Love in a Headscarf

by Shelina Zahra Janmohamed

  She told us that the Imam – as is required of anyone in the pastoral professions – was chatty. We giggled at her description of the meeting: ‘Fayyaz shifted his weight from buttock to buttock. At first he was patient, but then he kept throwing me desperate looks. Two hours later the forceful Imam turned to him and asked why he hadn’t spoken to me yet.

  ‘Fayyaz and I went into the other room. I understood immediately why the Imam talked so much.’ She explained that Fayyaz was as quiet as his chaperone was talkative. ‘Fifteen awful minutes of silence later we were summoned to return. Then the Imam chimes in: “You must have had a good chat” and gives me a wink. Then he says, “These meetings, ho-ho-ho! I had a friend who was an Imam too. He went on a visit on behalf of a friend of his to meet a girl. Liked her so much he married her himself! Ho-ho-ho!” ’ Sara, Noreen and I all squealed with horrified laughter.

  Noreen had her own story to tell: ‘Jameel was tall and good looking. He was a doctor and had been looking to marry for quite some time. He was intelligent and funny, and very charming. Everyone seemed to really like him in the family, including my Nana and my tiny little nephew. His stories were hilarious. And he said that he wanted a wife to embody both deen, spiritual life, and dunya, the world we live in. I thought he was perfect till his mum spoke to me.’

  Noreen put on her lilting mother-in-law voice:

  ‘ “Such a nice boy, Always thinking of everyone else, especially his poor little old Mother.” ’

  ‘I couldn’t believe it when my own mum started gushing too: “He seems lovely, I’m surprised he’s not been snapped up!” ’

  Noreen switched back into mother-in-law mode: ‘ “Well, he has liked a few girls, but you know, I never really liked any of them myself. He always says to me, ‘Mummy, you know much better, you decide. I don’t mind waiting for years until we find a girl you are happy with.’ ”’

  Jameel remains unmarried.

  Sometimes only the mother-in-law came to visit. I still served samosas and tea and tried to win their hearts. She might be visiting from abroad without her son, to set up a marriage tour. Once the prospective girls had been vetted and a critical mass had been established, the Prince would come to visit London and interview us one by one. His mother was the gatekeeper who had to be wooed. We had to pitch ourselves to get shortlisted to the next stage. I would make the snacks and cakes myself, and watch their eyes gleam with delight at the potential daughter-in-law who could cook heavenly strawberry gateau.

  My greatest dread though was the mother-in-law meeting at the mosque. After the lecture or gathering was over, my mother and I would have to find the mother-in-law and stand with her in a quiet corner for my interview. Since there were only women in our section of the mosque, I did not wear my headscarf. My mother would ensure that my hair and lipstick were pristine, so I would look my prettiest. We were both apprehensive. Not only was the process itself difficult and unpleasant, but the environment was challenging too. In a few sentences I would have to win over the woman I would not be marrying.

  Other women rushed behind us, stood in groups next to us, tittered in humorous gaggles close to us. We had to be discreet, otherwise gossip would start to fly the following morning about potential wedding matches before even a single glass of tea had been served to the boy’s family. Questions would be asked: ‘Who was that you were speaking to?’ ‘I hear she has three very good-looking sons. They were talking to the daughter of that woman over there before.’ ‘She’s been looking for the oldest one for years. I’m sure they will settle for anyone who will have him soon.’

  Habib cried when Sara spoke to him. Although his parents had divorced more than five years ago he was still very upset by it. He wanted to get married, but he would have a nervous breakdown if he had to go through a divorce. He was angry when she said this worried her as the basis of their first conversation. Sara described that he spat the words ‘Reality, not romance! Reality!’

  Then Noreen met Akil who said: ‘I need to leave because I’m meeting my friends to watch the football.’

  I was introduced to Bilal: ‘My mum is getting old and she keeps telling me to get married. To be honest I think it’s her that really wants the company. Personally I’m not so bothered.’

