Love Comes Later

by Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar

  She slides into the armchair, the worn bamboo antique having been replaced by a sturdy new piece of furniture that her more sizable uncles have been taking turns in as her grandfather has grown weaker. Now that Jassim is failing she knows she must compete with her uncles for his waking hours, so every moment is special.

  Just as she feared, he isn’t awake. His papery cheek is slack on the pillow as the sunlight fades from the room. It’s still Ramadan. At his age he doesn’t have to fast but she suspects he has been doing so, like many religious people, not taking advantage of the exceptions in their faith.

  She slides her iPhone from her pocket and takes a photo in the growing semi-dark: her grandfather. The flash causes his eyelashes to flutter. She holds her breath.

  “Lulu?”

  “Na‘am, Yaddi,” she says.

  Jassim opens watery brown eyes and smiles at his youngest granddaughter.

  “You came back to hear the end of the story,” he says.

  She smiles, though his voice is so thin she must strain forward to catch his words.

  “The moral,” he says, coughing, “is never part in anger.”

  “Is that what you did, Yaddi?”

  “And it wasn’t even her I was mad with,” he says, inching his torso up onto the pillows, waving away her help. “It was the family.”

  Luluwa listens as her grandfather closes his eyes, telling her the story of his lost love Aziza, the name meaning “dear one”, who was in fact his dearest, the daughter of his business partner, a wealthy businessman in Mumbai; a Muslim, yet somehow still not deemed good enough for Jassim.

  “She wanted to stay at home to have the baby. I wanted them here, but I was living with your great-grandfather and there was nowhere for her to stay. I had no money, her father knew that, and he wouldn’t allow her to leave.”

  His breath is growing ragged. Luluwa squeezes his hand where it lies on the duvet. She feels guilty that she doesn’t stop him, but she wants him to continue.

  “I thought I could come home, convince everyone to accept her, then go back, and… ” His voice trails off into a whisper.

  “Live happily ever after,” Luluwa finishes for him, into the growing stillness.

  Jassim tosses his head on the pillow as if the memories are too much.

  “There were many storms that season, so many storms. By the time I went back, she was already buried. Childbirth had not been kind.”

  Luluwa wipes a tear from her cheek, not bothering to check the others as they come quickly.

  Her grandfather squeezes her hand and she runs her fingernails across his knuckles.

  “Lulu, ta‘alee.” Uncle Mohammed calls her gently from the doorway. Luluwa gives the weathered fingers one more squeeze and goes to stand by her uncle. He wraps an arm around her, as Anita goes in to check on the old man and the various machines in his room.

  “Uncle, when did Yadd Jassim get married?” Luluwa asks.

  Mohammed squeezes her shoulder as they walk towards the top of the staircase. “You’re too young to be thinking of these things,” he says.

  Luluwa lifts her tear-stained face. “Someone has to know all of this before he passes away,” she sniffs. “All of his secrets.”

  Mohammed chucks her under the chin.

  “His marriage to your grandmother is hardly a secret,” he says, “Go down and eat with your brothers.”

  Treasuring the true secret Jassim has given her, for once Luluwa does as she is told.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “You sure it’s okay if I stay in your apartment?” Sangita asks. Sand-colored buildings whizz past as the taxi driver weaves through the traffic. They are on a long tree-lined avenue, the water to the left shimmering in the dusk. She can almost see sand roll across the street in the steady breeze. A dust storm, if she remembers Hind’s stories correctly. At the thought of her friend, Sangita feels another sting of guilt. It feels so strange to finally be in her friend’s country without her knowledge.

  “No one comes here,” Abdulla says, as the taxi crosses over a bridge onto an island shaped like the outer ring of an oyster shell. “No one has been here since... ”

  Since Fatima died is unsaid but understood.

  She stretches in non-answer, the effect of six hours of travel catching up with her in stiff joints, tangled hair and fuzzy teeth.

