by Zara Raheem
* * *
“Would you like more biryani?” my mother asked at the dinner table Sunday evening. My date had just called to cancel because of a work emergency, and I was relieved at the opportunity to just spend a mellow night in. My father nodded as she heaped a generous helping onto his plate.
“So, Leila, beti, what have you been up to?” My father turned toward me. I looked down and spooned a lump of rice into my mouth.
“Nothing much, Abba. Same old,” I mumbled with my mouth full. My mother glanced at me from across the table.
“And how is your search coming along?” he asked.
“It’s coming.” I shoved another spoonful in. I could tell my father wanted more details, but I had nothing more to share. Anything I said would launch them into an hour-long tirade about all the things I was doing wrong. I didn’t have it in me to hear those same criticisms. Not now. So I remained silent.
After a few uncomfortable moments, my mother changed the topic, much to my relief.
“Leila, I was telling your father about Meena’s engagement. Her wedding is less than two weeks away, you know.” I nodded. As much as I hated hearing about Meena’s upcoming nuptials, I was grateful that they at least shifted the focus off of me. “I was actually thinking of attending. What do you think?”
“That’s great,” I said, with as much fake interest as I could muster.
“But there is only one problem. Your father cannot accompany me.”
“Jaan. You know I have to work.”
“I know. I know.”
“You will have to go without me. Besides, I would rather save up my vacation days for our own beti’s wedding.” He winked at me. I looked away and slumped back into my chair.
“Actually, I was hoping our beti would come with me this time.”
“Me?”
“Yes, Leila. What do you say?”
I was not interested in attending Meena’s wedding at all. It was bad enough having to hear about it from eight thousand miles away. Why would I want to experience it up close and personal?
“Can’t you just ask one of your friends to come?” I offered. Considering the ever-growing list of aunties my mother knew, I was sure she could convince one of them to come along. Of all the skills she possessed, her strongest by far was persuasion.
“Nonsense, Leila. Why don’t you just come?”
“Leila, you are also off from school right now,” my father added. “It will be the perfect summer vacation!” I scrunched my face. Spending time with my mother hardly sounded like a vacation. “I think it is a great idea,” my father said, his spoon waving in the air.
“Leila, please come,” my mother urged. “Everyone will be so excited to see you. Especially Meena.”
As if that makes a difference. I had made up my mind years ago that I didn’t care for her, so why should I suddenly care that she would be excited to see me? The last thing I wanted was to be around someone who was arrogant and smug and proved to be better than me in every way possible. That sounded miserable. And I had enough misery to deal with without her help.
I pursed my lips together. “Can I think about it?” My parents looked at each other and finally nodded. But the truth was, even if I did somehow forget all the Meena comparisons over the years, the fact that she had now “beaten” me in the marriage race was just too much. There was nothing to think about. I wasn’t going.
* * *
After dinner, I lay in bed staring at the ceiling and thinking of an excuse for why I could not accompany my mother to Meena’s wedding. The simple fact that I didn’t want to would not be enough. It had to be a strong enough reason that neither of my parents could object. Like a serious case of aviophobia. Or mono. Or pregnancy—but not quite as drastic. As I went over the different scenarios in my mind, I heard a soft knock on my bedroom door. I sat up as the door cracked open. It was my father.
My heart began to race. My mother must have sent him to talk with me, I thought, panicking. Is he going to try to convince me once more to go to India? I don’t even have a good excuse yet! Feeling flustered, I tried to steady the emotions rising inside.
“Leila, beti? Can I come in?” I nodded, crossing my ankles and resting the tip of my chin on my knees. He walked across the room and took a seat next to me, pushing aside the comforter. Neither of us said a word. The only sound was the ticking of the clock above my bed. I waited quietly for my father to say something, anxiously wondering what it was that he wanted.
After a few silent moments, he finally turned toward me. “Tell me,” he said gently. “Are you okay, beti?”
I wasn’t sure if it was the simplicity of the question or the concern with which he asked, but my eyes suddenly moistened. Not once in the past seven weeks had I—or anyone else, for that matter—stopped to check if I was okay. The truth was, I wasn’t. Everything was not okay. After what had happened with Zain, my life felt like it had scattered into pieces and all I wanted, in that one moment, was for someone to fix it.
When I was a kid, I would always run to my father whenever I had a problem. When I accidentally killed my goldfish in third grade because I filled its bowl with hot water instead of cold, my father was the one who helped me flush Fluffy down the toilet. When I fell behind in AP Geometry freshman year of high school, my father sat with me for hours each night teaching me his Indian shortcuts until I finally understood every problem in the book. When I failed my driver’s test the first time around, he spent the entire weekend in the empty lots behind the South Street Mall showing me how to parallel park. And even after that, when I rammed our minivan into an adjacent vehicle while attempting to park at the post office, he climbed into the driver’s seat and took the blame for it so I wouldn’t have my learner’s permit revoked.
