Not All Marriages are Made in Heaven

by Farahad Zama

  “But that’s not quite what I meant – ”

  “Aargh!” she screamed suddenly, and started beating him on the chest with her fists. “Don’t talk to me about a man I’ve never met and have no feelings for. Give me my husband back, smiling in that crooked way of his. Allow me to cook his favourite khatti-dhal and salted-fish curry served the way he wanted with warm rice and dollops of ghee. Let him lift me up in the air as if I were a doll and feel his strong hands around my waist. I want to sit pillion behind him on our motorbike with one hand on his strong shoulder, leaning against his body to whisper into his ear. Return my father whole and hearty, indulging my every whim – not distressed and lying in his own waste, longing for death. I want to be in bed with my husband, knowing that neither of us had slept with another; that we didn’t need to be ashamed of our bodies in any way because neither of us had any other body to compare ourselves with. Can you give me that?” Her voice had been steadily getting louder until she was almost screaming at the end. “Can. You. Give. Me. That?” she repeated, in a voice made harsh by emotion.

  Rehman listened to her in agony. What she really wanted, of course, was to turn the clock back to when she was a simple housewife in a village – married to a good man of regular habits, following a path smoothed by tradition and the feet of millions of women before her.

  An extra-hard blow drove the breath from his lungs and he grunted, becoming aware that she was still hitting him and not gently either. Rehman seized her wrists, one in each hand and held them inches away from his chest. He was surprised by how much strength it took.

  Incongruously, an image of his dry stick-insect-like college physics teacher came to his mind, adjusting his thick glasses and intoning the second law of thermodynamics in his high voice, “The entropy of an isolated system always tends to increase when it moves from one state of equilibrium to the next.” The implication of this law is that the arrow of time only travels forwards and cannot be turned back.

  Their bodies were very close now and he looked into her unblinking eyes. Her arms had gone slack and he didn’t need much force to hold them in place, though he didn’t let go. He decided that she would not appreciate a science lesson, so instead, he quoted something else that he had come across in his teenage years.

  The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

  Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit

  Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

  Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

  They heard a window rattle in the building next door and looked up. A housewife was looking at them curiously from one of the second-floor flats. Pari twisted her arms free and jumped back. Red in the face, she turned away from Rehman and the onlooker, whipping her dupatta back over her head.

  Rehman glanced up again to see that the woman had withdrawn back into her flat. He rubbed his chest and said, “Have you considered a career in boxing? I reckon you could give Muhammad Ali a lesson in sparring.”

  Pari turned back and smiled at him. “That was a beautiful verse,” she said. “It’s not yours, surely.”

  “Much as I’d like to claim it, no. Have you heard of Omar Khayyam?”

  “Of course,” she said. “Wasn’t he a mendicant who wandered in the desert singing songs about wine and women?”

  “Well, he was actually a scholar and philosopher. The poem I quoted is one of his ruba’iyah, a quatrain – probably his most famous.”

  “I hadn’t heard it before,” said Pari.

  Rehman realised just how limited Pari’s education had been. Her fluency and knowledge made him forget that she had started studying English only four years ago and, much as she’d read, there must be even more gaps.

  Pari continued, “I am sorry about shouting at you like that and hitting you, Rehman. I don’t know what came over me.”

  “Don’t feel bad, you are right. You’ve had abba and ammi and me all talking about it and felt you were under pressure. That’s not the intention – not mine, anyway. I won’t speak of this again, after this one last time. So you haven’t actually met Dilawar?”

  “No,” said Pari. “I’ve seen his photo, of course. He is a handsome man.”

  Rehman shrugged. “Looks aren’t everything. Why don’t you meet him? Have a chat with him – tell him about your fear of moving to a faraway city and your concerns regarding Vasu. See how he reacts, what he says. Then you can decide whether you should marry him or not.”

  “That’s – ” Pari shook her head. “That’s not how my first marriage was fixed.”

  “That marriage was within the family. We all knew one another. This is different. Meeting your fiancé is not something the elders would ever suggest, but…”

  Pari turned away and stood straight as a slender reed, gazing towards the horizon, her dupatta fluttering behind her like a banner in the wind. Rehman couldn’t see her face. As he looked at her slim but shapely body, admiration for her crept up on him. What a brave girl she was. She faced so many problems and this was the first time that she had shown any evidence of the stress she must be under. He wished he could do something, anything, to lighten her load and make her happier. He rubbed his chest again with a rueful grin. She was a mean boxer, though. He hoped Dilawar could stand up to her.

  Pari faced him once more. “For a man who knows nothing about girls, you have come up with a sensible idea. I will meet your friend and we’ll see what happens after.”

