Love Comes Later

by Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar

  She lets out a nervous giggle. Maybe lighthearted is the way to go.

  “I can’t be happy unless I know she’s also happy,” she says.

  His gaze sharpens, his lips going from a soft smile into a straight line.

  She raises her eyes, aware of the flattering effect of the false eyelashes because she has stared at her own reflection for three hours as they curled her hair. Maybe the trick is to maximize the glow of the honeymoon period. She gives his hands, entangled with hers by the fingers, a squeeze.

  “What kind of life can she have here after this?”

  Neither of them needs to say who “she” is.

  “Your life here is what I’m worried about.”

  She loosens her grip on his palms.

  “I’ll be fine. She won’t. Can’t she work at an outside embassy?”

  Abdulla lets go of her completely.

  “Last I heard, she thought you were a whore.”

  Sangita winces.

  “She’s still my friend,” she says. “I’m the one who betrayed her trust.”

  He snorts. At her unblinking gaze he throws up his hands in frustration.

  “Only the minister gives out assignments.”

  “You could try,” Sangita says. “It doesn’t hurt to ask. Luluwa says you have wasta.”

  He slices a hand through the air as if to stop the words as they leave her mouth.

  “Luluwa is a child.”

  “She’s becoming a woman,” Sangita retorts, “if you haven’t noticed.”

  “I would lose any influence I have the minute I got involved in such a thing.”

  “We need to give her this,” she insists, reaching for his hand again, “otherwise we won’t be in the right.”

  He holds her hand and a shudder courses the length of his frame, either from anger or from some other emotion, she can’t be sure.

  “What she does with her life is no concern of mine.” The flatness in his voice makes him a stranger.

  “Consider it my mahar,” she says. “Replace it with the entire dowry in my contract. The divorce settlement, even.”

  In response to his silence, she presses his arm.

  “I don’t have enough influence to do this,” he says. “I would have to ask Uncle Ahmed for help. Then I would owe him.”

  His left hand grips her fingers where they rest on his right sleeve. His palm curls so tightly around hers she wants to cry out.

  “Ask me for something else.”

  She takes a breath. What else does she have to bargain with?

  “I’m giving up everything,” she says in a measured tone. The sting of the tears she is holding back makes her throat raspy. “I’m not asking for much.”

  “I can’t,” he says. “Everyone will think it strange if I even bring her name up.”

  “And having an Indian wife isn’t?”

  He drops her hand and paces the room, the movement familiar to her from his periods of internal debate in London. The swish of his thobe punctuates his abbreviated steps, his strides limited by how far it will allow his feet to travel.

  Sangita feels her heartbeat slow as tears fill her eyes. Life with an inflexible man is not what she has in mind, not when she is choosing him over everything else. Everyone else.

  “Luluwa, call Narin to pick you both up.”

  He is gone before anyone can say another word.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  The smell of bukhoor fills the house, and to Sangita’s rapidly adjusting senses it is not unpleasant.

  Maryam hadn’t said anything when she saw Luluwa welcoming Sangita back into the house. She hovers in the hallway muttering into her mobile as Sangita submits to the incense burner being passed around her. Sangita doesn’t bother telling her soon-to-be mother-in-law that this ritual is very similar to the arathi that her parents perform if they want to bless anyone or anything: a sacred light taken from the temple or puja room fire and circled around a person. She stands still as Luluwa finishes; she wills herself to stop sweating. She didn’t let on in the car the source of their argument, though she is fairly sure Luluwa had been eavesdropping.

  She can’t help sneaking a glance at the girl in the red brocade dress in the mirror, trying to remember that it is indeed her, she of the endless black leggings and t-shirts, staring back at herself. Sangita suppresses a shudder, a combination of longing and a twinge of fear that Abdulla will choose stubbornness over their happiness. Rather than diminish her feelings for him, the intervening hours and possibility of never seeing him again has made the longing grow.

