Love Comes Later

by Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar

  They are finally standing up to leave, stretching the kinks out of their legs, when Abdulla reaches suddenly for her hand and jerks her back down.

  “What in the world…?”

  “Keep low,” he tells her. “We have to go quickly, but stay down.”

  His larger hand grips her bony one and begins dragging her forward. Bent double, they weave through the mostly empty row towards the nearest exit. As he picks up speed, almost in a semi-jog, she finds herself doing double time to keep up with him.

  “Why are we doing this?” she almost wails in exasperation.

  “Co-workers,” he says. “Don’t look. Keep moving.”

  They are ducking past janitors sweeping trash and concession stands closing for the day when a large man coming out of the bathroom brings them up short. Abdulla drops Sangita’s hand as though it was on fire, flinging it away from him, and at the same time takes a giant step away from her.

  Sangita looks for somewhere to disappear. The elation of the day has evaporated and she is reminded just who she’s spent this special afternoon with – a Qatari civil servant, destined to be her friend’s husband.

  “Abdulla?”

  “Hamad!” he exclaims, with more excitement than he has ever shown his secretary before.

  “You’re on this trip? I thought you declined to join the official delegation.”

  Abdulla spreads his hands out searching for a plausible explanation.

  “Backstage tour,” Sangita cuts in, using a professional tone. “Up-close view of the Olympics for future hopeful host cities.” She gives them such a conspiratorial wink that Hamad almost reacts with a classic double-take.

  Unable to help himself, Abdulla breaks out into a grin, and coughs to cover a laugh.

  “We better keep moving along, sir, if we’re going to keep up with the others,” Sangita says to Abdulla, as though they have just met. She indicates forward with her head and Abdulla nods, thankful yet again for her quick wits.

  “Yes, yes, excuse my haste. See you soon, insha’Allah.” Abdulla waves and is off before Hamad can ask when or where. They take off again, so close to the exit he can almost smell the fresh air, and hit the crash bar of the double doors together, bursting out into the dusk.

  Sangita has her arm out, hailing a black cab before he can check behind them again to see if they are being followed. They tumble in as she says “South Kensington.”

  He takes a seat across from her on a pull-down chair; she sits on the bench. Abdulla looks out of the window, rubbing his chin. No sign of anyone he knows.

  She leans her head back, and begins to giggle.

  “Sir?” he says, breaking into a laugh.

  She joins him in a full-scale laughing fit, their sides heaving. The cabbie slides the partition shut as Sangita begins cackling.

  “We’re lucky that was Hamad,” he says, wiping his eyes. “He’ll probably forget he even saw us when he gets back to the hotel.”

  Sangita pays the driver and accepts the change, and they tumble out on the curb in front of the apartment building.

  “Who else was there?”

  “I thought I recognized my uncle in the front row,” Abdulla replies.

  She stops in the stairwell a step above him. They are almost the same height and he can’t avoid looking into her eyes.

  “Thank you,” she says, placing a hand on his chest. “For not getting Hind into trouble.”

  She seems to be about to say something else, but only gives him a pat before they resume tromping up the stairs to the flat. Sangita passes Abdulla the key, leaning on his forearm to keep her up.

  He enters the apartment behind her as she throws her bag down on the counter and kicks her shoes into a pile by the door. He doesn’t mention that he would have had as many questions to answer as his missing fiancée if the family had seen him and Sangita together, alone, in public.

  “You do that too?” he says absent-mindedly, watching her flop into an armchair as though there weren’t a bone in her body.

  “Do what?”

  “Stretch out... like that.”

  She looks at him with an odd smile and pulls a small blanket from the back of the sofa, covering herself from mid chest to knees. Turning his full attention to his own shoes, he scrupulously avoids the line of sight that could fully take in her supine form from head to toe. Abdulla realizes he hasn’t seen such a sight since he was a husband. Luluwa wouldn’t count, but in any case she has too much energy to lie down ever; and his mother is always watching TV upstairs in her room. How could this American girl know that women in abayas never lie down in public? It means nothing to her. Is that why he is not shocked? Then it strikes him that in truth, he hasn’t been this at ease with a female in his life ever, other than with Fatima. His dead wife. Fatima, Fatima, Fatima. Maybe repeating her name will bring him to his senses. He stands up, his back still to the sofa, pressing his hands against the wall as though warming up to run a 5K. He tries to shake the mounting tension from his body and settles into the chair opposite her, feet on the floor, legs casually extended in front of him, hands to the side, as though he can’t hear the blood coursing in his ears. After their little outing he has no plan. A few hours’ distraction was all he wanted, but the day wore on, and the longer they stayed the less sure he was what to do next.

  “We have a lot in common, Indians and Arabs,” the girl is saying. “You know, the Mogul dynasty of Muslims ruled India for hundreds of years. Where do you think you got the samosa and henna from?”

  He gives her a deadpan stare.

  “Do you break out in these mini-lectures often?”

  “I get that from my dad,” she says with a laugh.