  Sara got a visit from Javed: ‘You’re too clever. That’s not for me.’

  Mizan said to Noreen: ‘I’m not really into this whole marriage thing but my parents don’t get it. I wanna be single.’

  And then Wadud confessed to me: ‘I didn’t really want to come, but it was this or get kicked out of home.’

  Ahmed was not an attractive man. He was also not an intelligent man. I tried to ignore his looks and get to know him for who he was. When he came home to meet our family, he sat in the single armchair, surveying the room. He was aloof. His silence made me feel uncomfortable. On this occasion we hadn’t been shunted off to the dining room. My parents had by now refined the art of moving seamlessly with the guests through the patio doors and into the garden, leaving us in situ, audible and visible from their new location outside.

  Ahmed spoke little and responded less but when he did his tongue was very sharp. I tried all the techniques I had learnt to open up the conversation. His onion-seed eyes stared into me. I tried to break the frostiness with some humour as we talked about our friends working in the financial services sector. ‘They are all accountants, overpaid ones,’ I smirked in a slapstick over-the-top fashion to bring some humour to the conversation. I knew that I was making a simplistic and stereotypical statement, but in the Asian community being an accountant really can be a bit of a joke, so I played on it, trying to get both of us to bond over a shared caricature. He shot me a withering look and I felt my hair sizzle from end to root under my headscarf.

  In a patronising voice he enlightened me: ‘Accountants come in many different specialities and are quite different from other financial professions like bankers or actuaries, even though they are all considered financial services. It is a simple and obvious fact that even a mildly clever person would know.’

  He thought I was thick, like a plate of gloopy blancmange. It was not something I’d experienced before. Other boys who had met me had said that I was too clever for them and so either they were not interested in me or were scared of me.

  I did not care that Ahmed was the dullest and most difficult human being I had come across. I was more perturbed by the fact that he thought I was a bimbo.

  A bimbo?

  The matchmaker called the next day. ‘What did Shelina think?’ she asked my mother. I had briefed my mother on this boy’s lack of social grace, his inability to have a conversation and the fact he was deeply unattractive, although to be fair, she had spotted this herself. She was aware that Ahmed had been extremely difficult and had shown no effort or interest in easing what is always an uncomfortable and difficult situation by engaging in conversation, no matter how meaningless. Even when two people know early on that the match is unlikely, both have a responsibility to make the situation as pleasant as possible and maintain a reasonable level of sociability and civility. Ahmed had missed this training session in his How to Find a Wife course.

  My mother was brief and not complimentary. The matchmaker was surprised. I heard her popped ‘Oh!’ from the other side of the room whilst my mum was on the phone. ‘But Ahmed really liked Shelina.’

  This revelation elicited a corresponding ‘Oh!’ from my mother. I’d launched a tirade at her about Ahmed, so the fact he had enjoyed our meeting was unexpected.

  ‘Erm,’ began my mother. She gathered herself together and said, ‘But Shelina said he did not speak, and that he looked very unhappy and she had to do all the talking.’

  ‘Ahmed explained all this to me,’ responded the matchmaker. ‘He says it was a test.’

  A test? Surely marriage and love were complicated enough. I didn’t need a man who was rude or one who couldn’t be straightforward and honest. I didn’t have time to fritter away on a man who wanted to test me
before he even knew me. And yet the matchmaker was still on the man’s side.

  ‘He said it was a test to see how the girl responds and Shelina did really well. He liked her.’

  Huh?

  ‘Does Shelina want to see him again?’

  I began to despair. Where did these men come from? Was there something I needed to know about the male species?

  They all seemed so normal but underneath they had these strange quirks. Sharing anecdotes with Sara and Noreen confirmed my suspicions.

  ‘Have the men always been like this?’ I asked my mum and her friends, to see if their experiences could shed any light on the matter.

  ‘They are a strange bunch,’ they confirmed. ‘You have to be patient and let them do their thing. It’s like having another child around.’

