Chapter Twenty-Seven
‘So, then what happened?’ Dina demanded when she came over the next day with Sami and baby Sama. Aunty Noura had finally left to go back to Australia and we were both secretly relieved, although a little worried about how Dina would cope on her own.
We were up in my room enjoying tea and biscuits after dinner and prayers. Dina was breastfeeding Sama pretty much 24/7, dropping biscuit crumbs all over the baby blanket as she did so. Ma and Baba were entertaining Sami downstairs and he was thriving off all the attention. Ma loved children and was fussing over him like a grandmother hen, feeding him all sorts of sugary things that Dina would never have allowed had it been anyone else offering. During dinner, Ma kept making comments like, ‘Who knows when I’ll be a Nani or a Dadi?’, scowling first at me and then at my brother.
‘Nothing, I got on the train and I haven’t heard from him since,’ I admitted, as I dunked a cake rusk into my tea for a moment too long and watched the whole thing collapse into the bottom of my mug.
‘Maybe you should text him,’ Dina mused.
‘Why? I don’t have anything to say.’
‘He’s blatantly into you, Maya. Why don’t you give him some sort of indication that you’re into him too?’
‘Firstly, I’m not into him,’ I said weakly, aware of how lacklustre my response was. ‘And secondly, he’s leaving in a few months. There’s no point.’
‘So, tell him to stay!’ Dina began flailing her free arm about, as if the more she waved it around, the more I would be inclined to listen to her.
‘I can’t do that!’
‘Why not?’
‘He’s got a job out there! He’s been planning to go for years. I’m not going to make him give up his dreams for something that might turn out to be nothing.’
‘How will you know if it’s something unless you give it a go?’
‘How can I give it a go, Dina? What if he asks me to go to Dubai with him? I’m about to go back to uni! I’ve been offered a place and a scholarship. I can’t jeopardise all that I’m trying to achieve because I fancy some guy!’
Dina grimaced and her silence confirmed that I was making sense. Maybe Zak did like me, but ‘like’ wasn’t enough for us to completely put our plans on hold. And what did I know about ‘fancying’ someone anyway? I’d never been in a real relationship before. I hadn’t even been in a fake one. I had no idea what I would be like as a fiancée, partner or whatever I would call myself while we were courting. I didn’t know what it was like to have real feelings. For all I knew, this was a passing fancy. Albeit a mighty fine fancy. My insides tingled whenever I remembered him standing close to me, looking at me so intensely that it took all my self-control to walk away.
Dina and her babies left shortly after, as it was already past Sami’s bedtime and he was beginning to get cranky. Ma reluctantly let them leave, filling containers with rice and curry because apparently Sami really enjoyed her fried fish and daal and Dina needed to eat well as she was breastfeeding.
After doing the rest of the clean-up, I politely declined Ma’s offer to watch the latest Bollywood movie with her and Baba and went back into my room to peruse the list.
Climbing into bed and pulling the covers over me, I opened the weathered notebook. It was so fresh and pristine when I first found it on the Tube. Now, the black leather was wrinkled and worn, with creases in the spine and stains on the pages. If I ever met Noah again, there was no way I could return it to him in this condition, especially as I had scribbled my notes all over it. After completing each task, I wrote a few lines on how I felt about it. Nothing too deep, but nothing I wanted Noah to see.
Flicking through the pages, I got to number nineteen and swore under my breath. FFS, seriously? There, in the same ink as all the others, Noah had scrawled:
19.JOIN A DATING APP AND GO ON A DATE YOU MISERABLE SHIT
Tinder= hookups, Bumble and Hinge seem more meaningful. RateYourDate next?
There was no way I was going to join a dating app. No bloody way. Especially not after my social-media debut, when Lucy had plastered my before and after all over her accounts. I never wanted to go through something like that again, where strangers judged me solely on my appearance. I’d spent too much time trying to persuade myself that there was more to me than my looks to now go and put myself on display for a bunch of shallow, immature men to reject me. Not when I had come so far in my journey and was finally starting to believe it.
‘I’m not doing it, Luce,’ I said to Lucy as we sat at our desks on Monday, messing around on our phones but with PowerPoint open so it looked like we were working. Sheila was away meeting clients up in the north somewhere, so we were taking the rare opportunity to mess around all day.
