Chapter Eleven
When our guests finally finished eating, Pretty, Pinky and I started loading the trays with the empty cups and crockery to clear up. I couldn’t wait to get out of the living room and into the safety of the kitchen so I could tell the girls who Zakariya was. To my annoyance, his older sister, Halima, got up to help us, which meant I couldn’t offload. Then, to make matters worse, his mother, younger sister Hasina and Ma decided to follow us into the kitchen too, getting in the way as we attempted to tidy up without dropping anything (again).
‘Which of today’s delicious treats did you make?’ his mother asked, placing her hand on my arm and peering into my face, as if she was trying to figure out what I looked like without makeup. I tried not to extract my arm from her grip as I replied in a monotone that I baked the cake and shaped all the samosas. She looked pleased with my lacklustre response and Pretty suppressed a snigger as she put the leftovers into old butter, ice cream and one-litre yoghurt tubs. (I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve opened what I thought was Anchor Butter to find homemade ginger and garlic paste instead. The worst is excitedly grabbing a tub of chocolate ice cream, dessert spoon poised, only to discover a soul-crushingly disappointing frozen mutton curry inside.)
‘You like cooking then?’ his mother continued, as if it was the most important thing to know about me. Before I could reply, Ma jumped in with, ‘Oh, Maya is a bit of a whizz in the kitchen, you know! She’s always whipping up these fancy meals that put me to shame!’
By fancy, she must have meant mushy pasta with Dolmio sauce. I rolled my eyes at Pretty, which didn’t go unnoticed by Hasina, who seemed to pick up on everything. She looked at me as if she were trying to figure me out and I wished her luck with that, because even I didn’t know who I was half the time.
I was desperate to tell the twins about my meeting with Zakariya earlier in the week, but it was impossible with his sisters in hearing distance. And just as they left the room and I was about to combust, Malik came in to tell me that Zakariya wanted to talk to me alone.
‘I don’t want to!’ I hissed, begging my brother with every part of me. ‘I’m not feeling it, M. Please don’t make me!’
Ma stopped midway between putting the teacups away and both she and my brother stared at me like I was crazy.
‘Have you lost the plot?’ Malik whispered back. ‘He’s a decent guy and he’s good-looking! Get over yourself and meet him. I’m going to bring him up to your room.’
‘Maya, please, don’t ruin things,’ Ma implored, grabbing my hands. ‘They’re a good family. Proposals like this won’t come every day!’
‘I can’t believe you want him to come to my room! It’s my safe space.’
‘Stop being so dramatic, what is this “safe space” nonsense? Keep the door open so it’s not bejjoti. I don’t want your reputation tarnished.’
Ma all but shoved me out of the room and I glared at my brother’s back for a moment before legging it upstairs. The last thing I wanted was to be standing there like an idiot when Zakariya came into the hallway and having to lead him to my room myself.
Panting, I flopped onto my bed and then leapt back up, smoothed out the sheets and chose the desk chair instead. Sitting on my bed would have been too provocative. I didn’t want this ‘Zakariya’ to get the wrong idea about the situation and think I was interested in him. The saddest part was, I might have been if I hadn’t known that he was a judgemental know-it-all who talked too much about things that weren’t his concern.
Before I could spend any more time gathering my thoughts, there was a tap on the door and Malik walked in, followed closely by Zakariya, who was towering over him.
‘Affa, this is Zakariya,’ Malik said. He gestured to Zakariya to take a seat on my bed and I bristled as he did. To be fair, it was either my bed or the floor, but still, it felt horribly intrusive. I should have stayed on my bed and let him take the chair. I expected Malik to join him and make small talk but then my snake of a brother turned around, walked out of my room and closed the door behind him.
Staring at the door that my mum had specifically told us to leave open, I wondered if I should get up and open it again. Before I could, Zakariya spoke.
‘Fancy meeting you again,’ he began with a knowing smile, leaning forward. ‘How is your ailing grandmother?’
So that was how he was going to play it. I opened my mouth to respond and before I could think it through, I squinted at him and said, ‘I’m sorry? Have we met before?’
My response threw him and he shifted in his seat, not quite as confident as he was a moment before. ‘At that drawing class in the city? You had to leave early because your grandmother was taken ill in .?.?. Palestine?’ As the words came out of his mouth, I could see in his expression that he was doubting himself. He had seen my biodata for God’s sake. He would have known if I had a Palestinian grandmother.
I put on my best sheepish look and shrugged helplessly. ‘Palestinian grandmother? I’m as Bengali as they come. Sorry, you must have me confused with someone else.’
A silence followed as he struggled with what to say next, since his plan to embarrass me and put me on the spot was obviously failing. I did nothing to ease the awkwardness. He deserved to feel uncomfortable after the discomfort he had caused me during that class.
Clearly at a loss for how to respond, Zakariya instead got up from where he was perched on the edge of my bed and began nosing around my room. I watched him wordlessly as he took in the plain beige walls, matching carpet and similarly coloured duvet.
‘You like .?.?. beige, don’t you?’
‘It’s not beige,’ I said defensively, wracking my brains for a colour that didn’t have such a bland reputation. ‘For your information, it’s .?.?. stone. And I like things to be simple and unfussy.’
‘You’re hardly “simple” and “unfussy”,’ he mused, going over to my bookcase and flicking through the titles. He raised an eyebrow at Ulysses perched on the end of the shelf like a bookend and then I thought I heard a snicker upon his discovery of the handful of spicy TikTok sensations that I should have donated to a charity shop before the Big Marriage Meeting. But how was I to know that my parents – the same people who warned me about looking at boys – would allow a full-grown male into my bedroom, unchaperoned?