I consistently relied on my father for his comfort and generosity, but as I’d grown older, I’d come to him less frequently because I felt like I had the capacity to figure things out on my own. For the first time in a long while, however, I realized I was in over my head. If only my father could fix my broken heart, my dejected self-esteem, my sense of hopelessness, my uncertainty in love. I had no idea how he would do it, but I just needed to hear that everything was going to be okay.
My father placed his arm around my shoulder and held me as I cried into his shirt. “I know it has been tough on you these last couple months, Leila,” he began. “I know your ammi can be a little . . . pushy.” I lifted my head off his shoulder and looked at him with teary eyes.
“A little?” I said, with a cracked voice. “Abba, she made me go see a matchmaker!”
“Ya Allah!” He covered his face with his hand. “I told her to forget that matchmaker! She is of no use to us. Setting you up with that faltu boy!” He shook his head.
“Sajid? How did you know about him?”
“Beti, I called and spoke with him before you did. Crazy boy kept giggling like a madman!”
“But he never even mentioned that he talked to you . . .”
“Arey, he was so medicated on who knows what that he probably didn’t even remember.”
I let out a small laugh. “You could’ve at least warned me, Abba!” I said, wiping my eyes.
“I trust you, Leila. I know you will make the right choice,” he said. I looked down, wishing in that moment that I shared my father’s belief in me. “You know, beti, your mother just wants what is best for you.”
I shook my head. “Abba, how can she expect me to find someone in such a short amount of time? It’s just . . . it’s just not possible.” I dropped my face into my palms.
My father sat there quietly while I continued to cry. After a few minutes, he got up, went into the bathroom, and brought back a box of tissues. As I wiped my face, he cleared his throat and began talking.
“Did I ever tell you the story of how your mother and I met, Leila?” I took in a choppy breath and shook my head. “Ahhh.” He cleared his throat and smiled. “When I was twenty-four years old, I found out I had been accepted into
a master’s program at UCLA. I had only four weeks before I was supposed to leave, and your dada and dadi’s one request was for me to be married before I left.”
“Wh-why did they want you to be married so young?” I said, sniveling.
“It was not too young in those days, Leila. They were worried about my being so far away. They wanted to make sure that someone would be there to take care of me.” He looked at me, patting my knee. “You know, in the weeks leading to my departure, they showed me pictures of four different girls.” He held up his hand. “But I refused every single one,” he stated proudly.
“H-how come?”
“One was too tall. One too thin. Another had a large nose.” He folded each finger one by one, and laughed. “To be honest, Leila, I didn’t know what I was looking for. That is until they showed me your mother’s picture.” He smiled at the memory. “She had a very nice nose.”
“You picked Ammi because she had a nice nose?” As he sat there shrugging and smiling bashfully, I thought about how much time and thought I put into even the most routine things. Just this morning, it took me twenty minutes to decide which sweatpants I was going to wear. And looking now at the gray fleece with the stain at the knee, I was sure I had made the wrong choice. How could my father base the most important decision of his life solely on who had the better nose? What about personality? And life views? And compatibility? Aren’t these just as important when it comes to selecting a spouse as the size of their nose?
“Once I made my choice, her parents invited my family to their home that very weekend. We sat on opposite couches, but we were so shy that we barely looked at each other.” He chuckled as he reflected on the memory. “But I could tell by how she served us chai that she was a nice, simple girl. Two days later, we had our nikkah, and the following week, we were on a plane to America to start our new life together.”
I couldn’t believe that was all it took for my parents to get married. Five pictures and four bad noses, and now here they were, about to celebrate their thirtieth wedding anniversary. A part of me couldn’t help but feel a tiny bit jealous at how simple it had all been for them. But I also knew that that strategy would never work for me. I had more complicated wants. A laundry list of expectations. No matter how badly I wanted my Bollywood ending, I knew it would take much more than a nice nose for me to fall in love.
“The first step is always the hardest, Leila. Your mother and I were practically strangers when we married, but we took the time to learn about each other.”
“But what if there’s not enough time to learn everything?”
“Leila, you cannot know everything. Your mother and I are still learning about each other. After thirty years! Just the other day, she told me she doesn’t like the way I chew my food. I didn’t even know that!”
“But that’s what scares me, Abba. What if I discover something I don’t like? And by then it’s too late!”
“Leila, beti, the truth is you can never fully know a person. No matter how much time you spend with them. In fact, the more time you spend with someone, the more wrongs you discover. That is why so many people just continue to date but never marry.”
“But not everyone is lucky enough to find what you and Ammi have.” I sighed. “The risks are just too high to jump into a marriage blindfolded. What if I choose the wrong person? Or I don’t fall in love? Or I suddenly realize we’re not compatible?” I rambled off all my worst fears until my father finally stopped me.