‘Why not?’ Lucy asked as she put together her latest Instagram post. Her social-media presence was gaining traction after she had managed to persuade a couple of micro-influencers to let her style them. My ugly little post was now so far down her feed that you had to scroll quite a bit to get there. It was a massive relief for me and I was working up the courage to ask her to delete it altogether. She had enough content now; she didn’t need my crappy self sullying her aesthetics.
‘I don’t want idiotic men who don’t know me judging me based on my looks,’ I replied.
‘But you look good now,’ Lucy replied, completely missing the point.
‘That’s not the point.’
‘What is the point? I get that you don’t want to be objectified, but you’re not doing it to find love. You’re doing it to try something different and to complete the list. Are you really going to skip number nineteen to make a point to no one but yourself?’
‘I don’t like the idea of people reading a paragraph about me and then ticking a box like they’re doing online grocery shopping. What if I show up and they send me back because I’m not what they were expecting?’
‘Err, firstly, you’re not a balsamic vinegar being substituted for a balsamic glaze. Secondly, how is it any different from that marriage CV thingy your parents made for you?’
‘Did I tell you about that? I can’t remember.’
‘I remember and it sounds the same as online dating to me.’ She had a point there. It was the same, but I didn’t want a biodata in the first place. I only did it to get my parents off my back. But if I didn’t do this, I couldn’t tick it off. And I HAD to. I had jumped in a freezing-cold lake because I was determined to complete that blasted list. I had leapt out of a plane for God’s sake! All I had to do was make a profile and go on one date and then I could delete it forever, tick it off the list and move on to number twenty. With any luck, it would be something pleasant like learning how to arrange flowers. I’d always wanted to do that.
‘Fine, let’s do it,’ I sighed, handing my phone over to the expert. ‘You sort it out for me. I’m going to make some tea. Choose anything from the favourites folder in my camera roll.’
When I got back from the kitchenette carrying two mugs, Lucy was nodding and whispering with Arjun, who was typing away furiously on my phone.
‘There, all done,’ he said with a flourish when he spotted me. ‘You need to verify your face by taking a selfie now and you’re good to go. Thank me later, jaanu.’
Grabbing my phone, I did as he asked and then checked out the profile he had created with trepidation:
MissMayaMarvel
27
London
5’4
Born-and-bred Londoner, lawyer-in-training, lover of fine food, books, films, the Marvel Cinematic Universe and adventure. I make the best curry on this side of the Indian Ocean. Enjoy thrills and keeping fit. Looking for someone who knows their Ulysses from their Iliad and can match my passion and enthusiasm for all life has to offer
As far as profiles went, it wasn’t that bad. It made me sound interesting. Intelligent. Adventurous. Fulfilled.
‘ Can make the best curry on this side of the Indian Ocean? ’ I raised an eyebrow.
‘Creative licence,’ Arjun replied casually. ‘You’re welcome.’
Turning back to my phone, I browsed through the pictures they had chosen and I was surprised to see that I didn’t look completely out of my depth. There was a customary #goldenhour selfie, a picture from a wedding and a couple from Dubai. Looking at the profile felt like an out-of-body experience, like I was seeing myself for the first time. This profile didn’t look like it belonged to a confused introvert who lacked confidence and always felt inferior.
‘Thanks,’ I whispered, my eyes beginning to sting. Was this how people saw me? For so long I had felt unworthy, second fiddle to my brother, the twins and my work colleagues. I walked about in a fog, not knowing who I was or where I was going. But now, I felt like I had some clarity. I may not have known exactly who I was, but I knew where I was going.
Arjun began explaining how the app worked and I tuned in and out of his tutorial. All I was going to do was go on ONE date and that was it, I didn’t need to become an expert on swiping or reading between the lines.
‘Whatever you do, DON’T give your number to any random person and don’t meet anyone without telling us and letting us investigate him first, OK?’ he said sternly. ‘I really don’t want to read about you in the papers the next day.’
‘Stop freaking me out! I didn’t want to do this in the first place,’ I wailed.
‘It’s good you’re freaked out. And also, don’t send money to anyone or click any links. Or agree to go on a private jet.’
‘All right!’
Someone clearly took their Netflix documentaries too seriously, but deep down, I knew he was right. If Arjun was offering to do due diligence for free, then I wasn’t about to turn down an opportunity to preserve my life for a bit longer.
