But now the one person in Qatar who knows exactly why she left England is somewhere nearby. The real question is why? Most lovers do this because they are heartsick for each other. For Abdulla, she knows this to be anything but the case. She takes a deep breath. Maybe he hopes she won’t show, just as she hasn’t returned his texts.
“There he is!” Noor whispers.
Hind feels her pulse beat even faster, and this time not just from nervousness. He strides past, seemingly not even noticing them, heading towards the back of the store. He is with a woman, her face completely covered by the gauzy fabric of her shayla, which trails in clouds alongside him.
Noor, Hind, and Lisa follow at a distance of thirty paces, all three pausing to feign interest in a blender as Abdulla greets another shopper, a sleek, official-looking Qatari in traditional dress. They pause for the nose-touching of close male relatives. A cousin? They exchange overlapping greetings as Noor stares unabashedly.
Hind pulls her shayla completely over her face, encasing herself in black the way conservative women do, which she hates, knowing that it confers the cheap privilege of seeing without being seen. But this is one time, one place, she doesn’t want to be remembered. She gives Noor a sharp elbow to ensure she’ll cover up too.
As the other man moves on, Abdulla resumes a measured pace. The group find themselves in the garden section of the French superstore. Abdulla wanders over to inspect the garden hoses. The entire aisle is empty except for a few Indian men who look like they could be related to Ramzan.
For the first time all day Noor hangs back, suddenly engrossed in hand-held shovels and pots of various sizes. Hind has come to a full stop. Lisa seems unable to make up her mind which girl to protect, looking back and forth between them. Hind wants to reach out and touch her hand, reassure her. But she can’t reassure anyone, not even herself, about what is going to happen next.
Abdulla veers suddenly toward her. “Why haven’t you told anyone it’s off?” he growls in Arabic.
There it is, without the slightest preamble. Is this the economist-turned-diplomat they are writing about in the paper, sure to be minister one day?
Hind doesn’t answer. She knows now why women love to cover their faces. All this time she thought they were oppressed, these poor walking versions of Islam, huddled against the world. But instead, inside the gauze she feels insulated and protected, and no matter how hard he tries he will never see more than the shadow of her face, will always have to guess where her eyes are.
His right eyebrow rises at her silence and the facial tic, the one that starts whenever they tease him on Fridays, is starting.
“Tell people whatever you want. But tell them we aren’t going through with it.”
She is glad he spoke in dialect because Lisa’s Arabic is not good enough to keep up with the Gulf slang.
“Or else what?” Hind hears herself croak, watching the scene as though she were hovering on the ceiling of the store.
It’s hard to grasp. In front of her is a person she didn’t realize she wanted until after she heard he loved someone else. Does she want him? Did she ever? Whatever the case, he is now a stranger, reduced to snapping at her in the aisle of a grocery store.
“Excuse me?” he asks, slipping into English.
“Or else you’ll do what?” she says again.
The worst has already happened: she has ruined their chance for happiness. Emboldened by the thin layer of fabric separating them – and because no one can see the direction of her gaze – she stares back at him. Her eyes take in the line of his jaw and the stubble that says he is growing a beard.
“Listen to me,” he says, as if to a stranger, drawing as close to her as he dares without touching her, years of training restraining him from shaking her as his voice says he wants to.
“You are in the wrong here. I can do whatever I want. So I’m giving you one day to tell your version, whatever that is – ” here he breaks off in a laugh so horrible Hind knows she never wants to hear it ever again “ – or I will.”
She recoils as if he has struck her.
“We both know this is your fault,” he adds.
The tears start. Abdulla, the one her father chose for her. The hours of wrangling for her mahar as she and Noor lurked outside the majlis, listening in. Her mother’s glistening tears as she kissed her before the khutouba, and the men signing. All for nothing.
“A woman’s life is as hard as her husband’s,” her mother had said. “Insha’Allah, yours will be easy.”
Abdulla, her fiancé, once her playmate, now her enemy.