“You cannot worry yourself with these things, Leila. Once you marry, every day you will discover something new about each other. Some things good, some things not so good, but that is the fun of marriage.” My father bobbled his head.
Fun? That sounds frightening.
“It worked for your mother and me because we allowed love to take its course,” he continued. “You have to step aside and trust that love will happen, Leila. Over time, you will learn to make adjustments and come to respect each other. And soon, that respect will turn to like and then eventually it will turn to love. This kind of compromise cannot happen before marriage. It cannot happen overnight. It slowly grows over time and becomes stronger, and that is why it lasts.”
He patted my knee and gently lifted my chin. “Leila, if you want to be truly happy, you must realize that there is no such thing as love before marriage. True love exists only after marriage. Simple as that.” He snapped his fingers, smiling.
I said nothing, just sat there quietly, absorbing his advice. If there was no such thing as love before marriage, then what about all the movies I had watched growing up? What about all the fairy tales I had read? What about all the feelings I had felt for Zain? Who knew if what I experienced with Zain was true love—as my father called it—but it was the closest I had gotten to . . . something. I had spent my entire life wishing for pyaar, prem, ishq, mohabbat—the kind of love that was instantaneous; that didn’t require time or compromise or adjustments to blossom; that just was—and now my father was saying that that didn’t exist? Or at least not in the context that I had always envisioned. I blinked back the tears and looked away. Maybe this type of love didn’t exist for him and my mother, but I refused to believe that it wouldn’t for me. It had to . . . otherwise what was even the point?
Departure
“What are you going to do?” Tania and Liv looked at me curiously. Hannah was out of town at a conference, so it was just the three of us at our Tuesday night ritual.
“I’ve decided I’m going to go,” I said.
“What made you change your mind?” Liv asked.
“I couldn’t get pregnant in time.”
“What?!”
“Never mind.” The truth was I couldn’t come up with a strong enough excuse for why I couldn’t go to Meena’s wedding. At least nothing that would convince my mother, so I decided to just surrender.
“But you have less than a month left!” Liv reminded me. “What about the deadline?”
Deadline. It sounded so final, so uncompromising. I could see the concern in both my friends’ eyes. “The deadline is still there,” I stated matter-of-factly. “But either I stay here and continue going on terrible, dead-end dates, or I try to focus on the silver lining.”
“Which is?” Tania asked doubtfully.
“It’s an opportunity to go someplace new. Someplace far.”
“You’re not still thinking about Zain, are you?”
“No!” I said, trying to sound convincing. But that was a lie. I had been thinking about Zain and that night I fell for him on our second first date. I still experienced a pang of sadness each time I thought about the excitement I’d felt. The hope . . . the possibility of that evening turning into something more. It had all seemed so real—so tangible—but as the weeks passed with still no word from him, I knew that whatever I once believed we shared had already dissolved. I no longer clung to the expectation of receiving an explanation for what had happened. Instead, I managed to find some semblance of closure in the lack of closure I received.
“Forget Zain,” I said with more conviction. “I just think it’s time for me to move on. And what better place to find a Bollywood romance than the land of Bollywood itself?”
“So . . . you’re going to keep looking for a husband?”
“In India?”
“My three months aren’t up yet. Why should I stop now?” I said, my tone waxed with emotion. Liv and Tania looked at each other with uncertainty.
“I guess we just thought you preferred someone American-born,” Tania finally said.
“Well, I also preferred a chiropractor from Houston, but you can’t always have what you want. Right?”
“Leila—” Tania said, carefully studying my face.
“What?” My voice cracked.
“It’s okay if you need to take a break from all this. You don’t have to go. I’m sure your mother will under—”
“No, she won’t,” I said flatly. “Besides, my ticket is already booked. I leave in two days.”
“You’re sure about this?” she asked hesitantly. I nodded.
“When was the last time you visited?” Liv asked.
“A long time ago. When I was just a baby,” I replied.
I was too young to remember that visit, but I had heard countless stories from my parents growing up. Stories about the one-eyed chacha who would wave his cane in the air and yell at all the kids from atop his balcony; the juicy kala khattas that melted with each bite, leaving sticky trails down the sides of their arms; the delicious golgappas served on paper plates by leathery-skinned vendors at every street corner; the rows of colorful, hand-stitched mojaris hanging from the open-air bazaars. I always dreamed of visiting again one day as an adult—when I would be old enough to experience those memories on my own. But as curious as I was to see where my parents grew up, and the place where they married, these were not the circumstances I had hoped it would be under.
“So whose wedding are you attending?” Liv wanted to know.
“My cousin Meena.” I winced at the thought. There was no way to find the silver lining in that.