Love in a Headscarf Read Free Page B

daffodils burst out of a blue vase. I imagine where he might sit and wonder if the better profile of my face will be turned toward him. I turn my left profile in his imaginary direction, and then my right, and then sit and mimic speaking to him. I switch places to the chair I imagine he will sit in and pretend to be him responding to my statements: “I think you are stunning and I have fallen in love with you,” he informs me solemnly.
    I practice my smile again: a big smile, a cheeky one, a coquettish one, no smile at all.
    It would not be appropriate to be too enthusiastic or jovial at this stage. I ought to temper my usual exuberance in case I scare him. I have been told repeatedly by the elders and Aunties that I am too confident and clever, and that boys don’t like that. If I am serious about getting married, I will have to hide it. Showing a glimpse is fine, but it is crucial that the boys don’t think I am too clever. The Aunties have even gone so far as to say that I must not study a master’s or—heaven forbid!—a PhD, because nobody will want to marry me. Then I will have only myself to blame. “Nobody wants a girl who is too educated,” they advise me. “Then you’ll be old and left on the shelf. Better to get married first, sort out your husband, and then you can do as you please.”
    The Aunties were large and buxom, with strong accents that had a mesmerizing lilt to them, yet their voices grated as they echoed through my head. They were loud and powerful and rang with the legacy of thousands of years of tradition and heritage. Who was I to disobey their laws?
    “You know that girl Sonia,” one of them would begin. “Such a nice girl, so pretty and so fair.”
    “She got a proposal from a good family, and the boy was very handsome.”
    “Good-looking, heh.”
    “Yes, very good-looking.”
    “She was only seventeen.”
    “Yes, only seventeen, but very clever.”
    “Yes, very clever.”
    “And he had a good job.”
    “Yes, a very good job in a big law firm. Senior partner , you know.”
    “So she married him. And now she has three kids. And by the time she is forty-five, she will have had her children. The children will also be married themselves and have gone to their own homes, and she’ll be free. Then she can do whatever she wants. Study, work, travel.”
    “She’s already going to university to study. She has completed her degree and is doing a master’s.”
    “What you need a master’s for to clean the kitchen I don’t know!” guffawed the more buxom of the Buxom Aunties.
    “Masters of making roti and biryani!” they both cackled with their gravel-laden, paan -tinted voices. Chewing paan leaves released stimulants into the blood, like nicotine, and left yellow stains on the teeth.
    The Buxom Aunties raised the hairs on the back of my neck with their opinionated diktats. The unwavering confidence in their own view of the world threatened me at my point of greatest confusion: the intersection of being Muslim, South Asian, and British. I was not able to pull back the layers of culture that oozed from their Auntie-Jee pores to try to understand and assess the wholesome wisdom that lay beneath. Even their title—“Auntie” for respect and “Jee” for further respect—reinforced their standing as bastions of tradition. I cast them as old-fashioned while I thought of myself as forward-thinking and modern. I felt youthful revulsion at the stuck-in-time stereotypes of women that they supported, and my teenage self rebelled against them and all that they represented. But I did not see any paradox in engaging with the traditional process of marriage, of which they were a pivotal part. If I wanted a husband, this was how things were done.
    I hush their voices away as I sit waiting for this moment, this life-changing moment for which I have been primed. I tap my fingers on the table. Is someone whispering into his ear that he should move discreetly to the other room? Is he excited?