Thankful for the hundredth time for her shayla, she doesn’t bother to blink as tears course down her face. Many more years of this invisible public life await her. She can’t help the sob that escapes her.
“It’s not just my fault,” she manages on a hiccup when she catches her breath. Unlike Abdulla, she makes no attempt to keep it quiet.
The aisle goes very still as both Lisa and Noor look up from their giggling and whispering. Noor throws her shayla back over the top of her head and her green-lined eyes flicker from Abdulla’s stony face to that of her sister, who is uncharacteristically still.
Hind hiccups again, trying to get a hold of herself to retort something else equally heart-wrenching, but her mind is blank. Lisa is coming to her, her tiny frame moving with a speed that is surprising given her plump hips.
Then a dark shadow, a mirror image of Hind, comes floating towards them, slowly, as though the woman is unused to wearing an abaya. She has a simple rhinestone cuff on each wrist and a shayla pulled over her face with the same edging, hanging just above where her collarbone would be if you could see it.
Hind feels the edges of her vision slipping away as she realizes Abdulla is already over her and out with another woman. Suddenly she feels wobbly, light-headed; she hasn’t eaten anything since dinner, and then barely a scrap, since everyone has been about their business and not really paying attention to family meals during the week. She sways, and then steadies herself on Lisa’s arm as her faithful friend stares daggers into the boy she once partly raised, at least on his visits to their house. Now he is a man hurting her favorite child.
“Abdulla, khalas. Really.”
A woman’s voice. Something in it Hind thinks she recognizes.
A cousin? Would he dare betray her with yet another cousin? Hind knows this happens all the time, but the thought that he could be so heartless is one more pinprick in her heart. Even sharing him with Fatima’s memory is something she was never keen on, may her cousin’s soul rest in peace. Sangita had warned her that the loss of face, should Abdulla discover her whimsical journey, would far exceed any fleeting pleasure she might gain from it.
The Indian girl lecturing the Qatari girl about Gulf culture. And she didn’t listen.
The woman reaches for him with a slim, tan hand and grips his elbow. The simple gesture is enough to spring Noor into action. Stomping up the aisle, she takes position at Hind’s flank.
“Who the hell is that?” Noor hisses, watching Abdulla wrap his own fingers around those on the sleeve of his thobe.
“This isn’t you,” the voice says again, and everyone realizes she is talking to him, and getting through. His shoulders relax somewhat; his fingers leave hers for a moment to readjust his ghutra, pulling the front further down on this forehead.
“You heard me,” he says to Hind, but this time in a normal speaking voice. “Take care of this soon or I will.”
His gaze sweeps over all of them –Hind, Lisa, Noor – and then he turns away, intending to take his companion with him. But she shakes her head slightly and they murmur together.
Hind’s tears, slowed in shock, now begin afresh and she feels them drip off her chin.
“I’m staying for a moment,” Hind overhears.
The words freeze her. The woman is speaking classical Arabic. There is only one person Hind knows who pronounces all the vowels so clearly, as if she were reading the news on the radi
o.
Abdulla seems suddenly uncomfortable, glancing several times back at their group. But he squeezes the woman’s hand once and indicates with his chin he will wait at the end of the aisle. At the sight of the delicate wrist, even before she pulls back her shayla, Hind knows who this is. That she had to share him with the dead Fatima isn’t enough. Now, alive and well, it's her best friend too.
“You! You bitch!” Noor shouts at the top of her lungs, so that the workers in yellow Carrefour overalls stop wheeling in stacks of watering cans to gape at these crazy women in abayas squaring off like Mexican bandits.
“Listen, I want to make this right,” Sangita says.
Noor steps up, Hind realizes, part in horror and part glee, to slap Sangita in the face. But Lisa steps between them.
“You go now,” Lisa says in her simple English, shooing Sangita as if she were one of the many stray cats that hang around their kitchen door.
“No. This is our chance for happiness,” Sangita pleads, her eyes not leaving Hind’s. “Please, Hanoodie –”
“Don’t you dare call her that, you slut.”
