Love Comes Later

by Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar

  Uncle Saoud indicates with a jerk of his head that Saad, Abdulla’s younger brother, and the cousins should leave them alone.

  Narin the driver is back, offering a new round, this time of coffee. Saoud grasps a finjal, a palm-sized coffee cup. Abdulla takes one next, gulping down half of it in one swallow.

  His father, his uncles, again, the same room, the same conversation, only three years later. Will they never be satisfied? Abdulla wonders as he wordlessly sips coffee, waiting for their next foray.

  Uncle Saoud takes him by the arm, leaning in, his touch familiar and close, something Abdulla missed during all his years in England.

  “It’s been nearly three years, Abdulla,” Uncle Ahmed says, joining them, patting his nephew’s arm. Abdulla understands that Ahmed, as Fatima’s father, carries more emotional weight than anyone else. If he urges Abdulla to remarry, they feel, it will seal the deal.

  Abdulla is surrounded now, Saoud on the right and Ahmed on the left. He can’t leave now without causing offense. He grits his teeth and tries to resist the urge to deliver a punch worthy of a rugby brawl. It’s clear to him that his father sent Uncle Ahmed over as backup.

  “Fatima is still mourned,” Abdulla murmurs, “if only by me” – the last under his breath, as Ahmed grasps his fingers in his own meaty grip. Saoud relaxes into his seat, letting his younger brother have a go. “I don’t let go of wives as easily as some,” he adds, under his breath, shooting a glance at Ahmed.

  “Stop it,” his father grunts, looking at the others until he’s sure the slight has not been overheard. They are still conferring on potential brides. Of course it is easy for Uncle Ahmed to call for another marriage; it didn’t take him long to take a second wife when he felt that itch that men often joke about in the majlis.

  “Allah yer hamha,” his uncles say, calling for mercy on her soul. “She was taken from us, our daughter.”

  And my child, my unborn child, Abdulla thinks, whose gender I didn’t even know. Only God knew and apparently he thought it was a good secret.

  “Your grandfather has taken in Ahmed’s daughter as the last girl of the house. But the rest of us are here among the living, Abdulla. You must do your duty by your family. Marry another girl and get this done.” Ahmed’s voice, firm but rising, is causing some of his cousins to turn in interest.

  As though they don’t know what’s going on over here, Abdulla thinks. Hate to tell you, but you’re next. He eyes them malevolently, some as young as twenty-two, who are no doubt trading stories of their exploits, male or female. Before he was married he used to listen, a silent witness to their raucous tales of girls. It didn’t matter how holy the rest of their thoughts or actions were.

  Three years ago, during a Ramadan iftar, Ahmed was asking: “What about Fatima?”

  Abdulla had hesitated, so his father had answered for him. “Fatima is a lovely girl,” he said, blindsiding his son. Without an acceptable excuse or reason for delay, Abdulla had felt the noose tighten. The reasoning seemed inescapable: he had to get married, so why not this girl from a good family – his own family – Fatima, the mischievous cousin who, when they were younger, had put sand in his favorite dessert when he wouldn’t let her play his video games? He hadn’t been able to resist the tide. In a matter of weeks, it was done: he was married to Fatima, his first cousin, younger by one year, and they were given a brand-new apartment on The Pearl, just near the Ritz-Carlton. As it happened, this girl-woman Fatima had her own plans and ambitions of which he had known nothing in the years when puberty had separated them. She was more than competent in her first job as public relations officer for the National Bank, and he began to view her with admiration. Perhaps he had been lucky after all. They had settled into the kind of easy camaraderie that eluded most of Abdulla’s friends in their own arranged marriages.

  But all that is gone. Today it is his Uncle Saoud’s voice, not from the length of the room but right in his ear.

  “Consider your other cousin, Hind. She went to a foreign school like you. You will be a good match,” Saoud is saying.

  Abdulla forces a smile, the only way to free his fingers from his uncle’s viselike grip. He knows he shouldn’t complain. They are more modern than others, these men of his family – they do try to fashion matches that will make the couple happy, as opposed to simply seeking more money for the family or higher social allegiances.