  She knows they are coming to The Pearl, an offshore island built on reclaimed land, to Tower One and the apartment he shared with his wife. But once inside, rather than feeling suffocated by Fatima’s presence Sangita senses only the sadness of an unlived-in apartment sitting empty for nearly three years. She watches Abdulla walk around the suite with his familiar prowl. She watches him peer down at the street seventeen floors below. He shared this view with Fatima, the wife Sangita will never know and Hind can’t help but resent.

  Sangita rubs her arms. The apartment has the latest in finishes, from the crown molding to the floor-to-ceiling windows. The overall affect is not unpleasant, and she is glad of neutral ground away from the prying eyes of his family – including those of her former friend.

  He stops in front of her and turns, standing so close she can feel the heat of his body.

  Unbidden, she thinks of Hind. What part of the city is she living in? What is she doing right now? Has she felt this kind of desire, and did the same temporary restraint keep her apart from him too?

  But clearly Abdulla doesn’t want to talk about Hind; it is as if he has never known her, as if she has died. Sangita turns away from his gaze, wondering if she has done the right thing in following Abdulla home. Perhaps it is a mistake, but how else would she know if she can live here, a stranger in this strange land, for love of a man she barely knows?

  Even though she has disciplined her face not to betray any emotion, Abdulla seems to know she is unsettled. He comes to her, placing his hands on her shoulders.

  “I’m going to take a shower,” Sangita says, noticing a gleam in his eye. “You could probably use one too.”

  “I’ll call you in a few hours,” he says, backing away as though she were on fire.

  They exchange tentative smiles.

  Has she revealed her doubts? She hopes not. In Abdulla’s eyes she sees only steely determination. But that is a man’s privilege, she thinks as the door closes behind him. Men can always do whatever they want, and damn the consequences. Case in point: her presence in Qatar at this very moment.

  The one thought she can hardly bear is that her friend Hind would be the ideal person to get her through all this. But Hind is more or less lost to her forever.

  After Abdulla leaves, she washes away the grime of the plane and falls into a light sleep, buoyed by the jet lag of her first few hours in Doha.

  She awakes near dawn to a Skype call ringing on her computer.

  “Ravi,” she says, pulling the computer off the end table towards her, flipping hair out of her face.

  “How’s it going?” Her brother’s familiar face and voice in the plush Arabian surroundings make them even stranger.

  “Fine,” she says. “It’s almost seven in the morning. The sun’s been up since about five-thirty. Isn’t that wild?”

  There is silence from the other end as she pans the computer camera around the room. Daylight streams in from a bank of twelve-foot windows that she has intentionally left unshaded.

  “Can you believe this?” she says, “This building wasn’t even here six years ago. I’m on the seventeenth floor.” The remnants of sleep fall away and she grows more animated in her tour. Back in the bedroom her eyes fall on the black robe draped on the armchair.

  “And, look, this is the abaya they wear. See how this one has gold threading up the sleeves? The women design their own. Their grandmothers were only allowed to wear black.”

  “What are you doing, Gita? Why would you start wearing that?”

  Sangita pauses, since Ravi is looking at her, not the bell-shaped sleeve she has spread on the bed for his benefit. His image breaks
up for a moment over a bump in the connection, but she hears the sternness in his voice. She shrugs, even though she knows what her brother is hinting at. Her parents’ questions ventured into a similar vein yesterday during her session with them.

  “I think they’re beautiful,” she says. “Instead of hindering women they let them move freely. With their faces covered no one can even see where they are looking.” She senses he isn’t interested, but drapes a matching shayla over her face as she had done the day of the awful confrontation with Hind.

  “This isn’t some anthropological project,” he is saying, hands clasped between legs where he sits on the denim-covered sofa in the den in their parents’ apartment in New York.

  “Gender, Islam, first hand and whatever.” He waves a hand around his head as though indicating her thought cloud. “This is the rest of your life.”

  She blinks at him through the gauzy fabric.

  “Take that thing off your face!”

  She pulls it down. Sangita knows he can’t understand what she’s doing, because if she is honest, even she can’t really formulate how she has come to be in this apartment in Doha.