Breathing like a racehorse, Noor towers behind Lisa, hands fisted at her sides. Hind feels a moment’s surge of love and pride, watching her sister, the young lioness, until it occurs to her it is she, the older sis, who should be protecting Noor.
“Tell them soon, for your sake,” Sangita is saying, “like he said. We’re going to have news of our own soon.”
“Whore,” Hind manages, her voice gaining strength and sharpness. “I’m supposed to make it easier for you?”
Abdulla circles back and settles his hand on Sangita’s shoulder, turning her away and bending down to whisper in her ear.
“Tell them anything – say he would have beaten you,” Sangita calls back, her voice breaking, “but just tell them.”
Hind starts shaking uncontrollably. Held steady by Lisa and Noor, she lets herself be led away.
Tell them anything? The phrase, the thought, keeps time with her stomach and heart, repeating, churning. Her mind starts turning over ideas.
“Call Ramzan,” Noor tells Lisa. “Tell him to come to Gate 1.”
Chapter Thirty
“The bastard!” Noor is still seething as the mall recedes behind them. “I knew something was weird that day I went to see you. He was there. I know it. Here was there and they were—”
Drained of all feeling, Hind is still grateful for her sister’s passion. Usually, the full force of her personality is focused on Beyoncé’s latest fashions or the new Amr Diab single. Now it is a thunderstorm of pure rage raining down on Abdulla, her former favorite cousin, who might as well be dead to her now.
“Get Baba! Call Khalid,” she spits into her phone as their SUV speeds out of Landmark’s parking lot.
Sensing urgency, Ramzan drives even more manically than the rest of the Qatari traffic, even hopping a curb when the right lane is blocked. The Escalade bumps across the median in front of their house, veers through the iron gate, and zooms past the towering compound wall that protects the women of the family from the prying eyes of the street. Noor flings herself out of the vehicle before it has even come to a full stop and sprints into the house, pulling her shayla from her head and throwing it onto the rack of abayas.
Hind, following along behind, notices the rack is full. Someone, or many someones, is visiting.
“Noor, what in God’s name… ” their brother Khalid emerges from the side of the living room where a temporary internet area has been created for his electronic fixations.
“It’s off,” Noor says, panting.
“What?”
Hind enters the foyer slowly and, without meeting anyone’s gaze, unwinds her shayla with precise movements.
“Shinoo?” Khalid repeats in dialect, when no one answers him. There is a smear of chocolate across his face.
Hind eyes him, her gaze lingering on his chocolate lips. Someone has come quietly into the room. It’s their father, barefoot, the snap buttons of his starched collar undone. He looks on in mute shock.
“The wedding is off,” Hind says, shrugging out of her mother’s abaya. Lisa is there to take it from her and hang it on its white pearl-studded hanger. Hind rips her hair out of the bun she has worn it in to fit under her shayla and begins climbing the stairs to her room.
Her mother’s voice rings out: “What is going on here?”
The kids freeze: Hind with her hand on the straight back of the banister, Khalid in his ascent after her, Noor collapsed at the foot of the stairs. Their mother whisks into the room in a burgundy floor-length skirt, a white blouse with lace cuffs setting off her fair skin. Her waist-length hair is braided down her back and swings with her movements. She peers fiercely at them all. Lisa gives her the same headshake Khalid received only a few seconds ago.
“The wedding is off, Yuma,” Khalid says in a small voice. The youngest, he is always the breaker of bad news since, with his curls and dimples, no one can hold him responsible for long.
“Hind?”
Hind turns around and gazes at the sight of her mother: the diamonds at her ears, the thick rope bracelet, and the necklace with Allah’s name just visible at the hollow of her neck. They are the most modest of her mother’s jewels, given to her when her father was only a middle-class merchant.
“It’s true, Yuma,” she says in a steady voice.
Her siblings melt away as Hind descends the stairs, coming up to her mother, towering over her.
“How did this happen?”
“The bastard!” Noor bursts out, coming to stand at her sister’s side. “He, he –”
Hind reaches for her sister’s hand and squeezes it hard. “You don’t want me to marry him, Yuma,” she says.
