Love Comes Later

by Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar

  “Okay, but which dialect?” she sighs. “Arabic’s not one language, it’s more like fifteen.”

  They contemplate each other, this time openly, as they sip their drinks.

  He has rolled up the sleeves of his pristine white shirt, revealing ropy forearms sprinkled with wiry hair. The sound of a passing police siren startles them both. He smiles again, a not unfriendly smile, and gulps down half the contents of the mug. Her stomach growls loudly enough for them both to hear. Neither of them has eaten anything since their first encounter, which for Sangita means she’s had no food since lunch the day before.

  “Let me make some sandwiches,” she says, wishing Hind were there to do the shopping for them. Fresh Market is one of Hind’s favorite places in London, though she’s confessed that in Qatar she never does the shopping or cooking.

  Food in general is not Sangita’s strong suit, despite her mother’s best efforts. Opening the fridge, she misses Hind even more keenly. This is irrational, because if Hind were here Sangita wouldn’t be making small talk or sandwiches. They would be packing and saying their goodbyes.

  Abdulla contemplates the contents of the fridge: two bottles of Perrier – Hind’s; Sangita has never liked sparkling water – one box of baking soda in the door, two sticks of butter, and twenty bottled Cokes in the tub marked VEGETABLES.

  “Let’s see what you can do with this,” he says, coughing to cover what sounds like a laugh.

  She lets the door swing shut and bends down to open the freezer, located counter-intuitively underneath the fridge, European-style. She’s careful to use her knees, the way Hind has often reminded her: to bend down, not over.

  She plucks out a box of frozen tandoori that is hiding in a corner, and shakes it, attempting to loosen up the freezer burn clinging to the package. It falls with a dull thud on the countertop.

  They regard it instead of each other.

  “September 2011.” Sangita reads the expiry date with a straight face.

  “We’re going out,” he says.

  She tosses the tandoori back into the icy depths, shuts the freezer, and straightens to face him. Her uncertainty must show on her face: they are of the opposite sex, not related; he is engaged; and it is Ramadan. She can’t think of a more unlikely set of circumstances for a lunch date.

  “I have no place to stay, you have no food, and it’s still my first day,” he says, answering her questions as if they were written on her forehead. “I can’t shake this migraine from the plane,” he adds. “Food might help.”

  “Food is called for,” Sangita agrees.

  Whatever else he is, he’s not an unreasonable guy, she thinks, as if taking notes for Hind.

  “Afterward I’ll figure out what to do.”

  “You’re staying?" she asks.

  He pauses for a minute as if considering an invitation.

  “I mean, I just thought you’d have a driver, and a place, you know, in Bayswater or something… ”

  He rolls his shoulders into a shrug. “I could call someone,” he admits, “but then I’d likely get questions about why I’m here and requests to go places I’d rather avoid.”

  The downturned corners of his mouth make him seem almost sad, and for a moment Sangita actually feels sympathy for him.

  “You’d rather be anonymous,” she says.

  “If it’s okay… ”

  “You’re asking my permission?” There is no hiding the surprise and slight glee in her voice.

  “I assume you pay rent here, so it is technically your apartment too.”

  Now it’s her turn to nod and cross her arms as if she were weighing the possibilities.

  “And if I say no?”

  Abdulla pulls out his BlackBerry.

  “I’ll call the embassy. They can surely find me something. But when someone asks me why I’m in London and where Hind is –”

  “This neighborhood has a bit of everything,” she says, grabbing her bag from the table to the right of the door. “What do you feel like?”

  “Indian,” he says reflectively, to the spot just above her head.

  “That’s easy,” she replies, heading out the door with him and pulling it shut behind her, hoping to leave behind the burgeoning feeling she is starting to enjoy bantering with this stranger.