  “We’ll set up a visit next week,” his father says to Saoud, who nods solemnly, trying not to show his delight.

  Abdulla had married once because it was the right thing to do, and because the family wanted to see a grandchild. But after what happened it is not as easy as they would wish for him to go down that path again.

  “I’ll pay for everything,” Ahmed offers. The men look at him, and the regret on his face about his daughter’s unexpected death is clear.

  Sometimes, from the awkward way his uncle behaves when he’s around, Abdulla wonders if Ahmed feels as guilty as he does himself about what happened.

  “Alai al talaq, mahad ydfa,” his father replies, issuing something that is part cough and part laugh. If anyone else pays, I’ll divorce my wife. The groom pays for everything, they all know that.

  Abdulla resists snorting at the age-old saying, an empty threat indicating escalation between men arguing over a bill. The saying is usually applied to paying for dinner, but now apparently extends to familial manipulation.

  “Your obligation to him is settled,” Uncle Saoud says to Ahmed with a big sigh, clapping them both on the shoulder as though they have all won prizes in an endurance horse race. “His mother will come and visit our girl.”

  What a farce – the houses are in the same family compound, only a few hundred meters away from each other. Abdulla hasn’t seen his cousins since the night of Fatima’s death, except as shadows behind tinted car windows. Before that, he can vaguely remember their girlish faces in the years before he went abroad to the London School of Economics.

  In a familiar routine observed for as long as Abdulla can remember, one taking place in majlises all over the country at likely the same hour, if not moment, the men are trickling into the dining room, where a table is so laden with food that there is hardly anywhere to put one’s dinner plate.

  Uncle Saoud is right. Divorce is always an option, Abdulla is thinking. Either that or running away. Instead of voicing either aloud, which he knows would only erupt the majlis into vociferous arguments, he leaves it for others to say it. The pressure in the room has evaporated and now his father and uncles seemed to have lost all interest in him, having discussed the details of his future. Their full attention has turned to filling their bellies. Unnoticed, he creeps back to his room, waving off Anita when she chases after him to see if he wants something to eat.

  In the end, what they want is only what they all want, no difference between his family and his government: for single Qatari boys and girls to become men and women in marriage to other Qataris. The stability of society, they call it, ignoring the nearly fifty percent divorce rate and the many instances in which girls leave their husbands the morning after the wedding to return to their father’s homes.

  He can’t think of anything he would want to do less.

  Oh, wait – yes, he can.

  There is one thing.

  Get married.

  Again.

  Chapter Two

  Luluwa washes her hands with soap and dries them on the powder-white towel. She takes the stairs two at a time, her legs eating up the staircase in half the time it would have taken had she been more measured, like her aunties. It’s Thursday night, so she can’t be bothered to waste any more time doing anything other than being with her grandfather. Reaching the stop of the stairs she hovers in the doorway, waiting for him to notice her and call her inside.

  The rest of the family wants to move his room downstairs, somewhere more accessible, but Yadd Jassim isn’t having it.

  “Hayach,” she finally hears his sandpaper voice say, and s
he bounds inside at the invitation.

  The cool interior is slightly murky, since Anita has drawn the shades. Now, at nighttime, just a bedside lamp lights his weathered face and body, propped up in bed. He gestures to her, and Luluwa presses a kiss to his forehead before plopping herself into the bamboo chair beside the bed.

  “How are you, ya benti?”

  She smiles, because in the absence of her father, her grandfather, with only sons, has been showing her the care he always wanted to lavish on a daughter. Luluwa pulls her legs up underneath and wraps her arms around them to avoid exclaiming at how frail he looks. The chair groans, its wicker bottom nearly worn through from her increasing weight and more frequent visits.

  “What’s the news?”

  Luluwa rattles off the family’s daily hidden details – Khalid’s pranks, Noor’s latest gadget, Hind’s report card, Aunt Maryam’s new car. This time there’s a lot to report because it has been a week since her grandfather has had enough energy for their catch-up. Yadd Jassim listens to it all without criticizing her for being a busybody, sticking her nose into other people’s business, or blatant eavesdropping. He halts her verbal torrent to laugh, raise an eyebrow, or ask an occasional question for more details.