  Now she stands in his mother’s house waiting to profess her faith, waiting for the moment their life together will begin.

  The same as her own mother during the first meeting with her father, she can’t help but remember. As the story goes, her mother’s sister chastised her for looking up and smiling when entering the room. This is the reason her mother doesn’t beam with happiness in the black and white wedding album, but rather looks to the side as if in silent appraisal of the man who is now her husband.

  Sangita takes a deep breath and steadies herself for the moment when she will see Abdulla on this night, the night their contract will be signed. Legally, after this they will be considered married. She isn’t sure how to explain this idea to anyone and so has left most of her friends in the graduate program in the dark. Ravi is supposed to be here as the stand-in for her father, but uncharacteristically he has been incommunicado. The last flight out of New York should have brought him here by now, but in the whirl of the beauty salon and yet another round of endless preparations she hadn’t had two seconds to herself. Hind showing up this afternoon after another emotionally draining conversation with her parents hadn’t made her head any clearer.

  “This way,” Luluwa says, and takes her by the arm. “The sheikh is here.”

  Sangita smiles, but none of the muscles in her face moves. She glances at her watch, but in its place is a stack of gold bangles, on loan from various female members of the family. She has no way of knowing if Abdulla is late or if Luluwa is jittery in the presence of her fuming aunt.

  “Alone?” Sangita’s voice cracks, revealing how tense she is internally.

  “He’s coming,” Luluwa says, and flips out her BlackBerry, typing into the BBM. Where she has room to hide the small device in her pleated red satin gown, Sangita has no idea.

  Although she hadn’t been there, Sangita feels an odd sense of déjà vu remembering the photos Hind had shown her from her own engagement evening. Hind had been radiant, even if her foundation was a few shades lighter than her skin. This is a trick all the women her mother’s age also try to pull off at Indian weddings, but for tonight Sangita has insisted with the MAC makeup girl on a foundation that is true to her skin tone. If she is really going to make her life here, there is no point in pretending that she is anything other than the non-milk white beauty that she is.

  “Ta’ghatu rajal!”

  A shriek from Maryam as a man, resplendent in a black suit with a purple shirt, strides into the sitting room. His gleaming black eyes scan the room.

  “Ravi!” Sangita says, standing up despite the tsking from Luluwa, who has been arranging her hair for the umpteenth time. Her brother strides to her and they hug, more fiercely than she can ever remember.

  “I got here fast as I could,” he murmurs into her forehead, “You alright?”

  She nods, and feels the lump in her throat for the first time. She squeezes his hand as he surveys the hair piled on top of her head and the three inches of gold necklaces covering her collarbone all the way to the sari border which begins the top of her dress.

  “Sangita, this man shouldn’t be here,” Luluwa says carefully, taking care to avoid looking Ravi in the eye. She has whipped a shayla over her hair and as much of the upper part of her body as possible.

  “This is my brother,” Sangita says with a shaky laugh. How like Ravi to have upset the gender balance in the house by charging in to see if she needs
rescuing.

  Luluwa and her aunt relax visibly after hearing this news.

  “Then he should wait for the sheikh,” Maryam says, indicating that Anita should show him out.

  The maid’s eyes climb over Sangita and her brother with such naked curiosity that she feels herself blush.

  Sangita involuntarily clutches his arm. He has arrived only to be sent away from her again. He turns to her and searches her face, unsatisfied by what he sees, but she wills herself to let go and pats the place on his sleeve she has just a second ago been clutching.

  “You need to talk to the sheikh,” she says to him, knowing this might be the only reason he would leave her. “The papers are all waiting.”

  He looks down between the two of them, and then stares down the brunt of Anita’s inquisitive glances before pressing a kiss on each of Sangita’s cheeks. As he comes in close he whispers to her.

  “You’re giving up everything.”

  She feels her throat tighten at the fear in his eyes and the echoes of her own words to Abdulla earlier in the day.