  Chapter Eighteen

  After a few Tube stops and a brisk walk into the Soho area, they are sitting at Ragam, her favorite South Indian restaurant, with its hot pink interior and green trim. Sangita and Abdulla pore over their large wood-casing menus. If they were to hold them up it would be impossible to see each other across the table. She lays hers flat, pretending to scrutinize it as he is doing, though she knows most of it by memory. She’s just grateful for a few moments to focus on something other than making polite conversation.

  Abdulla seems relieved Hind isn’t likely to show up imminently. He is considerably more relaxed since their morning encounter and is becoming almost interesting.

  “You two ready?”

  The waitress appears, the streak of pink in her hair a match for the restaurant’s interior.

  “Do you have biryani?” Abdulla asks.

  The girl’s answering stare can’t be read as either affirmative or negative.

  “Dahl makhni, butter naan, chicken vindaloo,” Sangita says, falling back on her favorite meal with Hind. This is the heavy carb version they've relied on when working through the night on qualifying exams, usually sending Nigel out to pick it up.

  “On the menu it says lamb.”

  “Tell the cook Gita asked.”

  The girl turns away unimpressed, but the move gets Abdulla’s attention. He closes the shutters on his menu and looks inquiringly at Sangita, his head tilted to one side as though he’s assessing a painting.

  “We come here a lot," she says.

  Sangita has to remind herself to stop sounding like she and Hind are a couple. In fact their friendship has mostly allowed them to avoid family pressures to become grown-up women and hurry along their path to being wives and mothers.

  “Drinks?”

  A woman with a long braid, wearing a yellow sari, appears and Sangita kicks herself inwardly. She looks at her watch – three o’clock. Normally Maya Auntie doesn’t work the lunch shift but leaves it to her nephew to manage. She thought they would be safe, but the already strange lunch has just become public news. Not to the Qatari community, maybe, but Sangita’s life has just gotten enormously complicated.

  “Orange juice,” Abdulla says, waving off the wine list when the woman returns with one.

  “The same please, Maya Auntie,” Sangita echoes, trying to avoid eye contact with the restaurant owner, a friend of her parents. Perhaps coming to Ragam wasn’t the best idea after all, but she took a chance, same as Hind. And, same as Hind, she has been caught out.

  “Of course, dear. Nice to see you again. Please say ‘hi’ to your parents.” Maya Auntie speaks as if it were just Sangita dining alone, but her eyes linger on Abdulla, taking in the gleaming flat dial of his watch and the starch in his white shirt.

  Sangita wishes painful death on her brother and missing roommate for the third time that day. Maya Auntie has been playing a major role in helping her parents find “the one” for their daughter, even though she is far away from their nest in the U.S. All she needs is for her mother to find out she’s had dinner with a good-looking man in London. In two days she’ll be sending out wedding invitations. Can Maya Auntie tell that Abdulla is Arab? Has she heard Sangita say his name?

  “You okay?” she asks Abdulla, hoping that Maya Auntie will keep her distance if they make conversation; otherwise the matron will be unlikely to hide her curiosity.

  “Flight catching up with me,” he says, rubbing his long fingers across his face. She can see the signs of travel fatigue and something more, years of pressure maybe, in the fine wrinkles around his eyes. His pinkies rub down the length of his nose on either side.

  “She’ll come back,” Sangita says, hoping it’s
true, and resisting the urge to touch his hand, which is now lying inches from hers. Reminders of her Hindu upbringing and life with Hind have helped restrain her boundary-crossing American tendencies. Rule number one is simple: never touch non-relative males. Of course, there’s also “do not dance, eat, or have sex with them,” but these Sangita has managed to bend every now and then. Although not, she reminds herself, sitting up a little straighter in her chair, with other people’s fiancés.

  “And then what will I do with her?” Abdulla says pinching the bridge of his nose.

  “You’ll talk it out,” Sangita offers diplomatically, and raises her chilled glass to him in a toast. “More than that I can’t say, because I don’t know what you want to talk to her about,” she says carefully.

  “It was a rhetorical question,” he says drily. “No need to bring out your inner Oprah.”

