Love Comes Later

by Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar

  “Thanks for your help,” she says. “See you next week.”

  Sangita grabs her wrist as Hind keeps putting things into her bag. At her look, the girl drops her arm.

  “I thought you had to wear a veil,” she says in a rush. “But you’re not.”

  Despite herself, Hind laughs at the furrow in the girl’s brow. Her shoulders relax and she twirls the pen she was going to put into her bag.

  “The veil is religious,” she says. “For some people. For others, it’s cultural.”

  Sangita leans forward, elbows on the table.

  “You’re on the cultural side?”

  Hind lets out a little sigh.

  “There’s no real point in talking about it. People’s minds are already made up. Those who do, aren’t going to stop… ” she trails off, unsure of what else to say about this symbol that Westerners are obsessed by.

  “And those who don’t aren’t going to start,” Sangita finishes.

  Hind nods.

  “Couldn’t have said it better myself.”

  Chapter Ten

  “The British system is so weird,” Sangita says. “You don’t even have to show your face. In the U.S. you get marked down if you don’t go to class.”

  Hind looks up from her book. “That sounds like high school.”

  A rare shaft of sunlight illuminates the coffee table where the two girls are delving into a stack of used books they’ve just bought. Close to campus, Hind’s sparse flat has become a replenishing hub for Sangita.

  “Maybe, but think about it. Only about four of us, out of a dozen international students in the program, always attend section. We’ve met only two of the others in our own program. It’s crazy.”

  Hind has to admit that the daily sessions aren’t worth that much. Today, during their postcolonial African literature seminar, she doodled a map of the African continent. True, she’s gotten to know almost none of the other international students. But she has no complaints, She has Sangita, this bubbling spirit of a girl with whom Hind has rapidly formed the first solid relationship she has ever known outside her family.

  From the start something had told her that, unlikely though it was, they could be friends. Only a week after their first seminar meeting, she did what she would only do for a friend from the Gulf or a relative: instead of going out for coffee, she invited her over for tea.

  A bit hesitant at first, Sangita had made a breezy joke out of being both Indian and American, “which in the UK means I’m a two-time loser”.

  Hind wasn’t sure how to respond. “I grew up with an Indian maid,” she said after a pause, but couldn’t help noticing her new friend’s slight wince. She rushed on: “Anita. My grandfather found her during his trips to trade on the coast, and she’s been with the family ever since.”

  “Well, our housekeeper is Mexican,” Sangita replied, letting the pressure off. “My family is full of entrepreneurs, too. Dad’s into hotels but I didn’t catch that bug.”

  “Everyone in Doha wants to own a business,” Hind said. “Cupcakes or abayas are the current range. Oh, and magazines.”

  “Cupcakes?”

  Hind laughed.

  “Qataris love to eat.”

  “You’re getting this degree to design abayas?”

  Hind stopped laughing. Sangita indicated she had clotted cream on the corner of her lip and she wiped it away.

  “I want to be an ambassador.” A sentence she had never said out loud to anyone else.

  “Do Qatari women do that?”

  Hind shrugged.

  “I would.”

  “Somebody has to be the first,” Sangita said as if this was the most normal thing in the entire world to want. She didn’t list all the reasons this was a bad profession for a woman or why Hind was being too demanding of her culture.

  Instead Sangita chattered on about the eccentricities of her own family, how odd she thought her mother was for trying to instill a sense of domestic duty in her even though they had a housekeeper, how Saturdays involved being dragged to the Indian grocery store so that she could keep an eye on her mother’s purchases.

  “If I’m honest, Mom’s attempts to domesticate me haven’t really amounted to much. I can barely boil water. But I make some mean eggs.”

  Hind sighed. “Whatever it is, we always have people there to do it,” she said, ignoring Sangita’s surprise. “The cook cooks, the maid cleans, the driver drives.”

  Sangita’s phone buzzed on the table between them but she didn’t answer. This caused Hind to raise an inquiring eyebrow.

  “Parents,” Sangita said. “You know, checking I’m alive.” She stretched her arms. “If you want to know the truth, I can’t wait to get engaged. That will make them happy, and maybe then they'll leave me the hell alone.”

  Hind replied with a snort. “That’s just the beginning,”

  Sangita’s face widened with surprise. “And how would you know?”

  Hind looked away, then back. “I’m engaged,” she burst out.

  Sangita froze. “What? Are you serious?”

  “Totally.”

  “Your husband is going to travel around with you?”

  Hind took a sip of tea.

  “Well! Forget all those career aspirations.” Sangita boomed with fake delight. She put on the high-pitched voice and blinking expression of an old auntie. “Congratulations dear, may you give birth before your anniversary.”

  They dissolved into helpless laughter, holding their sides.

  “What a relief to tell someone!” Hind said, falling back on the red sofa that had been delivered just that day, bringing some much-needed color into the apartment. “You know white people; they’ll think I’m going to be chained to the wall or something.”

  “You mean you won’t?”

  Hind paused for a minute, frowning. When Sangita didn’t blink, the two burst into peals of laughter again.