  “What’s that?” Ravi is pointing to a stack of legal pads on the end table behind her head.

  She sits up, wishing she had put them in the closet before falling asleep last night.

  “Oh, I’m just doing a little work,” she says, putting them on the floor out of his line of sight.

  “Work?”

  “You know, taking notes.” She flops back onto her stomach in feigned relaxation. “I want to remember every moment of this.”

  She doesn’t mention that the notes contain a rough outline of what she hopes are the first of many articles, maybe enough for a book even, on her experiences in Qatar.

  “Have they made you convert yet?”

  Sangita fixes him with a stare.

  “You know as well as I do, I don’t have to. A Muslim man can marry a non-believer. A Muslim woman cannot. Sexism the world over.”

  Her brother laughs, but it is a harsh and broken sound.

  “No,” he says.

  “No?”

  “They can marry Jews or Christians without any problem.”

  Sangita pinches the bridge of her nose for being so insensitive. He won’t talk to her about what happened – or didn’t happen – on their trip to India, or about Hind’s decision to come home. A taboo subject is a first for them, and neither is handling it well.

  “Seriously, it’s not like that, Ravi,” she says, “I’m just here to check it out. But did you know citizenship only passes through the father here? What a way to make sure the women behave.”

  “People of the book are believers,” he says, enunciating as if to a child. “You’re a Hindu. You’re a non-believer. And you have to convert.”

  She chews her lip uncertainly.

  “Would that be so bad?”

  “You’re supposed to be the rational one,” he says.

  Now would be the time for a dropped call, she thinks, but of course the technology is fine just when you hope it won’t be. He is right: in the escapade that was Ravi And Hind Go To India, Sangita had kept her head.

  “Hind had her adventure,” she says, hating the whine that has entered her voice. “This is mine.”

  Ravi sighs loudly and comes closer to the camera on his end.

  “The kinds of notes you’re taking,” he says, and it isn’t a question. “Could you go to jail for what you’re doing?”

  “Jail? I’m here legally,” she huffs. “Do you want to talk or just lecture me?”

  He puts his hands up in surrender and agrees to back off. They talk for a few more minutes about the possibility of him coming to Qatar if things do go further.

  “Can you honestly see yourself living there?”

  Instead of answering she leans against the headboard and smiles at her brother, whose creased forehead belies how much he loves her.

  “If not, I’ll just come home,” she says, blowing him a kiss, wishing she didn’t have to involve him in this. But since he has taken a shine to Hind, he is the second-best thing to a gal pal for her, since he knows something of Qatari society.

  “There’s no future for you there if you don’t marry him,” he is saying as she signs off. “And technically, if you sign that contract and you break it off you’ll be a divorced woman. At twenty-four.”

  His words echo in her head as she goes back to sleep. He isn’t in favor of the marriage and she isn’t sure she can go through it with it alone, even if the American embassy does give consent for her to marry a Muslim man and make her marriage to a Qatari legally binding in the U.S.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  A blast of air-conditioning envelopes her as glass doors hiss shut behind Hind. After a moment’s blindness, her eyes adjust to the fluorescent mall lighting after the darkness of the tinted SUV windows. She wishes she had big-frame sunglasses like the two women who slide by wearing flame-red lipstick, the metal tips of their heels winking out with each strutting step of their abayas. A pimply-faced teenager is walking behind them, so intent on his mission he crosses Hind’s path without noticing, his jade prayer beads dangling from one pocket, an iPhone in one hand.

  “Khamsa khamsa khamsa,” he mutters, causing the girls to pick up their glacial pace. He keeps a few paces behind them, rattling off the digits of his phone number.

  “He’s so bold,” Hind says. Having finished reciting his phone number, the boy’s lips are still moving. He has begun again.

  “Why don’t they say something?” Hind asks, stopping in her tracks. “That’s harassment.”

  Noor grabs her elbow and pulls her along.

  “If you talk, they think you’re encouraging them,” she whispers. “He’ll get tired eventually and find someone else to bother.”