  “You’ll be here, far away from your family and friends.”

  “I’m getting what I want,” she says. She strokes the fisted hand nearest to her. He clutches her fingers in return.

  “I’m just in the other room,” he says. “To sign papers, or if you change your mind.” This last under his breath, only to her.

  She fights the lump that rises in her throat again as he leaves. Her hands hang limply at her sides now that she has lost the anchor of his solid presence next to her. Her brother, her broken-hearted brother, has come all the way to stand for her and her marriage. She reminds herself to breathe and keep her knees soft, as Abdulla had told her that first time they met.

  “Abdulla!” His father now, for the first time, appears in the room, mid-sentence, striding after his son.

  “Yuba?” he says.

  “Come in the other room.”

  Abdulla stiffens.

  “Whatever you have to say, let’s say it here.”

  His father’s eyes flick toward Sangita and then back.

  “I’m sure, Yuba. Don’t you want me to get married?”

  “Don’t do this to hurt us.” Mohammed leans in, lowering his voice. “This is serious.”

  “She’s not as good as a Qatari woman?”

  Abdulla hears Sangita’s swift intake of breath.

  His father looks between them, clearly embarrassed, since now they are speaking in English.

  “She understands Arabic, even,” Abdulla switches back. “Call my grandfather,” he says.

  “Son, son…” His mother now, coming between the two men, linking them with her arms. “No one disputes your right to choose.”

  Abdulla shakes his head impatiently.

  “Either you can throw me out of the family right now, or you can accept my choice,” he says. “It’s up to Yaddi.”

  The trio turns so they are looking at Sangita, still sitting posed by the photographer on the teal chaise longue.

  “You have chosen well,” Yadd Jassim says, his shaky frame entering the room. Mohammed helps his father to a large, padded sofa. “I wish you the happiness I never had.”

  “But –”

  “My grandson has chosen,” his grandfather says, and gives Abdulla a pinch on the cheek. He takes a much-folded piece of paper with a grainy black and white image and slips it into the breast pocket of Abdulla’s thobe. Abdulla knows it at once as the duplicate of the one he has carried for over three years.

  His wife hadn’t been able to wait after all to share her joy with the one person who would be even more excited than she was. Even without looking at it he knows, somehow, his grandfather has a copy of the one sonogram Fatima had of the unborn baby.

  The one he had found when the hospital returned her personal effects after declaring her dead. The one he had carried around for years, until now. Not a week had gone by without him taking it out from his wallet and looking at it. The last time had been… sometime before leaving for London, he realizes now with a shock. Nearly two months ago. His grandfather gives him a wink as Abdulla kisses the elder man’s forehead.

  “Your happiness,” Jassim says, catching Abdulla’s arm, “does not allow you to disrespect your family.”

  Abdulla kisses his forehead again. He turns to where Sangita sits in the room, waiting.

  “Have you thought about things?” she asks, keeping her eyes trained on her hands, as aware as he is of their audience.

  In the yawning silence she tries not to clutch the gilt arm of the sofa in panic. “I can’t go through with this otherwise,” she says.

  “I don’t take well to ultimatums,” he replies.

  “Don’t punish her for wanting what we have,” she says. “This is about fairness, not power.”

  He ducks his head and exhales forcefully.

  “Your grandfather fought for you,” she says, her voice rising despite the listening ears. “How can you withhold good from someone else?”

  He paces the room, avoiding her gaze. The silence between them grows into a living thing, filled with their harsh breathing.

  “I’m going home,” she says. “Enjoy being alone.”

  She stands, wondering how she can get to the door without Luluwa’s help in the six-inch heels Luluwa had insisted she wear. With the shoes, she is almost his height and returns his gaze.

  “You can’t leave,” he says.

  “Give me a reason to stay,” she replies. “And it’s not the conservative I fell in love with.”

  “I forgot about your one-liners.”