  Now that she had agreed to his suggestion, Rehman wondered why, despite the bright fireball of a sun in the clear, blue sky, the day suddenly seemed to have lost its brightness.

  ♦

  “What a bother it was,” said Mrs Ali. “Honestly, it would have been less trouble to arrange a daughter’s wedding than it was to buy the phone. Ration card, voting card, this certificate, that proof. Does anybody even check all those documents once they collect them?”

  “Oh yes, madam,” said Aruna. “Ever since mobile phones started being used by terrorists, the government is pretty serious about identifying who owns which SIM card. If the documents are even slightly out of order, your phone will be cut off within forty-eight hours.”

  Mrs Ali was now the proud possessor of her first mobile phone. If she was really candid, she didn’t actually need the phone, but everybody seemed to have one nowadays. She had read in the paper that fifteen million phones were being purchased every month, and surely so many consumers couldn’t all be wrong. The same article had said that more people in India now owned mobile phones than in America. She had felt a moment’s pride in that statistic until her husband pointed out that India had a population three times the size of the USA’s and surely there were not three times more phones in India. She had shrugged irritably at him, thinking that was not the point, but being unable to articulate what the point was, she had asked for a phone of her own, prepared to argue that if Aruna and Pari – and even the tailor who had come to measure their windows for the curtains – had a phone, then she ought to have one too. To her surprise, Mr Ali had agreed immediately.

  She still remembered the time when they had first applied for a phone – a proper black one that had a dial with little holes showing the numbers into which you put a finger and turned in a circle to make a call. It had a loud brash ring that was instantly recognisable, so that you did not have to wonder whether the tinny tune, seemingly coming from nowhere and everywhere, was somebody calling you, or a car reversing, or a visitor with his fat finger pressed to the doorbell. They had been advised that the waiting list for a phone was seven years. According to the dismissive clerk at the post office, they were lucky that it was only seven. The government had just sanctioned a new exchange as previously the waiting list had been twelve years. She knew men who had died disappointed and phoneless, and whose children had fallen out with one another over who would inherit the father’s position on the waiting list.

  Yesterday evening, she and her husband had gone to an air-conditioned, though terribly crowded, shop, been waited o
n by an attentive salesgirl and come back home, triumphant, with a phone. Actually, it had been a little bit more complicated than that. They first had to negotiate strange names like Nokia, Motorola and Samsung, then terms like pre-paid, post-paid, calling plans, SIM, GSM and SMS. After that they were given a box of sealed envelopes, each with a phone number written on it, and the salesgirl had told them to choose one. Mrs Ali selected a number with a repeating pattern that would be easy to remember. At that moment, the man standing next to them, waiting for his turn to be served, said, “Madam, that’s a bad number.”

  Mrs Ali stared at the speaker in surprise. He looked like a daily-wage labourer – his clothes were serviceable but old, and his feet were shod in tattered rubber slippers. She remembered an old maxim about a man who could not afford to feed his family but always bought wax for his moustache. The saying has to be updated, thought Mrs Ali, to refer to people who can’t afford shoes but bought mobile phones.

  “Why is it a bad number?” asked Mr Ali.

  “If you add up all the digits, it comes to sixty-one, whose sum is seven,” he said. “Everybody knows that seven is not a good number.”

  The word for seven in Telugu sounds just like the word to cry and is considered inauspicious.

  “We don’t believe – ” Mr Ali started saying.

  Mrs Ali interrupted him. “We are Muslims,” she said. “In our language, Urdu, the word for seven sounds like that for friendship. We don’t consider it a bad number.”

  The man nodded and went back to choosing a phone model.

  “Why – ” began Mr Ali in a whisper.

  “Shh,” said Mrs Ali in Urdu so the labourer wouldn’t understand. “I know what you were going to say and I don’t want a discussion on the merits of numerology.”

  The girl took the envelope from them and said, “Do you have two forms of ID, one with a photo and one with your address on it?”

  Mrs Ali stared at her husband in consternation. “No,” she said.

  Wherever they went, whether to the local grocery shop, their bank branch or even the goldsmith, their faces were their identification.

  “Why do we need papers to prove who we are?” said Mrs Ali. Then a thought struck her. “We are not paying with those new-fangled, what do you call them…credit cards. We will pay in cash.”

  “Sorry, madam. It’s not about money. It’s a government regulation.”

  The salesgirl was smiling but inflexible. No paperwork – no phone.

  As they turned away in disappointment, the girl said, “Why don’t you call somebody at home to bring the papers?”

