Love Comes Later

by Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar

  She shifts her weight backward, onto the floor, so that his head and shoulders lie on her stomach. She hums a faint tune, one her mother loves to sing to the babies in the extended family. Sangita stares at the ceiling, her fingers riffling through Abdulla’s hair, wondering how you chase away the sting of a lifelong regret. Somewhere during the course of the night she slips into sleep, cradling Abdulla next to her heart, their breaths merging together. The circle of her arms around him relaxes. They spend the night on the floor, half on and half off each other.

  “What the hell?”

  Sangita hears the familiar voice coming from somewhere, maybe the next room, maybe another time or place. But more distracting is the numbness in her legs and stiffness of her back as she jars awake.

  “Sangita!”

  Sangita tries to sit but bumps her head on the coffee table. Trying again, she scrambles upright before the open-mouthed stares of her brother and Hind, frozen in amazement in the open apartment door.

  Abdulla recovers first, straightening his rumpled shirt and smoothing a hand over his eyes and then his mouth. “We have questions of our own,” he says, standing tall in front of Sangita as she pulls her dress straps back onto her shoulders. “Where have you been?” he says, aiming a stern glance at Hind.

  Sangita wrings her hands through her hair, twisting it into a knot. She keeps her eyes on Abdulla, avoiding Hind’s gaze, which burns across his shoulder at her like a flamethrower.

  “You’ve been fucking each other,” Hind says flatly.

  With a swift stride Abdulla grasps Hind by the shoulders and shakes her once emphatically.

  “You have lost your mind.” Even with her three-inch heels he can look her dead in the eye.

  “I come home to find my half-naked roommate rolling around on the floor with my fiancé and I’m the one that’s crazy?”

  “You have a fiancé?” His face twists in mock amazement. “If anyone knew you went to India without a chaperone –” Running short of words, he shakes her again.

  Hind slaps his hands, rubbing her arms as he withdraws them.

  “If I knew she’d stab me in the back the moment I was out of sight, believe me,” she mutters, moving away into the kitchen, “I wouldn’t have gone anywhere.”

  “Oh? You would have remembered you’re an engaged woman?” Abdulla shouts.

  Looking back at him, the throbbing vein in his forehead, the clenched fists, Hind recoils, her eyes widening. Sangita lays her hand on Abdulla’s elbow. At the touch he whirls away, disgusted with both of them.

  Ravi, who has stood silently in the doorway, clears his throat, reminding everyone there are two men present.

  “But you don’t even want him,” Sangita whispers at Hind, coming around the island toward her.

  Stillness settles over the four of them.

  Sangita reaches for her friend, but Hind breaks her grasp and heads for her bedroom, past the two men who are now eyeing each other warily.

  “Hind, there was nothing. Nothing happened –” she begins, trying to follow her, but Hind turns on her with fierce eyes.

  “Our definitions of nothing are very different,” she snaps.

  “We were talking, it was later and later. And then –”

  “And then your arms found themselves around him? Your legs?”

  “Stop.” Sangita makes a strangled sound and reaches toward her once more, but Hind sweeps into her bedroom, slamming the door so hard it shakes in the frame.

  Sangita turns, appealing silently to her brother. Ravi manages a smile and hugs her briefly, planting a kiss on the top of her head, while at the same time eyeing Abdulla who is now pacing again behind her.

  “Ravi, I swear, we just –” her voice sounds pathetic even to herself.

  What can she say? We were bored, we went to a party, and he told me his darkest secret? She avoids looking at Abdulla. Behind her guilt and shame is the knowledge that she has never been kissed by anyone with such ferocity. Or been so surprised by liking it.

  “She was coming back,” Ravi says to both of them, to the room at large. “She couldn’t do a life abroad. She’d decided to live in Qatar.”

  Ravi squeezes her shoulder and disappears into Hind’s room.

  Sangita sighs, running a hand over her face. She can hear Hind’s angry sobs and over them her brother’s warm tenor, trying to soothe her. This is a first, Sangita thinks: for once she is the cause of her friend’s pain, not the solution. Sangita moves to follow Hind despite her protests, but Abdulla tugs her hand.