‘Hey, Luce, how’s it going with you and that guy you were seeing?’ I asked her later that afternoon, as I carried on doing fake work. I’d had the same Excel spreadsheet open for the past two hours and hadn’t made a single change on it.
‘Same thing,’ she all but growled at me. ‘He won’t commit and I’m done. I’m so done.’
‘He doesn’t deserve you, hun,’ I said sympathetically. He really didn’t. She was a catch in every sense of the word. She was kind, caring, fun, smart, beautiful. She could have anyone she wanted. She didn’t need a wasteman who wouldn’t commit to her. I said all this out loud and she suddenly stood up, her eyes ablaze.
‘You’re right!’ she said. ‘He doesn’t deserve me. Look at me! Do I look like someone who waits around for a man to make up his mind if he wants to be with me?’
I stared at her as her voice grew louder, causing colleagues in different departments to look over at us.
‘WELL? DO I?’
‘Uh no, you don’t. Sorry, I thought it was a rhetorical question.’ I looked at her nervously and at all the curious faces watching us. Rachel in accounts in particular. She’d had it in for us ever since that time she asked if she could join us for lunch and we had slipped off without telling her. ‘Err, Luce, do you want to keep it down a bit? People are looking.’
Lucy sat down in a huff, her face as pink as a marshmallow. ‘You know what? I’m making a profile too. That’s what I’m going to do. I’m not wasting a second further on some mummy’s boy who’s too scared to bring me home.’
Later that night, when I was in the privacy of my room, I checked RateYourDate and tried to figure out how to use it properly, wishing I had paid more attention to Arjun’s lesson. Mind you, it wasn’t exactly neurosurgery, quite the opposite, in fact. Some of the profiles made me wonder if the person writing them had a single brain cell. Said the woman whose friends curated and created her entire profile for her. I know, I’m a hypocrite.
Soon, I was having quite a lot of fun swiping this way and that. What made this app different was the fact that dates could rate each other after meeting up and the higher the star rating, the higher the profiles ranked.
Judging people on their dodgy profile pictures (heavily filtered ones being the worst) and their badly written bios was just what I needed after a long day at work. With some of the guys, it was obvious that they were there looking for a sneaky link, but it was more difficult to tell with others. The app wasn’t a Muslim-centric one but there were still plenty of Muslim men on it. It didn’t matter to me either way. I was after one platonic meeting and that was all. Number nineteen would be done and dusted.
It didn’t take long to get bored of constantly swiping, so I decided to call it a night. I would check out my own notifications the following morning to see if anyone was interested in me, but it was late and I didn’t want to get sucked into a conversation with anyone.
Just as I was about to log out and put my phone away, a profile caught my eye. The guy looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him immediately. There was only one picture, so I moved down to the bio and gasped as realisation struck me in the centre of my chest like a lightning bolt:
NoahPT29
30
London
6’3
Hey everyone, Noah here. I’m a half-Lebanese, half-English personal trainer looking for someone who’s smart, fun, easy-going and enjoys going out, working out and experiencing new things. If that’s you .?.?. well, who knows where swiping right could lead us?
WHAT. THE. HELL?
My fingers trembling with excitement, I read his bio over and over again until I knew it off by heart. I analysed every millimetre of his picture, lapping it all up like a thirsty horse in a desert oasis. The beautiful, wavy, light brown hair, the twinkling green-grey eyes, skin the colour of molten gold, perfect straight white teeth, the bump in his nose. He was looking straight into the camera and it felt like he was looking straight at me.
Hurriedly, as though I was afraid that the profile would disappear, I took a screenshot and sent it over to Lucy, who called me immediately.
‘OH, MY BLOODY GAWD, MAYA!’ she shrieked so loudly that I had to move the phone away from my ear.
‘It’s him, Lucy! It’s Noah! From the list!’ I yelped. ‘What shall I do?’
‘Swipe right, you idiot! Do it now before he deletes his account or meets someone else! Do it now! He’s so bloody hot.’
‘OK, OK. I’ll let you know what happens.’
Hanging up the phone, I took a moment to compose myself by closing my eyes and doing a bit of deep breathing. I couldn’t believe I had found him and I didn’t have to go to a triathlon to do it.
Whispering ‘Bismillah’, I swiped right and waited, praying that he would do the same.