  Now, looking back on that first awkward tea, Hind still marvels at how quickly she had confided in Sangita. It’s the last thing she would have expected. After all, they’re so different in so many ways. She’s given up keeping track of the contradictions. Sangita won’t hesitate to take the Tube, which Hind would never do. Back home she drives her own car, even parks it herself. Yet here in London the girl has no idea of how to do the grocery shopping or even make a cup of tea. She is full of twists and turns; one minute Hind thinks of her as a cousin or even a sister, then the next it’s as if she is indeed the near-stranger she met only a few weeks ago. There is money in Sangita’s family, no doubt, but the differences between their privileged upbringings are so stark that Hind sometimes wonders whether, if the two met in Qatar, they would give each other a second glance.

  But their similarities are just as striking – scouring neighborhood bookstores, for example.

  “Can’t they find something new to write about us?” Hind mutters, as she flips the pages on a book she has picked up on a table marked: “Essential Texts: Arab Women.”

  “Orientalism is not dead!” Sangita declares, picking out one particularly lurid tome with veiled women’s faces on the cover, only eyes showing. She holds it up to Hind’s face, squinting, as if to compare the eyes. As so often, they erupt in giggles that turn into loud guffaws. When they do this in the bookshop it touches off uneasy glances in their direction. Two white women hug their purchases tighter to their chests and wander quickly into another part of the shop. Hind has to grab her friend’s arm and propel her out into the street before they are mistaken for hooligans.

  *

  The two never seem to tire of trading stories about parents who want them to find marital happiness, when what each of them really wants is academic or professional success. Before meeting Sangita, Hind thought the Gulf pressure to marry and have a family was second to none. Spouse-hunting at weddings was an Arab mother’s specialty, or so Hind had always believed. But Sangita has regaled her with stories of similar antics by Indian mothers in the United States. Matchmaking and const
ant introductions of eligible bachelors – it’s all nauseatingly familiar.

  “I want to see a book about similarities in Gulf and Indian marriage rites,” Sangita says.

  “Why don’t you write it?”

  “Maybe I will.”

  Hind knows Sangita doesn’t approve of her engagement to Abdulla. She tries not to liken it to the old-fashioned custom of arranged marriages that used to be widely accepted in India as well.

  “We had a little pressure, yes,” she says, “but it was generalized. Just get married was the message. Nothing specific was actually arranged. It was our decision. You have to admit there’s been a little progress.”

  Sangita won’t have any of it. “It still sounds coerced to me. I can’t tell you how many of my cousins have been in marriages like that – arranged marriages,” she says, shaking her head. “Still, in this day. And to keep their parents happy.”

  “But ours is more like... a marriage of convenience,” she explains.

  “Convenience?” Sangita says. “Like the old Europeans? Land deals, pure and simple.”

  “You mean like in the fifteen century,” Hind says, scoffing.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “He’s family. The money, the land, the name. Yeah, I guess it is like the Europeans.”

  “Is he at least hot?”

  “You sound like my sister. Who is a teenager,” Hind says, laughing. “You can judge for yourself. Here, I’ll show you the engagement photos.”

  Hind reaches under the sofa and pulls out a photo album. Looking at it with Sangita, she tries to view their official portrait from a non-Qatari perspective: on a low cream sofa with a high back a youngish man, handsome but stern-looking, sits stiffly beside her, green paisley wallpaper in the background.

  “You’ll come to the wedding,” she says, looking up at a surprised Sangita. “There will be six hundred other women there, so you’ll fit right in.”

  Sangita smiles slowly and nods. “Well, why not? I’ll come. Actually, it could be fascinating. I mean, I’ve never been to a wedding without everyone my parents ever knew being there. And the idea of an all-female reception, without any photography? Rather intriguing.”

  “Who knows who you might meet,” Hind teases. “On the other hand, my sister always says ‘Don’t go to a wedding to find a wife, go to a funeral. That’s when you know what they really look like.’”

  “I don’t think I’ll share that gem with my mother,” Sangita says. “One of the reasons I left home was because the whole family decided to take on the mission of finding me a husband. I wasn’t safe with anyone. I don’t want to give her any more ideas about where to find a potential groom for me.”

  *

  For the first six months of their program Hind has left the walls of the flat bare, the polar opposite of her wall, indeed every wall she’s ever seen, back home in Qatar. It gives her a quiet feeling of liberation.

  But for the past two weeks, as Hind has written a paper for the media and popular culture seminar, a rolled-up poster has sat on the island in the kitchen. Sangita, who has had enough of bare walls, has decided to frame it during reading week as a way to commemorate their survival of the first term. She talks Nigel the security guard into letting her enter the flat one afternoon while Hind is still in class, and hangs it above the sofa as a statement to offset the apartment’s dismal lack of décor.

  Hind, when she walks in, laughs until her sides hurt at the installation of teenage heartthrob Robert Pattinson, whom she describes as “pale as a bad shade of foundation”. But Sangita’s tactless push to get Hind to decorate the walls galvanizes the couturista in her, though the poster retains its prime placement in the apartment even after the painting of various rooms and the introduction of actual framed art, including Arabic calligraphy.