  “Come back with me,” he says into her ear. “To Qatar.”

  She shakes her head as though to clear it from a stray radio frequency.

  He rotates her gently so that she faces him, her chin tilted up. Already a slight bruise is forming near her collarbone from their brief encounter.

  “We don’t even know each other,” she says.

  “The love comes after,” he says. “Remember?”

  Looking into his eyes, Sangita knows he is serious.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Tell them the truth, says a voice inside her head that sounds suspiciously like Sangita’s. Tell them that it’s off. Hind shakes her head and carries on applying eyeliner.

  “Hanoodie, let’s go.”

  She can just see her sister at the foot of the staircase, head thrown back, shoulders taut, raising her voice at her to hurry up. Noor will not give up, and she is letting the whole house know it.

  Hind momentarily considers flipping on the house intercom and whispering: “I don’t like to be rushed.”

  The comfort she normally feels in the familiar routines of home seems distant, along with the other things she loves about living with her family. Her beloved Lisa has become irritating, for one. Lisa, her lifelong nanny – most of her cousins call theirs “maids” – has taken to hovering around since her return as if worried she might disappear again. The solicitousness Hind exploited in her childhood to sneak contraband snacks into bed is now cloying. Hind has begun to avoid Lisa and Noor, the two people who know her best and are most likely to quiz her openly about the brilliant horizons ahead in her new role as a wife. They’ll surely detect her palpable lack of enthusiasm for the wedding reception planned for this coming Saturday.

  “If you don’t go down there, she will leave you.”

  Her father’s voice startles Hind out of her thoughts. He looms in the doorway, resplendent in a thobe with a red and white checkered ghutra. She rises from the stool in front of her vanity table, what he calls her “beauty arsenal”, where she and Noor used to play dress-up for family engagements and wedding parties. To her surprise he takes her by her shoulders and kisses her on top of her head, the very thing she is supposed to do to him to show respect.

  “It’s good to have you home, Hanoodie,” Saoud says, “even if we will lose you again.”

  Her eyes fill with tears at the sincerity in his voice. Moments with her father are rare: they all fight for them like little kids vying for money at Garinga’o, the children’s night celebrated in the middle of Ramadan.

  “I’ll be nearby,” she says as they walk down the hallway towards the top of the staircase.

  She focuses on his presence, not wanting to think about how she is likely to be living in her room for the rest of her life. Will her father support her as a divorced woman, or will she have to go through the debacle of Abdulla again with another suitor after a few years? And when the wedding is called off, will he blame her for ruining Noor’s chances, not to mention the family name?

  “Hind!”

  “Coming,” she calls out with more force than she intended. Her father chuckles and squeezes her hand.

  “Noor is upset too,” he says. “The house will miss you. You just got back.”

  She holds on to those blunt fingers, feeling the rough skin that betrays his elegant appearance, the calluses revealing his upbringing as the son of a spice and pearl merchant. Now, only a generation later, he is a modern businessman, a civil
servant.

  Tell him the truth, the voice says again, and this time Hind doesn’t override it.

  “Baba –”

  “There you are.”

  Noor rushes up the steps of the curved marble staircase. On the landing she pauses to catch her breath and adjust her metallic-tipped heels, nearly hopping with excitement at the sight of Hind in her room.

  “Mama needs Ramzan, so we have to go now,” she says. The bell-shaped sleeve of her abaya is a black shadow against the white marble foyer as she points to the back door.

  Saoud flicks Noor gently on the arm as he passes. “She’s nervous,” he says. “Go easy on the bride.”

  Hind lets out the sigh that has been building up all morning. If only her life were as simple as they imagine it for her. She will truss herself up like some ancient trophy and on Saturday be delivered to her husband, push out a few babies, hopefully boys, and then for the rest of her years meet her sisters and friends for elaborate meals at five-star restaurants, reliving the glory days of graduate school while on family holidays to London over Eid or during the summer. Racing from one sale to another, getting ready for one party or the next, her life will pass in a delightful succession of events marred only by an increasing number of wrinkles and growing children.