  He stands in the doorway, keeping her from exiting. His jaw clenches and unclenches.

  “You’ll get a lifetime of them if you agree,” she says softly, recognizing a glimmer of the openness she had seen in London.

  “Promise me it will be a lifetime,” he says. “Nothing less.”

  “I promise,” she says without hesitation.

  They share a shaky laugh.

  “For you,” he says. “Because no one negotiates like you.”

  “For us,” she whispers. “For the future we’re going to have.”

  They walk into the other room to seal their fate.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  The heavy cream envelope that Lisa brings to her at the breakfast table gives Hind pause, because it has the seal of the Emiri Diwan across the front. She carefully lays down the spoon with which she has been absentmindedly shoveling foul into her mouth as Noor prattles on about what she should pack for the start of school in a few weeks. Hind has toyed with the idea of asking her father to send her as a chaperone for Noor or one of their other cousins studying in the UK, but hasn’t had enough courage to face him.

  For the past few weeks he has come home from the office in the blackest mood, not speaking to anyone, and ignoring the servants completely, which is puzzling to the entire household. Even if he is upset with one of the children, he almost always has a nice word for Lisa or Ramzan, both of whom he regards as being among the adults of the house. No, her father has been avoiding them all, and Hind can’t help feeling that it has something to do with her but he isn’t ready to talk about it just yet. Or maybe ever, if it has to do with her failed alliance with Abdulla’s family.

  “Well, open it,” Khalid says, coming through the dining room and scooping some hummus onto a slice of pita bread. Hind rolls her eyes at him.

  The thing about being at home is that you are never alone. This means you have no secrets. She wistfully thinks of her days in London, which seems such a distant memory now, although it has only been two months. If she didn’t have the framed diploma hanging on her bedroom wall, just to the right of her vanity mirror, she wouldn’t believe herself that she was once a girl free to come and go as she pleased.

  That’s why I ran away to India, she thinks to herself, avoiding eye contact with her siblings. Because I knew I was returning to a lifetime of this. She restrains herself from sighing or screaming at the th
ought of a hundred days exactly like this one rolling out before her. Sooner or later her family will ask her to consider another groom – one who will go under even more scrutiny than the last. Or will Noor be next? She contemplates her sister, just as Noor joins them all in the dining room, rubbing sleep from her eyes.

  “What’s this?” she asks, her gaze going straight to the heavy cream envelope.

  “A letter for the sheikha,” Khalid says, coming around her and snatching up the letter.

  Limply, Hind tries to swat him and get the letter back. His height, plus the fact he is already standing, puts him out of her reach.

  “Salaam alaikum, peace be upon you… ketha, ketha, ketha,” Noor intones, skipping the flowery Arabic introduction.

  “His Excellency the Deputy Foreign Minister asks that with God’s help you will serve in the position of –”

  Hind is torn between interest and despair. A job for the government means sitting on the ladies’ side of buildings, using only certain elevators, and getting less pay than the men. But a job would mean fewer hours at home after Noor returns to school and leaves her the only girl in the house, a prospect Hind is avoiding thinking about for any length of time.

  The letter flutters from Noor’s hand as she clasps Hind’s shoulders.

  “Position of what?” Khalid screeches, jumping up to finish the letter-reading. “Assistant Secretary to the Qatari Ambassador in India!”

  Hind feels ringing in her ears, as Khalid takes his turn to look at the letter, as he mutters to himself in grade school Arabic, reaching the same conclusion.

  “Can I come and visit you?”

  “Good luck getting Yuba’s permission,” Noor says, creating another swath in the hummus. “What can they be thinking, offering this to an unmarried girl?”

  Hind’s head snaps up and she regards her sister, her hip propped against the table as she chews thoughtfully.

  “That’s horrible,” Khalid says huffily. “Hanoodie’s just as qualified as anyone else in that office. She actually has a degree.”

  “No family would let their daughter go alone to India.”