  She laughs.

  She both does and doesn’t want to get further involved. In the midst of her frantic calls to Ravi and Hind she hasn’t had much time to worry about what exactly it is that Abdulla wants from her roommate that can have brought him all the way to London. For now, just sitting across from him is a welcome distraction from the threat of Maya Auntie hovering in the periphery.

  He clinks glasses with her, his lips turned downward in a sardonic grin, as the waitress arrives with their masala papad.

  “This isn’t the fifteenth century,” Sangita says, emboldened by a few bites of the first food she’s eaten all day. “You two can come together and figure things out.”

  Abdulla contemplates her over the glass’s rim, places his glass back on the table, locks his fingers together, and seems to consider her statement. Sangita shoves more tomato and papad into her mouth so as to avoid saying anything else ridiculous. She swears she can hear a clock ticking on the wall.

  The throat-clearing of the waitress announces more food has arrived. The girl with the pink streak serves spoonfuls of each dish as though putting out feed for farm animals.

  “I’ll do it,” Sangita says, as a meager plop of rice lands on her plate. The girl shrugs, as if to say it’s not rocket science.

  “I always get biryani because I never know what else to order,” Abdulla says. They attack their food as though in agreement to suspend any serious discussion. She shovels rice into her mouth and rips a piece of naan in half. Sangita, do not get in the middle of this, she reminds herself sternly as her mother often did while disciplining her brother.

  “I don’t even know your name to be talking about such personal things,” Abdulla says.

  She rubs her forefinger around the rim of her now almost empty glass, causing a tiny hum from the vibration.

  “My name is Sangita,” she says.

  “Does that have a meaning?”

  “Musical.”

  “Abdulla is –”

  “The slave of God,” she completes for him.

  “I feel more like a slave to my family,” he mutters.

  “I thought men had all the power in Qatari society,” she says.

  As if to save him from revealing any further secrets to this perfect stranger, Maya Auntie shoos away the reluctant waitress and refills his glass herself. He immediately drains it again. This is the only excuse she needs to hover around them and refill it.

  Her presence stills their repartee. Maya Auntie avoids Sangita’s side of the table until Abdulla inclines his head to indicate more for her as well. Sangita knows her mother’s phone will be ringing as soon as daybreak hits the American East Coast. Her life as an independent woman is doomed.

  “You seem to know a lot about me,” Abdulla says. The waitress comes around again to refill their plates, but he waves her off and picks up the serving spoons himself.

  “Hind talks about you all the time, and how strange it will be to go back. To be married… ”

  Something about the sound of her name stills any playfulness in the conversation. Abdulla spoons out the dahl and rice, first to her then to himself. Sangita could kick herself for sharing anything about Hind’s private ruminations. He goes perfectly still, leaning his knife and fork together against the side of the plate.

  “It’s not just her life that is changing,” he says, and takes a large gulp of juice.

  “It isn’t that she doesn’t want to marry you,” Sangita says, almost at a whisper. “She just needs time to get used to the idea.”

  He seems to consider her point as he chews a large portion of chicken vindaloo.

  “It’s not easy on the guy either,” he says finally. “And we have run out of time.”

  It is her turn to raise an eyebrow, but she has a feeling it looks nowhere near as elegant as when he does it, partly because she has never figured out how to raise just one.

  “You don’t know what you’ll get. What if she’s lazy, refuses to work, spends all your money to keep up with her aunties and cousins and sisters? Or changes her mind after you’ve spent a million riyals on the wedding and goes back to her family’s house and you have to go through it all again.” He counts off the various possibilities on his fingers.

  Or she could die, Sangita thinks, when she sees him staring at his ring finger.

  Abdulla’s pause is almost imperceptible. “Or end up giving you only girls," he goes on, "so you have to marry again. And then you’re stuck with two wives. I can’t think of anything worse.” He feigns a shudder.