  Suddenly he is struck by an image of his own father, Mohammed, at his second milcha, grinning like a child with candy in the midst of Ramadan. I should have called home the minute she told me the truth about Hind’s whereabouts, he thinks. But then what? Explain he has come to London to do what? Consummate it, as Sangita had boldly pondered? His father would see right through that, knowing full well he had no desire for this marriage in the first place. No, if his family knew he had come here alone, without her family’s permission, without a chaperone, they would instantly know the truth, that he had come to end it. And whatever Hind’s mistakes, nothing will save him from going on the marriage market again.

  “Eggs?” he says, to fill the growing silence.

  So there are his choices: marry Hind, or break it off to do it all again another day. His future, the one his family always sees as so rosy, unrolls like a tableau before him: rumors, recriminations, and whispers at the mall, at the office, at restaurants, that he is the guy whose fiancée ran off on him. He is the man. There will of course be other families happy enough to make an alliance with his, but the torment of another beauty parade of victims is more than he can bear to consider.

  Sangita giggles.

  “We’re in London. Let’s order something.”

  She points towards the kitchen where an array of take-out choices is taped to the side of the refrigerator.

  “What do you fancy? Chinese?” he asks, his fingers darting over the menu collage that covers the entire left side of the fridge above where it meets the counter.

  Sangita shrugs and pulls off her headband. A shiny wave of black hair spills across the sofa arm, sweeping to the floor. Abdulla can’t help but notice how much she resembles an odalisque in a painting. The shape of her face, the color of her hair, even her skin could be mistaken for Moroccan. And the pose. It is the pose of the harem woman.

  He clears his throat and tries to concentrate on her face, excluding the rest, but the V of her t-shirt defies him as it dips lower when she stretches. It has been a long time since he saw, much less touched, a woman’s body. Not since Fatima’s pregnancy, when she was too worried about the baby.

  Just as he is watching Sangita’s lips say “Chinese sounds good to me”, the phone rings and he makes a stabbing reach for it.

  “Hello?” he
says, turning toward the wall, back to Sangita.

  “Who is this?”

  He bristles at the male voice on the other end of the line.

  “I could ask you the same question,” he says.

  “I want to speak to Sangita.”

  Abdulla hands the phone over, since she is already hovering at his arm.

  “Hello? Ravi!”

  Abdulla eyes the menus on the fridge and flips out his phone, dialing absently. She can feel his eyes trained on her face.

  “Where are you? What? Slow down.” She turns her head toward the receiver as though this could amplify the sound of her voice. “I tried calling you, they said you were out.”

  She listens; Abdulla calls the Chinese take-out place and asks for one of everything on the menu. Whatever they don’t eat they can give to Nigel or freeze for later.

  Sangita closes her eyes when she hears the panic in her brother’s voice. Unflappable Ravi who was the first to arrive at disaster scenes, who had broken his leg during the state final football match and gone off the field smiling, who looked in the face of poverty once a year on the visits to their family’s ashram. Ravi sounds like he hasn’t slept in days.

  “Sangita, it’s been a roller coaster,” he is saying, as Sangita feels her heart slightly breaking. “I don’t know how you can have lived with her for so long. She’s so sheltered it’s shocking.”

  She leans her head against the fridge slightly and rubs her throat.

  “I told her to go home,” he says.

  She feels a brief moment of elation. Maybe Hind is on her way home that very minute.

  “This is what turned it all around.” He laughs. She can imagine him shaking his head, as her father had done when Sangita refused to go to any of the half-dozen universities in New York. “She loves a challenge.”

  Warmth has entered his voice, as if talking about the quirks of a friend – or new infatuation.

  Sangita closes her eyes. Her only brother is falling in love with her friend. Who is already engaged. And whose fiancé is standing right behind her. In the apartment he has paid for.

  “Ravi, I can’t really talk about this now,” she says for the first time in their lives, halting his rhapsody in midstream.

  “Who was that earlier?” he asks.

  Sangita bites her lip. Abdulla is doing the predatory walk again across the living room. She pinches the bone of her nose in between her eyes.

  “I need to talk to Hind,” she says.

  “She’s not here, Sangita,” he says, as though she were daft. “Do you think I’d be ranting about her in front of her face?”

  “Come home,” she says flatly. “You both need to be here and settle this.”

  “It’s the guy,” he says, whistling through his teeth. “He’s there.”

  Sangita nods even though he can’t see her and despite the fact that Abdulla hasn’t asked her a question.

  “We’re a day’s drive from the city,” he says, “in slums. And I don’t know if there are flights.”

  “We’ll get you a flight,” she says. Abdulla already has his phone back up to his ear. “Just get to Mumbai Airport as soon as you can.”

  He is about to say something earth-shattering, she is sure, like “Hind is having my baby” or “We got married two days ago” when the line cuts off, as it still so often does in India. She places the receiver back in its cradle and massages the back of her neck.

  The doorbell sounds. Abdulla deals with the delivery boy who has brought six bags of food that neither of them feels like eating. He drops them on the countertop.

  “Heavy rains predicted for the weekend,” he says, fingers drumming on the countertop.

  “It’s the monsoon season,” Sangita says, lifting plastic containers out of the brown paper bag. “They’ll get out as soon as they can.”

