone in the mundane hallway of my ordinary high school and that had been enough to justify all manner of spectacular delusion: that I was a demonic mistress, a horny, immoral slut, good enough and shameless enough to make money off it, and do so publicly, a porn star, a traitor, a broken person, someone fallen, disgraced. I grew cynical about my own agency, my capacity for autonomy. Going to school, standing in a hallway, answering the telephone, not answering the telephone: these were enough to make others think they could do what they want with you. Do what they want with me. Kill me.
I had to do something.
“What lies are you making up about me?” I asked Wasif that evening, with neutrality, when he called once again.
“Sorry,” he replied. “I was just trying to get her jealous.”
“Please don’t get me wrapped up in your drama. I have nothing to do with this! And I told you, please stop calling me or I’ll have to tell my parents.”
“Will you really tell your parents?”
I slammed the phone down. He didn’t call again that night.
I tossed in my bed as if ants were crawling all over, and by the time the morning rays rediscovered my face, I’d decided I’d take the approach of a diplomat. I’d consult the school principal, and I’d have to help Priya see reason.
The next morning I found myself on the principal’s red barrel chair, facing the girl who’d plagued both my waking and sleeping hours. I took a deep breath and I told her everything. At first, Priya was in denial. She didn’t want to listen. “He would never do that to me.” Then, there was anger. “I can’t believe he lied to me!” Then a form of gratitude perhaps. “Thanks for telling me.”
I left somewhat satisfied.
Wasif called me later, enraged. “Tell her you lied about everything you said!”
“And what? Also say I’m a porn star?”
Sunny Leone wasn’t in mainstream media then, but I later pondered what she would have thought about such a situation. We kind of look alike, at least that’s what some wooers would tell me. I’d cherish the compliment. To be so beautiful and desired by so many. To be so brave as to fashion a life out of your desirability in this world that’s already loaded for women.
“I’ll fuck up your life,” Wasif threatened.
“I’d rather speak the truth than be wrapped up in your messed-up relationship.”
And this time, I hung up without worrying for a second.
I didn’t know then but what would follow for days, weeks, and months was Wasif calling Abbu and Ammu, especially when I was at school.
“I’m just a concerned Muslim brother,” he would say. “Do you know what your daughter has been up to?”
And days later, in our living room, on our brown corduroy sofa, Abbu looked at me with tenderness and said, “This young, concerned man, he just has your best interest at heart. I’m truly grateful he has notified me of your troubles.”
I couldn’t swallow. It was as if I were back in front of the subway tracks again.
It never ceased to amaze me how a fictitious story can have so much power to shape the trajectory of a life, especially a woman’s life. That people are often more interested in a woman’s perceived sexuality than her own voice. Why wouldn’t anyone ask me for my truth or get to know who I was? The masses of students and even the concerned parents. You have to be saved.
“If you don’t believe me,” Wasif told Abbu one day, “visit the school parking lot during lunch hour, when her lover will be present.”
And Abbu did, only to see Bhav there.
After Abbu found the Polaroid, shaki
ng it as if instructed by Outkast, I told him everything about my relationship. Then, a few days after the Polaroid’s discovery, Abbu confessed he’d seen me with Bhav during lunch break, sitting in a Dodge Neon, eating a California sandwich, listening to Method Man and Mary J. Blige while discussing who knows what. If he’d only come a bit closer, he’d have heard us discussing our faith in God and plans for marriage.
“Well,” Abbu had said, his voice a little softer than usual.
After a minute or two of reserve, he said, “I trust in you, your judgment.”
I remembered that Abbu told me often that he was most proud of my intelligence and, furthermore, the softness of my heart, which he warned could also prove to be my greatest weakness.
“My Ammu,” he continued; it was what he called me often, “I only ask that you use your aql, too. Read and learn about all the world’s religions, and human nature. Become knowledgeable, use your cognition, before making any decisions that could twist and turn your life on paths that may not be the best for you, at the end of the day.”
Then Abbu got up, made his way to the door, and then turned around and said, “If you do lie to me, it would certainly break my heart.”
He took the Polaroid with him.
The time had come. It was more urgent than ever. Bhav needed to call Abbu and express his intentions. I needed him to, being who I was. He loved me, so he would. When Bhav called Abbu, I was in one of my classes. I spent the duration of it imagining the voices on the line oscillating. Abbu’s voice calm then rising then completely dead. Questions: “How?” “Who?” “What?” and then “Who do you think you even are?” Would Abbu slam the phone down with a certain passion, or would he listen? I tapped the pencil in my hands on my desk during a calculus lesson — limits, functions, derivatives, integrals all blended into one buzz in my ear. The thumping in my chest was like a wild boar about to run over my very existence. After class, I waited for Bhav in the school parking lot, biting my lip, ferreting for his face. He pulled up, parking on the other end of the lot, not close to the door where all the students usually stood. I passed all the cars and all the eyes, curious or oblivious. This would be the moment that would determine what our future could possibly look like.
The Shaytan Bride Page 9