  “You girls go,” her father is saying, “or your mother will take the car for sure.”

  Hind descends the stairs to a small antechamber outside the garage where the shoes of various household members are strewn in the doorway. On a clothing rack hang several abayas on padded hangers. She fingers a plain black one, her mother’s, devoid of any embroidery and long enough to cover her feet in the style of women thirty years ago. It is a stark contrast to the brilliant blue embroidery snaking up and down Noor’s arms and the metallic blue stilettos peeking through the folds at every step.

  Hind draws the cloak of black around her shoulders, smelling her mother’s rose perfume. She misses having the oud rubbed into her temples if she feels a headache coming on. The light weight of the fabric on top of her clothes is familiar, yet so different from her carefree student days abroad. Noor makes a face without commenting. Normally the choice of such a drab abaya would be the cause of a mini-makeover, with Noor as stylist. But today getting out the door takes priority over fashion.

  Her mother’s abaya swirls over Hind’s shoes, making her seem to glide over the marble floor as she follows Noor, who is somehow sprinting to the door even in her near-stilts. Hind trails behind, out to the car waiting in the circular drive. She stops for a minute to catch a glimpse of her father, at the side of the house near the separate entrance to the men’s majlis, but his back is turned to her as he chats on his phone.

  She pulls her shayla closer to her neck, gathers her abaya in the other hand, and steps into the black Cadillac Escalade reserved for the older women of the family. She glances out the window and doesn’t see the Land Cruiser in the carport; the kids – Khalid and the cousins from Uncle Mohammed’s house – must be out with their nanny.

  “Your nails are awful,” Noor says. “And you could do with a trim. Let’s go to the salon after this?”

  Hind makes a noise of despair at the tide of pettiness she has re-entered, which her sister takes as assent. Noor starts making calls.

  She then gives Ramzan, the Indian driver, instructions on the upcoming shopping expedition, all the while continuing her beauty routine. He is wearing his trademark khaki baseball cap and bobs his head at each of her instructions, his eyes barely visible below the cap’s rim.

  Noor pulls a perfume bottle out of her purse and douses her arms, then the front of her abaya, before offering it to Hind. Hind takes the bottle and gives herself an obligatory squirt before passing it back.

  “First us to Landmark, and then Mama from Al Dana Club,” Noor says as she checks her makeup in a tiny crystal-rimmed compact.

  They wind out of the back gate and speed down the street. Ramzan deftly weaves through the roundabout and onto the North Road, taking them away from the West Bay area and towards the suburbs of the city. Sand whips across the windshield as the car picks up speed to keep pace with the increasing Thursday afternoon traffic. Behind the dark tinted windows, air-conditioner blasting, even in their abayas they are cool, defying the scorching temperatures outside.

  “If only Villaggio were open,” Noor sighs. “All the brands were there.”

  “I wouldn’t go there even if it were,” Hind says. “Who wants to shop with the ghosts of dead children?”

  The news of the tragedy still stings Hind, even though she was away when it happened. People who could shop there unfazed are a mystery to her. Her sister is a mystery, like the rest of this once familiar life she has left behind.

  “It was terrible,” Noor agrees. “But life goes on.”

  “Not for the dead,” Hind says pointedly.

  A Thursday night, and headed to the mall with her sister. Hind can almost close her eyes to the construction cranes of the latest real estate projects dotting both sides of the road and imagine it is any other week in the years before her engagement. This same trip to the mall. Since the weekends were the best days to see and be seen at the mall by everyone, male and female, they would take turns doing hair, bunching up their buns for more volume under their shaylas. But those days seem like a dream now.

  “Mama home, then back to pick us up,” Noor continues.

  At Ramzan’s nod that he understands, Noor settles herself against the car’s butter leather interior.

