The tassels on her shawl hopped as she made her way to the living room. Her heels clicked as she jumped from one couch to the other. Her eyes gleamed with anticipation and the energy that she carried in that petite little body of hers was too much for her luminous features to carry. My Ama jee thought that she was quite short and ordinary but what she did not see was how captivating and mesmerizing her ordinariness was. Just by how she wrapped herself in the navy blue saree that I had given her, swept me off my feet. Her raven corkscrew waves fell down on the side of her cheeks, and her hair was parted just on the side, which made her forehead prominent, she was indeed completely unaware of what hold she had on me. A dimple formed just beneath her lip when she used to guffaw. I adored her. I loved the way she frowned when the aloo parhattas weren’t round enough. When we used to walk in circles around the track at the aam baagh, she knew exactly how many banyan trees we’d have passed. I did not know whether it was the adventitious roots that she was inclined towards or whether she just liked counting trees. She was pure and wild, and she unintentionally set souls on ranging fire. She was a celebrated exception to the world.
“Muhammad!” Abdullah yelled, and Muhammad quickly dropped the blue journal onto the carpeted floor. Without much ado, he slid the worn out diary into the little space under the wooden cabinet with the help of his foot.
“Muhammad bhai, I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” a tired voice exclaimed, making its way into the room. “I did not expect you to be in my room. Anyways, I was just on my way out. I wanted to know if the car was free today.”
Muhammad smiled and nodded nestling himself on the beanbag near the cabinet, careful to not let Abdullah see the journal which was quite evidently capable of being found.
“I just came to your room to get the passports,” Muhammad replied. “I figured you’d have kept them on the side table but-um- they- they weren’t there.”
“Oh, haha,” Abdullah said, letting out a nervous giggle. His stood by the door with one hand swinging the car keys and the other on the knob. “Things haven’t been the same since I returned from Pakistan. I’ve gotten kind of, well- careless but why don’t you ask bhabhi jaan? I think she has my passport.”
Saying this, Abdullah made his way out of the room oblivious to notice the shuffling of his action figures or the sudden disoriented classification of his medicine books.
Muhammad had not known how to respond to his brother other than smiling at him sheepishly. He was well aware of the suspicious behavior Abdullah had adopted after their trip from Pakistan last summer. It was not the first rishta that had not worked out in the family, but it was certainly the first time a groom had refused to sign the nikkah papers with a turban on his head. A gulab-jamun had fallen out of their mother’s mouth that day.
The incident had happened in front of every relative known, and had brought utter shame to the family, as their father termed it. Muhammad believed otherwise. He had known his ‘parent pleasing, Mr. Goody two shoes’ of a brother his whole life and refused to believe Abdullah’s made up excuse of not wanting to settle.
Hearing the noise of the car clear out of the garage, Muhammad took his brother’s journal out and sighed. There was a sudden excitement of finding the truth out, this way.
Last summer, I went from Pennsylvania to Pakistan for the second time in my life, and that was to meet my bride. I was thrilled to tie the knot not only because any desperate brown American would have been (whose parent’s sole purpose in life was to keep him from engaging with feminine species) but because I believed in love. The morning before my flight, my horoscope had promised me an overwhelming month and keeping my fingers crossed and bachelor friends updated, I landed in Pakistan. There was a particular blue in the sky that day.
Amina wasn’t anything like bhai jaan’s wife, and bhabhi was from Pakistan too. I had expected a timid soul to greet me from behind the wall and to ask me how much sugar I wanted with my cardamom tea just like bhabhi jaan had done so with bhai but my Amina was different. She wandered around the house, smelling of lavender, with not a care in the world.
I thought our love story would be set in the 90’s, with A&A carved on three trunks and Amina talking about her bangles with her head in my lap and me writing A Mid-Pakistan’s Night Dream similar to the tale of Shakespeare’s.
She hadn’t passed eighth grade, and she did not make palak like bhabhi did, but she made the most alluring paintings in the world. Her room was full of sketches of well-proportioned women of all colors, in all dresses but none could compare to her.
One day, I woke up without any scent of lavender in the house, finding out that she had not come out of her room. Thinking that the elders were still asleep, I crept upstairs and knocked on her door. My heart was skipping beats, of that I was sure. She quietly opened the door as if all this time she had been expecting I would come knocking.
“I thought it wasn’t much like you to not come downstairs today,” I said.
“Salam,” she replied, with a little grin on her face.
I realized that she had sensed my nervousness on my inability to start a decent conversation with a greeting.
“Salam,” I said and we exchanged smiles.
We talked for a long time that day. Fifteen minutes is a long time when you feel that it is the only meaningful conversation you’ve ever had. She seemed rather drained of her usual energy, yet she cracked a joked after every line she spoke.
“You say no to us marriage,” she said at the end. “You see paintings I done. All women.”
The way she tried to create meaning out of her incoherent usage of English, made me love her even more. I laughed. I laughed a lot that day. Her jokes were indeed, hilarious.
That afternoon, I stood by the stairs as she cringed shyly when bhabhi closed the hooks of the saree that I had given to her. I smiled. She would fit in our family so well, I thought. After lunch, I asked if we could go for a walk. She nodded and blinked her eyes twice at once. I wonder if she ever noticed these little things about herself.
She took me to the nearby gol gappa stop and cackled hysterically when I could not fit a whole gappa in my mouth. I told her about the tacos we had near our house in Pennsylvania and that the spices there would mess her up. I told her about the time I had peed my pants in back in fifth grade and about my action figure collection just for her laughter to repeat its rhythm which it did.
“So,” I said, rubbing my hands with my kameez. I could never get used to a shirt not having pockets. “Our parents want us to sign the papers tomorrow. Just a little formality first, you know.”
She looked at me if she had seen a ghost. Startled, she kept the half eaten gol gappa back onto the plate almost as if the food had lost its taste.
“Me told you,” she said, in a hesitant and annoyed manner.
“You told me what?”
“I not marry with you, Abdullah.”
Thinking it was one of her jokes, I waggled my eyebrows. “And why is that, Amina?”
“Mujhe auratein pasand hain,bhai.” (I like women, brother.)
The whole night I tried to laugh at what she had said, but it wasn’t funny and then it finally dawned upon me that my Pakistani wife to be was indeed a lesbian. On my way back, I cried my bones dry.