  Hind realizes Sangita has become almost a roommate. She is as used to Sangita as she is to Noor, and when the obvious conclusion strikes her she’s amazed it took so long.

  “Look, Sangita, I should have realized this long ago, but you should have the spare bedroom.”

  “Oh, I can’t.”

  “No, no, it’s yours. Really.”

  “No, I mean I can’t... Well, I just don’t think I can afford it.”

  Hind waves away any thought of sharing the rent.

  “I’m not trying to make money,” she says. “I’d be paying the rent anyway. Regardless. But with you here I’d have a friend to share things with. Not just now and then, but all the time.”

  Sangita’s hesitant smile turns weepy as she throws her arms around Hind.

  Yes, Hind thinks, this is what I need. Company, as the term wears on and the chill of the British fall hardens into winter. Workload is bound to increase, and exams will call for intense late cramming. The lonely anxiety of all this would be eclipsed by having Sangita here, ready to listen to her deepest thoughts, worries and fears, and to hear them without judgment through the lens of what-will-so-and-so-think?

  “So, that’s done?”

  Sangita looks up and nods vigorously, her face wet, full of gratitude. “Done.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Incredibly, Noor’s presence in Essex has turned out to be no problem at all. Hind had expected her little sister to be all over her, but besides a “Hi, let’s meet soon,” there have been no cries for help.

  Her mother, who helped Noor move in, actually came and went without Hind having to host her for tea, or otherwise subject herself to interrogation, thank goodness. Her mother texted that she wanted to visit, or at the very least meet Hind at Heathrow on her way home, but Hind made sure she was unavoidably busy during the slight window of time her mother provided.

  Meanwhile, Noor has hardly been in touch and seems to be doing fine, which is definitely a relief, but behind the relief Hind has to admit she is a little irked, maybe even disappointed. Noor doesn’t need her? Well, fine.

  Still, as big sister, she really ought to do her duty and at least drop in for a visit. Things aren’t always what they seem. What if the poor girl is floundering but too proud to call? Hind decides to skip another day of classes – she’s already skipped so many she’s lost count – and pop in on her sister, which means a tedious train trip to Essex, but if she’s needed, she’s needed.

  “Skipping again?” Sangita says, noticing Hind is still in bed. Sangita, of course, is all ready for class and probably has been since dawn.

  Certainly the two of them have been exceptionally good roommates, but as the term has dragged on the differences in their approaches to class attendance and studying have become more and move evident.

  “Please, don’t go on at me,” Hind groans from the bed. “I have to check on Noor today – and you know we don’t have to go to the lectures.”

  “Listen, if we were in America, we’d both fail if we didn’t show up,” Sangita calls back from the front door. “But as my father would say, words of wisdom going down the drain.” She pulls on her boots. “And I doubt Noor needs as much help as you say. You just like riding the train.”

  “To Colchester, seriously?”

  But the door has shut. Hind rolls back over in bed and pulls down her eyeshade.

  There hasn’t been a text from Noor in days, which can only mean Sangita is right and her sister is finally settling into her undergraduate program. Poor mother. First one daughter abroad, now the other. From the silence in the days since her mother helped Noor move in, Hind knows she blames her for the liberalization of the family.

  As the tantalizing degree comes ever closer, Hind can almost forget about the welcome reception brewing at home, the one that will usher in her new life beside the stranger she is already half-married to.

  A knock at the door wakes Hind up, and for a moment she doesn’t know where she is. The last thing she remembers is trying to decide which train she meant to take to visit Noor. If, that is, she kept to her plan, which was becoming less and less attractive as she thought about it. She had dressed, and then flopped on the bed
again, studying train schedules. She must have dropped off, because that’s the last she remembers.

  More knocking. Sangita is still out so she can’t yell for her to get the door.

  “Is Sangita here?”

  Still half asleep, Hind stumbles to the door and cracks it open. Peering out, she sees a tall, very dark, extremely handsome man with hair thicker and blacker than her own. Could it be one of her cousins? He looks so familiar, and not at all threatening,

  “Sangita,” he repeats, smiling slightly. He raises his voice a bit, and enunciates carefully. “Is she here?”

  “Sangita? No, she’s in class.” Hind feels herself blush as she studies him. No, he’s not Arab. He looks more like... like Sangita, she decides. Indian. And, like Sangita, his accent is oddly American.

  “You are?”

  “Ravi,” he announces, as if this explains everything.

  They linger in the doorway. Hind is thankful she fell asleep with her Armani jumpsuit on and not the tattered jeans she normally lounges around in when she stays home all day.

  “Nigel let you up?” she asks, stalling. Usually their security guard is much more attentive. She doesn’t want to be rude, but if Sangita has a boyfriend this is certainly the first she’s heard of it.

  “Didn’t seem to have a problem.” Ravi gives her a smile that, though practiced, still has the desired effect. She somehow feels more at ease, if not intrigued by the appearance of his dimples. There is something about the grin that is familiar, though she cannot put her finger on it.

  “Sangita isn’t home yet,” she says.

  “You’re in the middle of something,” he says, as if just realizing the awkwardness of the situation. “I promise I’m not a serial killer.”