  Despite herself, Hind swivels around. The teenager is still following the women, who are probably twice his age.

  “He could be after them for hours,” she says, but Noor’s shrug indicates this is just normal practice.

  “You know this is how it is,” she says. “What’s gotten into you? It’s as if you’ve returned from Antarctica instead of England.”

  Hind feels sick to her stomach. This is home and yet increasingly it seems a place she no longer knows. The churning in her stomach intensifies at the thought of seeing Abdulla again. This man – her cousin, her friend, and the person she is supposed to marry – has betrayed her with another woman; though if anyone knew where she herself had gone while Abdulla was cozying up to Sangita, they’d likely say the same thing about her.

  “You guys didn’t arrange to meet somewhere at home, while everyone is busy?”

  “Like that ever happens,” Hind murmurs back. She has avoided Abdulla’s calls under the pretense of jet lag, but doesn’t know how much longer she can keep this up.

  They pass in front of a coffee shop. The white leather seats facing the mall arcade are already taken by groups of men, ostensibly there to chat, surreptitiously eyeing all the women that pass by, regardless of race. Hind, Noor and Lisa continue walking, caught in the game of pretending they don’t know they are being watched. She longs for the streets of London, where anyone can watch just as casually as they might glance at their cell phone – and no one gives it a thought.

  A man who doesn’t ogle. She knows one, but he isn’t Qatari. Hind tries to put Ravi’s face out of her mind, realizing what she feels isn’t longing but guilt. The bald truth is that none of this has anything to do with Ravi. Or with Abdulla, for that matter. Ravi has become another person on her growing list of people she is avoiding. No, in some way she hasn’t fully grasped yet, it’s about her. Marrying Abdulla is simply the easier thing to do. She turned off her UK mobile the minute she got on the Qatar-bound plane at Heathrow, and she hasn’t turned it on since. All the emails, Facebook messages and IMs Ravi and Sangita have been sending her have gone unanswered.

  “Yalla, Hind.”

  Noor is at her
side again, Lisa on the other arm, as they shepherd her towards the main avenue.

  “He says to meet him near Carrefour. We’ll come back here,” Noor says.

  How have they communicated? How does Abdulla even know she is back? When did he get back? The questions swirl in her throat as she and Lisa follow her sister’s bobbing head. It wouldn’t make sense to meet in a restaurant, where they’d be more likely to run into someone who knew them. Though it is perfectly proper for them to be speaking. They are legally married, after all.

  “You spoke to him?” Hind asks.

  This engagement is different from what she thought being an engaged woman might mean. Hind shies away from thinking about the night she caught Fatima sneaking down the driveway, her shoes in her hand, and the sight of Abdulla’s car outside the gate. Her cousin is dead and her transgressions with her.

  Noor varies her gait, walking briskly then, realizing she has gotten ahead of Hind, slowing to let her catch up. As they pass the shiny black mannequins dressed in the latest fashions, Hind longs to duck into H&M with the other girls, out with their sisters and cousins. Instead, they keep marching, Noor so eager that Hind wishes it were her sister getting married, really getting married, and not this farce that her life has turned into. She is certain this is the fastest either of them has ever walked through a mall, past expat mothers pushing strollers, past the store guards who stare at passersby, averting their eyes as this small juggernaut of women troops by.

  They pool in the electronics section just inside the Carrefour entrance. Noor looks around, erect as a meerkat, her eyes scanning the arcade.

  How have they set this up? Noor and Luluwa? Luluwa is as close to Abdulla as any of his brothers, some say closer. He probably used her to set the whole thing up. Hind tries to remember seeing the two girls together in the past few days. She racks her brain for any sign that her parents know, but they are blissfully ignorant, she is convinced. Her father hasn’t asked to see her passport; her mother hasn’t bothered with the official Supreme Education Council notice that she has completed her degree. After a few months, Hind can just pretend it is lost, destroy it with matches from the bukhoor burner and apply for a new one.