  They weren’t complaining about men or berating them. They smiled when they gave me this information. It was almost as though they wanted to add ‘and that’s why we love them’. Perhaps they grew up in more understanding times, when you just accepted men as they were. Maybe they understood that it was the quirks that made men perfect.

  My generation was young and we knew it was just a matter of time and some effort before we encountered Prince Charming. We told ourselves that the strange men we had come across so far were one-off oddities.

  We were optimistic. We had broken all the rules: we had been well educated, gone to good universities and had great jobs. We were attractive, interesting, well-spoken, religious and family oriented. Surely it was, to reiterate, just a question of time and effort.

  I had learnt to be philosophical about these meetings. I had to be. It was important for my sanity to keep alive a small glimmer of hope that one of these Y-chromosome unmarried individuals might have something to tease me into marrying them. For weren’t human beings full of surprises?

  This continuing optimism, coupled with a good old-fashioned British stiff upper lip meant that I ploughed on with the search with stoic determination.

  It was all a game of statistics. The big question was, which statistic: ‘Finding the One’ or ‘Four out of Six’?

  FOUR

  Only Connect

  Waiting

  It was 4 a.m. Outside it was somewhere between the end of the darkness of the night and the pale grey light of dawn. My alarm was ringing wildly and my father’s voice echoed through the hallway. ‘Beti, you have to get up.’ It was time for the morning prayer.

  How did he always sound so energetic and cheerful so early in the morning? My parents had already been awake for an hour, immersed in middle-of-the-night prayers.

  ‘Allah loves this time of the morning the most, when His creatures give up their precious sleep to be close to Him,’ they told me. Their eyes shone with excitement. There was something in the light from their faces – clear, contented – that resonated with their words.

  ‘Whatever wishes you have, this is the time to ask.’ It was so quiet, so uninterrupted, only your heart and the Divine. The answers become clear even before you ask the question.

  I was not feeling so sublime that morning. ‘Five more minutes,’ I croaked. I hung my legs painfully over the edge of the bed, head between my knees, and then swung myself delicately out of bed, bleary-eyed, feeling slightly queasy at the few hours of sleep I had had so far. With the thought of having to get up again for work in less than three hours, I searched for a delicate balance between being awake enough to pray and not so awake that I couldn’t sleep again. It took a force of will to stand up.

  I could hear the soft patter of my parents moving about elsewhere in the quiet house as they prepared to pray. This was the magical period of fajr, a time when most people were sleeping. As the seasons changed, fajr would sometimes be earlier, as early as 2 a.m. in the summer and as late as 7 a.m. in the winter. It was the first of the five ritual prayers which punctuated the day and gave it rhythm. Fajr, to start the day right; Dhuhr and Asr, in the afternoon, to centre you during the busy work day, to remind you what the day was for and to pull you back from fatigue; Maghrib and Isha in the evening, for rest and peace, to give thanks for the day and to remember the Creator before sleeping.

  To work out the beginning and end timings of each prayer, you could collect a printed timetable from the local mosque or access one on the internet. A simple matrix would help you calculate the timings: Fajr, starts 3.56 a.m., ends 5.53 a.m. You could pray your salat at any time in between, but it was always better to pray early. It showed you were keen, committed.

  ‘If you had an appointment with a lover, your entire being would race through all the chores you had to do, and you would always do your best to be punctual,’ used to say the Imam.

  The principles to calculate prayer time are based on the movement of the sun, and so timings vary throughout the year as the length of day changes. Dhuhr was prayed when the sun was directly overhead, when shadows were at their shortest. Maghrib was prayed as dusk fell, on the cusp between day and night. In an urban lifestyle, the prayers created a much-needed sensitivity to nature’s rhythms. ‘The day was created for work,’ says the Qur’an, ‘and the night was created for rest.’