Her mother peers at her quizzically, as if she has just said she wants to convert to Christianity.
“I don’t? What are you saying? Your father chose that man for you.”
Hind shakes her head, struggling not to show that her heart is cracking.
“Abdulla is your father’s favorite nephew.”
Hind swallows. “He’s gay.”
Khalid is instantly ushered out of the room by Lisa. Her father looks as though he has been struck by a flying object. Noor loses all power of speech and can only stare open-mouthed at Hind, unable to contradict her.
“There were rumors after Fatima’s death,” Saoud says, the first to speak. “No man has that much discipline to be away from women for so long.”
Her mother starts reciting Qur‘anic verses.
Hind closes her eyes; it is done. By tomorrow everyone in Qatar, half the UAE, as well as Saudi and Bahrain, and anyone with relatives abroad, will know she is not marrying Abdulla. Because her cousin prefers men. She keeps herself from thinking about the person who might be most affected in this scenario, because she doesn’t know whether what she feels for him is pity or hatred. Or both.
After dinner in silence, her mother insists they must go to a friend’s wedding reception, reasoning that in light of the recent news Hind has to present herself publicly in her best form.
“But I don’t feel like going out,” Hind protests as the hairdresser arrives. Her mother and sister ignore her, one busy with her nails and the other taping on false eyelashes.
“The only excuse we have for not going is your wedding one day from now,” her mother retorts. No one has to say “which isn’t happening”, though the thought races around the room.
“I have nothing to wear,” Hind tries, after her hair has been curled into cascading waves down her back. Noor gives her a once-over and brings out all the dresses she thinks might fit.
“You’ve gotten fat,” her mother comments, as Lisa tries vainly to pull up the zipper on a yellow chiffon number that shouldn’t be considered a dress, it is so short. But why even bother responding, Hind thinks, since “fat” is a word Arab women throw around with impunity.
“Student life,” Hind says with a shrug, bending over and raising her arms s
o Lisa can yank the strapless yellow gown off her head.
“Good thing you aren’t getting married this weekend,” Noor says.
For a second Hind catches her breath, as if a tiny dagger were twisting in her ribcage. She meets her mother’s watchful gaze, and then forces a rueful smile for her sister.
“Yes, there are blessings in everything, al-hamdu-lilah,” Hind says, praising God as she is supposed to in everything. And isn’t that what the failed engagement is, a blessing in disguise? But why does she feel such a growing knot in her stomach?
They finish their preparations, shooing Khalid away when he and their father wander in from the men’s wedding party, which finishes even before the women’s has started. Their abayas cover their Oscar-worthy glamour as the women leave Lisa alone for the night and climb into the car so Ramzan can drop them at the Sheraton. As the car whizzes up the Corniche, past the water lapping in the manmade inlet, and her mother and Noor chat about who else is likely to be at this wedding, Hind tries to remember how exactly she found herself in this moment. Her degree, her year in London, hasn’t changed her life at all. In fact the minute she set foot back in Doha it was as if she had never left. The social obligations, the family drama – all of it is just as she left it. The only thing different is that now it is Hind who is the cause of the drama. And if anyone ever finds out the real cause of her failed engagement, even more tongues will be wagging.
Chapter Thirty-One
Sangita sleeps the rest of the day away, worn out from her confrontation with Hind, and secure in the knowledge that she won't miss much, since during Ramadan the city shuts down in the afternoon. Evening, that’s when Hind said Doha comes alive again. The sunset call to prayer rouses her, the adhan ringing out from a webpage she left open while comparing Islamic practices in North Africa with those of the Gulf States. All of this research will go into her next blog post about the Arabian Gulf. After only a few days, the page has already received several hundred hits and comments from people interested in the Middle East – her target audience. When she glances at the clock she realizes she’s going to be late. Sangita showers and pulls on leggings and a light tank top – she has the heavily embroidered abaya to wear over both to dinner.
Love Comes Later Page 19