  “One of us,” she says, unwinding ear buds for her iPhone, “has to make sure you don’t embarrass yourself during your henna night or your honeymoon. Since you didn’t bother shopping in London where all the latest stuff is.”

  Hind bites her lip rather than tell her sister not to bother. There isn’t going to be a wedding or a honeymoon or babies. Instead she turns her head and watches the neighborhood she grew up in go by. What she sees now is mostly ripped-up roads and construction cones. That the plans for major overpasses and flyovers have made their way out to this part of the city, far from the center and heading towards the North Road and the oil fields, is a comment on the scale of Doha’s expansion. She has seen the ads on Sky TV and in The Guardian about Qatar Airways and Chelsea Barracks and the hundreds of other Qatari projects abroad. But coming home, she barely recognizes her country.

  “Hasna says not to bother with Nayomi or Jennyfer, all cheaply made,” Noor says. “So I thought we’d start with the new Victoria’s Secret. The stuff may be cheap but it’ll give you a big bang. You know, for effect.” Another fit of giggles.

  “They only sell perfume here,” Hind replies. “Even I know that.”

  “There’s dozens of other places,” Noor says, waving a hand. “We’ve got the rest of the day to walk around.”

  Hind wishes she had an iPod to drown out her sister. Maybe she can get one today. The gap generation, that’s how Sangita always describes them – Hind and Sangita, the odd couple with their preference for reading books on the Tube rather than listening to music.

  “If you still need stuff we can go on the Agent Provocateur website. I can’t believe you didn’t go before leaving London!” Noor hits her sister playfully on the exposed leg of her jeans, showing through part of her abaya. “Where were you the day I came to go shopping?”

  “There’s no need for all this foolishness!” Hind explodes and punches Noor back in the arm to avoid answering the question.

  “Ow!” Noor rubs her arm and eyes her sister reproachfully. Ramzan and Lisa’s eyes flick to the rearview mirror. Fights between the girls are legendary, but now they are too old to be admonished by anyone but their father.

  “Chill out,” Noor says. “Everyone says it’s normal to be nervous.”

  Hind scoots closer to the window so she can press her forehead against it like she did when she was a child, and fall asleep looking at the sands on the edge of the city. Speaking the truth has drained all the energy from her.

  “It�
�s not nerves,” she whispers to the window as much as to Noor. “We aren’t doing it. I’m going to be divorced.”

  Noor’s tinkling laugh causes Hind to turn to her sister again, just as the SUV pulls up in front of the mall’s newly-opened designer section. Noor lays a hand on her sister’s leg where only a moment before she delivered the offending swat.

  “Abdulla is coming to see you,” Noor says. “It’s all been arranged with Luluwa so you can have some privacy. Away from the house. That’s why we’re really here. Maybe he can do a better job of calming you than I can. Now that you two are so close and all.”

  “What?” Hind asks, stunned.

  A hint of pouty lips as Noor slides off the seat and out the door, adjusting her shayla and bag in the reflection of the car window. Hind snatches up her own bag and crawls across the back seat after her sister.

  “What did you say?” she shouts at her, hanging from the car door.

  But Noor is already striding toward the sliding glass doors. Cars behind Ramzan are starting to honk, waiting to unload their own female cargoes. Hind has no choice but to grip her shayla with one hand and her bag with the other and dismount.

  “I go to parking,” Ramzan says.

  Hind nods absentmindedly and shuts the door. Lisa’s flat Asian face is devoid of emotion as she climbs down out of the front seat and stands waiting to follow Hind into the entrance. For a desperate moment Hind wishes she were younger and able to grasp her nanny’s hand and hold onto it as they toddle into the wonders of the mall. Instead, Hind puts one foot in front of the other, sucking air through her nose as Sangita taught her during their home yoga sessions. She has to fight the urge to run as fast as she can in the opposite direction in her three-inch brass-studded Gucci pumps.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Luluwa enters the bedroom on tiptoe so as not to wake her grandfather, but at the same time hoping he will already be awake to finish telling her about his mystery woman.