  Another wife? Sangita puts her knife and fork down carefully, reminding herself that an assault on any person would likely result in a jail sentence, let alone stabbing a foreign semi-dignitary.

  Abdulla notices her flash of anger. “It’s a joke,” he says, tapping her on the back of her hand. “Lighten up. Most people our age don’t practice that custom. Unless they are from really conservative families.”

  She lets out a cautious breath, assessing him from under her eyelashes.

  “Don’t tell me you’re like the Westerners, always obsessed with the idea of multiple wives,” he says.

  He continues eating, grinning because it was so easy to get a rise out of her.

  “I watch Big Love,” she says. “I know Muslims aren’t the only ones who practice polygamy.”

  At his blank look she laughs.

  “It’s a show on HBO about some extreme Mormon types who have multiple wives, but secretly, because it’s illegal in America.”

  He seems dubious, and the eyebrow rises again.

  “Why are you here?” she asks.

  There is a small silence as he casts about for something to say.

  “The divorce rate is really high,” he says, “Too high. I just want to make sure we are still on the same page.”

  Sangita chews a bite of potato and rice, considering the stories she’s heard about women leaving their husbands the morning after the wedding reception, going back to their father’s house.

  “This is when it might be good to be poor,” she says, finishing her piece of naan as he pauses, waiting for further explanation. “When the family has money to take the girl back in, she may have less incentive to work things out.”

  He sweeps the last drop of curry from his plate with the last piece of naan and seems to consider.

  “There is such a thing as too much money,” he agrees, to her surprise and pleasure. “As a country, we are suffering from this.”

  She drains her juice, thinking the next time she sees Hind she will tell her she could do worse than this man. Of course having lunch with someone is not the same as living with them every day for the rest of your life…

  “Dessert?”

  Maya Auntie is hovering again, the glint in her eye giving Sangita an uneasy feeling. What if she has already woken up her mother? The sighting of her daughter at lunch with an unexplained male might be an occasion worthy of such an early morning phone call. What an irony – lunch is still going on, and they may have discussed everything from the proximity of arms on the table to how much the two have eaten of each dish.

  I should have intro
duced him as a classmate, Sangita thought belatedly, smiling weakly. Her teenage skills at deception have faded since she moved out of her parents’ house.

  “No, thank you,” they say in unison.

  “The bill, please,” Abdulla says to the waitress when she comes to clear the mostly empty dishes from their table. Maya Auntie frowns and waves at Sangita as if to say don’t be a nuisance.

  “We’re going to pay, Auntie,” Sangita begins, but instead of arguing Abdulla simply leans back, pulls out a roll of fifty-pound notes from his pocket and leaves a few on the table. The waitress brings a small tray of fennel and sugar in place of the bill. He tosses a few pieces of crystallized sugar into his mouth, pushes his chair back and rises to leave. He’s all the way to the door before seeming to remember something, and turns, waiting for Sangita, who rushes away from Maya Auntie’s inquisitive gaze with a perfunctory murmur that the food was delicious, and precedes him into the street.

  Chapter Nineteen

  As they enter the building Abdulla nods at Nigel, who is reading on his Kindle – most likely how to convert a nuclear reactor into an ecologically friendly device or something equally obscure. Sangita is amazed at how knowledgeable the door guard is about world events. After noting the understated exchange between the two men, she makes a mental note to Google his photo and see what former military branch he might have served in. His bulging thighs and ramrod-straight posture give away what she suspects he would never share with her if asked.

  She slides the key into the lock and then takes out a second one for the top part of the doorway. Abdulla silently takes it from her, as it is half a foot above her head, the one Hind usually leaves undone and they are back in the apartment.

  He seems as lost as she is at what to do next.

  “I’ve called Hind a hundred times,” she says, slinging her bag down on the end table.

  “And she isn’t answering,” he says, stating the obvious.

  Sangita takes care not to mention that the phone in question is a satellite phone, which would clue him to the fact that she’s thousands of miles away.