  “And Abdulla?”

  Now it is her turn to pause. Luluwa sighs. She has avoided telling her grandfather what he already knows – what the whole family knows – in case it would worry him: his eldest grandson is an incurable workaholic.

  “I don’t know how to get through to him,” she says, trailing off, chewing the end of her rope of hair that has curled between her arm and leg.

  Jassim shakes his head.

  “I know, I know, it’s not my job,” Luluwa grumbles. She flips shaggy bangs out of her eyes.

  “I was going to say he reminds me of another workaholic,” her grandfather admits with a slow grin.

  “Who?”

  No one in the rest of the family could be accused of taking work as seriously as Abdulla.

  Jassim points a gnarled knuckle at his own scrawny chest, causing Luluwa to raise her eyebrows in surprise.

  “But you were a tawash, Yaddi, a negotiator. Didn’t you hire someone to do the pearl diving for you?”

  He coughs, beckoning her to hand him the glass of water on the end table. Taking a big gulp, he relaxes again against the frame.

  “It wasn’t that simple, habibti,” he says, closing his eyes and letting his head drop back. “The competition was fierce amongst the traders. It was always a race to get back and forth before anyone else.”

  Luluwa holds her own breath until his begins to slow, loving the moments ahead best of all. Jassim will forget she is even there and resume telling her the stories of his merchant days, when he was one of the few Arabs ferrying precious pearls to India and gold out of Mumbai for the Qatari markets.

  No matter how many times she hears these stories, there is always something new, a detail Jassim remembers, or a person on al-lanj, the ship, who wasn’t introduced in a previous version. During one such session Luluwa connected the purposeful choice of her name, “pearl” in Arabic, with the growth of her family’s wealth, hard won by Jassim’s relentless expeditions.

  “So you see, they all wanted me to stay,” he says, his voice faint, barely a whisper. “They said it was enough. We had enough to start buying land.”

  Luluwa chews on the end of her hair, hoping they are finally getting to the year in which Jassim disappeared from Qatar to regions unknown, without the usual messages from the divers or crew.

  “But you wanted to go,” she prompts when the silence begins to lengthen, fearing he has fallen asleep.

  “I wanted to go back,” he admits, sinking down onto the pillows.

  “To see her again?”

  He nods, as if the motion is made painful by the memory.

  “We married in secret. She was…”

  “Pregnant?” she blurts, as if guessing at the next development in this evening’s Ramadan special.

  “With my baby.”

  “She was Indian,” Luluwa murmurs, showing mild surprise despite her best efforts to appear sophisticated.

  Her heart constricts and she fights the urge to pounce on her grandfather’s bed in glee. She knew, she just knew, there was a thrilling personal story in addition to all the talk about travel on the high seas. The twinkle in Yadd Jassim’s eye has no place in the tradition-bound society he comes from and lives in now. He has always gone his own way. Even allowing Luluwa, child of scandal, to come and live on the compound is a testament to his willingness to break molds.

  “What was her name, Yaddi?”

  But he is out of her reach now, enjoying the rare gift of sleep, one that comes to him less and less easily as his illness grows worse. Luluwa smacks herself in the head for forgetting how frail he is. She wishes she could reach out and touch the stubby eyelashes that cast small shadows on his papery skin. She turns out the bedside lamp and tiptoes out of the room, wondering when she will finally hear about her grandfather’s first love. The story keeps turning in her mind, even after they have broken their fast. She eats with Abdulla’s parents and brothers, as she has done for nearly three years, as though she is one of the originals.

  They pass plates for machboos, harees and thareed, the Prophet’s favorite dish, made especially during Ramadan. There’s tamarind juice, also served only during the season, and while normally she would toss back these delicacies, today she’s deep in thought.

  “Not feeling well?” Aunt Maryam asks.

  Luluwa shakes her head.