  Abdulla doesn’t reply, merely punches the countertop, thumb tucked under his fingers, knuckles meeting the marble.

  “Egg drop soup?” She lifts up the quart-size container, which is nearly as big as she is. He shakes his head no, but his lips manage a slight twitch at her attempt at humor.

  “We have to eat,” she says.

  They play with their soup. Neither of them makes a move toward the solid food.

  “Who knows what they’ll say when they get here?” Sangita says.

  The thought seems to deflate Abdulla more than anger him. He realizes he is actually intrigued at thought of the two of them showing up, arms intertwined, confessing their love for each other.

  He wonders how marriage to Hind would play out if they lived in Qatar. Abdulla’s mother would take to her immediately, of course, able to spot a fellow appreciator of brands, a fellow Gucci-lover. His father, not really interacting with the world of women except to see his eldest son married, would be satisfied by her mere presence.

  But now he doubts things will ever reach this point. Disinheritance is most likely on the horizon for one if not both of them. Abdulla is sure of it. And then there will be no way to fund Hind’s designer addiction.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Satiated with a little taste of everything, Sangita takes up her customary seat in the living room. Only this time, stretching out across the coffee table across from her are two muscular saplings in place of Hind’s lean legs. Abdulla flips through channels after grumbling about the position of the TV, which is half the length of the room away, half-hidden in a wardrobe across the room from where they sit, and nearly impossible to see from the more comfortable sofa.

  “The living room is for conversation,” Sangita says.

  They haven’t spoken about the phone call or the flurry of follow-ups when Abdulla made a complicated series of flight arrangements and backups for Ravi and Hind in case the monsoons caused more delay. Sangita is glad of the silence. She is still trying to process the breathiness of her brother’s voice and gauge the wonder she could almost see in his eyes.

  They would be such an odd couple, her best friend and her brother. So different: he shunning their family wealth to make his own contribution in India; she using her wealth to establish the kind of life she wants away from the prying eyes of her culture. Going to see Ravi in action was one thing. Living day in, day out, amongst the poorest people in the world, as he was planning on doing full time, would be another.

  She sighs at Abdulla’s channel surfing and stretches. He doesn’t seem able to stop on any one station for more than ten seconds.

  Abdulla glances over at her and immediately regrets it. The smell of her perfume hangs in the air between them; not heavy like the oil-based oud they use at home but light, citrusy. How has he not noticed it before?

  “What are we going to do tonight?” he asks. “Since there is no satellite to save us.”

  Sangita can’t help but notice – it is the first mention of “we” since the truth came out. Perhaps he doesn’t think of her as the enemy after all.

  Held by her shining eyes, it is his turn to stand and stretch. For a moment the breadth of his arms places the top of her head only a fingertip away.

  “We’re in this together,” he says, “whatever they come here and say.”

  Sangita resists the chill that creeps up her arms with this reminder of how serious the whole situation really is, despite the bad tea, eggs or Chinese food. She is sitting next to a government employee of a state that still has beheadings on its law books – and this is true, no matter how much he dismisses their existence. A quick scan on Google proves as much. Her brother is running around India with the fiancée of a cousin of a cousin of the brother of the ruler of a country that still allows beheadings. Or something like that.

  But Sangita can’t reconcile the misogynist tendencies of a state that would do such a thing with the living, breathing man who stands before her. He seems... reasonable. After all, has he gone screaming to the authorities or turned her in as some kind of accomplice? Maybe she’s going to have to reframe her opinion of the sheikh.

  Her eyes fall
on the calendar that also serves as a placemat on the glass top coffee table. Alice’s shebang is written in black block letters.

  “There’s a party tonight,” she says. “A silly party with people from the department. It'll be full of grad students.” She doubts the appeal or wisdom of this option.

  “As long as it’s not Harrods or Hyde Park,” he says, pulling himself up. “If there’s no chance we’ll run into any Qataris, we’re safe.”

  They disappear into their respective rooms. Quickly Sangita dabs on perfume before shedding the jeans and V-neck from the Olympic event and stepping into a red linen dress, spaghetti straps hidden under a see-through white elbow-length sweater. A change of earrings and she is ready.

  In the living room, Abdulla’s skin and hair look vibrant against his white button-down shirt. He’s wearing jeans so artfully faded she would have thought he had spent hours picking them out if she hadn’t seen Nigel hand him the Thomas Pink bag herself.

  He waits for her to exit the apartment then follows her down the stairs. They melt into the crush of people out on a Friday evening in the summer, most of the girls in skirts short enough to make Sangita blush.

  “Walking is the only exercise we get,” she says, trying to fill the silence but also relishing the fact that there is someone else to talk to. Normally she and Hind share the minutest details of their reactions to daily events. But Hind has been gone for what feels like ages.

  “No one walks in Qatar,” he responds. “There isn’t a sidewalk in most places.”

  “So it’s true,” she says.

  He shrugs as though it were obvious.

  “Too hot to walk, I guess.”

  Abdulla considers it. A plausible theory, but doesn’t go far enough.