  Before every ritual prayer it was a requirement to wash certain parts of your body, not only for physical cleanliness, but also for symbolic spiritual purification. Each step had a prayer that accompanied it. I washed my mouth: please put sweet words onto my lips. I washed my face: let light shine from my face. The words made me feel focused and uplifted. I washed my arms between elbow and fingertips: let my hands do good, let them prevent bad deeds and injustice. I ran my fingers gently across the top of my head: when things get pressured, let me stay calm. Finally, I wiped my feet, let them walk me to places where I can do good.

  I returned to my room and unfolded my prayer mat. It was made of deep red velvet, about a metre in length and half a metre in width, with a small arch printed at the top, symbolically pointing in the direction of prayer. I laid the mat to face south-east, towards the qiblah, at the heart of which was the Kaba in Mecca. Hundreds of millions of other people, perhaps even a billion, around the world would face the same point throughout their day. I covered my hair with a long cloth, which swept over my shoulders and fell just past my waist. Beneath I was wearing my favourite blue satin pyjamas. I drew a deep breath and tried to focus.

  First I stood upright, in qiyam, the standing position, and recited Arabic verses from the Qur’an.

  Bismillah Ar-Rahman Ar-Raheem. In the Name of Allah, the Lovingly Compassionate, the Kind.

  Alhamdu lillahi rabbil aalameen. All praise is due to the Sustainer of the Worlds.

  I continued until the words were complete. Then I bowed down, my hands placed upon my knees, my back curved, my face looking downwards. I continued reciting:

  Glory to Allah, glory to Allah, glory to Allah.

  Finally, I bent down further and placed my forehead on the floor in sajdah, prostration, my hands on either side of my body, almost curled into a foetal position. Being in this humbled position, my forehead touching the ground, was the ultimate crushing of pride and showed that in front of no human being were you to fall so totally and humbly. Only the Creator was worthy of complete devotion.

  I repeated these movements and completed the prayer. I sat on the prayer mat, at a loss. I reflected on my single status and the painful, heartbreaking process of looking for a partner, but never finding one. I felt so lonely. I didn’t want to grow old alone.

  I wondered whether it was my pride that had stopped me from accepting someone who didn’t live up to the standards of my imaginary Perfect Prince. But I could not think of even one man I had turned down who could have made a suitable match. My head was tipped downwards, strands of my hair trailing over my eyes. I thought about how hard I had been trying.

  ‘Wasn’t effort to be rewarded?’ I asked the Divine. ‘You could magic up a perfect man in an instant if You wanted. You have power over all things. In the Qur’an, You tell us that You say “‘Be’ and It is”,’ I remind
ed Him petulantly. God clearly didn’t need reminding of what He had said.

  My eyes welled up, and tears started rolling slowly down my cheeks. I raised my hands, both of them open facing upwards. God wasn’t upwards, wasn’t in any physical place. But my hands moved instinctively, pleading. ‘I really want to get married, have a husband, settle down. Haven’t you told us that getting married means to complete half of our faith? I want to follow Your guidelines and I’m trying hard, so hard, to find someone. Why don’t you send me someone?’ I complained.

  The tears came faster, unstoppable. I wept, blew my nose and cried some more. I was blessed in my life in so many ways: wonderful family, lovely house, good job, the opportunity to travel, close friends. This was the one thing I felt was missing. ‘I’m only asking for something good, someone to be with and love, someone who will love me and bring me closer to You. It’s awful having to go through this process week after week with all these strange people. I just want to get on with my life.’

  ‘Am I not ready to be married yet? Are there more things I need to learn? Or is my Prince not ready for me yet? What are these things I need to know, to experience before I find the one who will complete my soul?’

  I would have to be patient. The ability to wait, to hold yourself with dignity and thankfulness when you can’t have what you want, or can’t have it quite yet, is one of the hardest qualities to master. ‘Allah is with the patient,’ says the Qur’an. All good things come to those who wait, I reminded myself. I wondered how much longer I would need to be patient.