If his prying into my taste in books wasn’t excruciating enough, he then moved on to my photographs. There was the one of Pinky, Pretty and me in Cornwall the summer after GCSEs that Ma had taken. One of Malik and me in Bangladesh when we were kids, wearing vest tops and shorts and drinking fresh coconut water straight from the fruit. There was one of my mum and dad on their wedding day and then a really embarrassing one: me, on my own, dressed up to the nines in a full-length gown at Dina’s wedding. He spent the longest looking at that one. I felt the heat rise to my cheeks as I stomped over to him.
‘Do you mind?’ I snapped, snatching the frame out of his hands. ‘This is private stuff, you know.’ I put the frame back on the shelf facing the other way so the photo wasn’t visible and made a mental note to replace it with something less personal, like our next-door neighbour’s cat.
‘Well, it is on display, not hidden away in an album,’ he reasoned, going over to the chair I had vacated and sitting down, crossing his outstretched ankles and making himself comfortable.
‘I wasn’t expecting you to start digging through my room,’ I retorted. ‘If I had known you would be this nosy, I would have put everything away.’
‘I’m glad you didn’t. A person’s boudoir speaks volumes about their personality.’ He leant back in the chair, eyeing me with an interested expression on his face, and I resisted the urge to push him over. His confidence was bordering on arrogance and while a part of me found it endearing, the bigger, more sensible part, found it annoying.
‘Oh, really? And what does my “boudoir” say about mine?’
‘You’re studious. You love your family. You’re smart.’ He nodded to Ulysses then and I held back a snort. ‘You prefer staying at home to going out. You’re soft beneath that prickly exterior. A bit shy and introverted, despite the image you’re trying to portray.’
I forced my jaw not to drop open, shocked by his brazenness. Soft beneath that prickly exterior? How dare he! Like I was some sort of ripe jackfruit. He probably expected me to swoon at his charm, but I rolled my eyes instead. What a load of codswallop. So what if what he said was spot on? Anyone could have figured that out.
‘But what I’m really curious to know –’ he continued, staring at me with a half-smile on his face ‘– is why you’re pretending that we haven’t already met?’
‘Because I wish we hadn’t!’ I blurted out, unable to contain myself anymore. ‘You didn’t exactly leave a good impression!’
‘What did I do?’ he asked, looking genuinely confused, which irritated me further.
‘Forget about it. It doesn’t matter.’ I sighed and looked down at the floor.
It had been such a long week. I had put my blood, sweat and tears into preparing for this visit. I let my parents create a marriage CV. I cleaned every inch of the house. I bought a new outfit. I gave it my best shot and what happened? The guy turned out to be a judgemental git that I had already met before. How was that for bad luck? I was exhausted. Physically, mentally and everything in between.
‘It obviously does matter because whatever it is, it’s impacting the way you’re behaving towards me today. You’re not going to give this a chance, are you?’
‘Of course not. And who cares? You might think you know me after poking around my room for five minutes, but you don’t. So why don’t we call it a day and stop wasting everyone’s time?’
‘Are you serious? Just like that? I don’t know what I did that was so terrible.’
‘Like I said before, it doesn’t matter. Forget it.’
‘You know what? Fine. Let’s forget it. We’re obviously incompatible. But can you tell me what I did?’
‘You really want to know?’ I finally looked at Zakariya again and I was surprised by the intensity of his expression. It felt as though he truly did want to understand why I disliked him so much. I had no idea why he cared, but maybe he was one of those guys who couldn’t deal with rejection.
‘Yes!’
I took a second to gather my wits, before letting him have it. ‘You made a comment about being surprised that a “visibly Muslim girl like me” was at the class. Do you know what it’s like, being a brown Muslim woman in London? I get judged everywhere I go, from white people to our own people. I can’t win either way! You judged me without knowing me, or why I was at the class, even though you were there yourself to support your naked friend!’
By the time I got all this out of my system, I could feel my cheeks burning and I was waving my hands around like a lunatic. He looked surprised and then incredulous as he digested my revelation.
‘Well, it was a valid observation,’ Zakariya said after a beat, his voice a lot calmer than mine. I tried to take my own volume down a notch, reminding myself that our families were downstairs.
‘Seriously?’ I hissed from between clenched teeth, crossing my arms like a child and then uncrossing them when I realised it probably made me look immature. ‘It was judging a woman, without knowing her, because of the colour of her skin!’
‘OK. Fine. If you insist. So that’s it then? No point in talking further?’ His voice still quiet, he stood up and stepped closer to me. Uncomfortably so. I inhaled deeply and his expensive, manly scent went straight to my brain and made me feel lightheaded. Why did he have to be so bloody good-looking? This would be so much easier if he wasn’t. I tried to take a step backwards, but my bed was right behind me and if I moved back any further, I would fall onto it. And Lord knew what sort of invitation that would have been.
I contemplated his question and I hesitated for a second before saying no. I looked away from him because suddenly, staring into his eyes made me feel funny. There was something about the way he was looking at me, the intensity of his stare, which was making my legs turn to jelly. Swallowing nervously, I lifted my eyes again to meet his. ‘There’s no point.’
‘Right. I’ll go back downstairs then.’
With one last long, hard look, he turned around and walked out of the room, closing the door firmly behind him. And as soon as he did, I didn’t feel triumphant like I thought I would. I felt horribly deflated. And alone.