  “I’m fine, Ameti.”

  “Where’s Abdulla?” Uncle Mohammed asks the table at large. No one answers. After they had prayed the sunset prayer he had slipped away again, to his room, Luluwa suspects.

  “He didn’t fast today,” Saad says.

  “Telling my secrets?” Abdulla appears in the dining room as Maryam dishes out another helping of French fries onto Saad’s plate.

  “Migraines still?” Maryam says.

  Abdulla nods.

  “Well, I always fast,” Luluwa declares. “Even if I don’t feel well and even if it’s allowed. I never make up days.”

  “You don’t always,” Saad retorts.

  In their back and forth the two are like biological siblings, the proximity of their ages making them nearly twins.

  “You’re a girl, so no, you don’t.”

  “I do –”

  “Luluwa, eat,” Maryam says, as Abdulla slides into his seat at the table.

  Luluwa reddens, only just realizing what Saad means. Her period. She has to make up any days she’s not fasting when she’s on her period. This is the first Ramadan this has applied to her and the idea is still new.

  “I think I saw you with McDonald’s before maghreb,” Abdulla says casually in Saad’s direction.

  The boy’s protests fade away under the inquisitive gaze of his parents.

  Maryam elbows Mohammed.

  “Were you eating?” he growls.

  “No, Yuba,” Saad squeaks.

  “What were you doing at McDonald’s?” Maryam snaps.

  Saad ducks his head.

  “I was waiting for sunset,” he says.

  Luluwa passes the plate of French fries to Abdulla, who gives her a wink. No matter how much he pushes her away, she knows he still loves her, and her heart soars.

  Chapter Three

  Abdulla draws his fingers off the keyboard, adjusting white Bose earphones. He begins the piece again, for the hundredth time since waking up at fajr, the dawn call to prayer, unable to go back to sleep. Not that he had actually gotten up to pray: since the accident, he hasn’t been able to bring himself to his prayer mat, much less the family mosque.

  “Your cousin Hind is in the paper,” his mother texts, alternating with email attachments of the articles on her graduating class, as though he didn’t know the reason for her sudden interest.

  The weekends are mostly his when there is nothing pressing at
work, so he keeps listening, not bothering to shower since it is the weekend. As the sun climbs up and over the horizon, his family keep their opinions of his lack of faithfulness to themselves. Over the past years they’ve had bigger issues to worry about than his prayer life.

  Hours later, the sounds of the house waking up, another Friday beginning.

  The women are back from their orchestrated errands: in between sets, he hears the car doors and the side entrance to the house opening and shutting. Click, click, click, he hears his mother’s heels, likely accompanied by those of his aunties, Ahmed’s wife and anyone else who wanted to go shopping so that the bride go be on parade. A ridiculous exercise, since they had all known Hind since she was born.

  “Abdulla!”

  Luluwa must have been one of the click-clacks he heard moments earlier, because she now appears at his shoulder, examining the sheet music.

  “Bollywood Hits,” she says, wrinkling her nose as she reads the page.

  He shrugs.

  “Yadd Jassim still talks about his time in that city as a trader. I thought I’d practice and play for him.”

  She runs an oval fingernail over the white keys with a tentative smile.

  “He would like that.”

  Black leggings emphasize Luluwa’s gangliness, but today a red silk tunic falls at mid-thigh instead of the Ed Hardy t-shirt. Today, in honor of the occasion perhaps, she is wearing a shayla even though it is slipping towards the back of her head. Already she’s discarded her abaya, the outer garment worn by the rest of the women outside of the family compound. Partly because her own father may not have corrected her and their grandfather rarely leaves the house anymore, Luluwa has the most leeway of any female he knows. His mother, who has taken on responsibility for Luluwa, is certainly no restrainer of character, having raised only boys. Abdulla’s father is always off breaking ground on yet another building, especially in the up-and-coming West Bay area, and can’t be bothered with feminine affairs.

  At Luluwa’s impatient rap on the cover of his keyboard Abdulla slips off his headphones. She folds her arms and regards him without blinking.