  “That’s why we need the phone,” said Mr Ali. “To call people.”

  The girl didn’t see the irony of the situation, but eventually offered them the use of the shop’s phone to make the call. Rehman brought them the papers and after that they were out in half an hour. Rehman had taken the transaction for granted but Mr and Mrs Ali were impressed that one could walk into a shop with a little money (and some documents) and come out with a phone, connected to the world.

  Mrs Ali looked at Aruna. “I don’t like these long numbers,” she said. “The land phone numbers are so much easier to remember.”

  “But you don’t need to memorise them, madam,” said Aruna. “Your phone will keep track of them for you. You select the person by name. Here, let me show you.” She came out from behind the table and sat next to Mrs Ali. “Whom do you call most often?”

  Mrs Ali took out a battered, old address book and pointed out a few of the numbers. Aruna entered them.

  “Do you want my number?” Aruna asked.

  Her husband had bought her the phone as a present during the festival of Sankranti, the three-day celebration of the main harvest being brought in. Aruna now took it out of her handbag and showed it to Mrs Ali.

  “Oh, that looks nice,” said Mrs Ali, holding the sleek instrument. “Was it expensive?”

  “I think so, but Ram won’t tell me. To be quite honest, I would have loved it even if it was the cheapest toy, because he bought it for me without my even asking for it.”

  Mrs Ali smiled. “Yes, it is nice when our men do that, isn’t it? It is so easy to please a woman – just some unexpected flowers or a sari or even a bit of help in the house when we are not well – but somehow men never seem to understand that.” She looked at Aruna’s phone more closely. “What are all those pictures on the screen?”

  “They are different apps, madam. This one, for example, shows our exact location.” Aruna tapped the icon and the phone displayed their co-ordinates.

  “What’s the point of that?” said Mrs Ali. “You know where you are – you don’t need the phone to tell you! All gadgets have become complicated now. Last month, we went to buy a TV.”

  Aruna nodded. The Alis’ TV was almost as old as the television in her parents’ house.

  “Well, the salesman showed us so many TVs and they all had such complicated remote controls with lots of tiny buttons, just like a mobile phone, that we gave up and decided to stick with our old TV.”

  Aruna laughed.

  After a moment, Mrs Ali said, “Your parents don’t have a phone, do they?”

  Aruna shook her head. “No, madam. Vani has been asking for a mobile phone, though. I’ve told her that I might get her one for Dusserah.”

  Dusserah was the other main Telugu festival, to celebrate the killing of the demon, Mahishasurah, by the goddess Durga – and the autumn harvest.

  Mrs Ali said, “Yes, your sister goes to college. I am sure it will be useful for her.”

  Aruna showed Mrs Ali how to bring up the list of names on the phone and called her own number. When Aruna’s phone rang, she immediately hung up and fiddled with the keys. “I have stored your number now,” she said.

  “Thanks,” said Mrs Ali, frowning with concentration. “It doesn’t seem too difficult. So whom do you call on the phone? Your husband?”

  Aruna blushed. “Yes, I call him at the hospital to find out when he’s coming back. I also call Peter, our driver, when I have finished shopping, so he can come and pick me up. I’ve only had the phone for a couple of months, but already I wonder how I used to manage without it.”

  Mrs Ali said, “Does Ramanujam ever call you or is it always you calling him?”

  “Oh, no, madam. He keeps calling me too. Last Monday I went to my parents’ place for the afternoon and he called me three times. Vani started teasing me and it was very embarrassing.”

  Mrs Ali smiled at Aruna’s earnest expression and said, “That’s all we need. Whatever little chance we have of escaping from our husbands by visiting our birth families is gone. They will be tracking us down and asking us to come back home as soon as we have reached somewhere. How unlucky we are not to have even this tiny amount of freedom that our grandmothers enjoyed.”

  Aruna laughed and Mrs Ali joined her. “Yes, madam. You are right. We should tell our men to be more patient and not keep calling us all the time.”

  A rattle came from the iron gate of the verandah, making the two women look up and their mirth instantly was expunged. Pari stood there, her slim frame silhouetted against the bright light, her dupatta trailing behind her and her hair windblown. She stared at them intently and something about her face made Aruna shiver. Before they could say anything, Pari turned on the spot and left. The two leaves of the gate slammed against each other loudly.

  Pari crossed the road blindly, making for her room and crashing into a passing pedestrian. He almost swore at the unexpected bump, then fell silent at the despair on her face.

  Pari tried to tell herself that Mrs Ali and Aruna were not being deliberately malicious. They had surely not even been thinking about her. If she and her husband had had mobile phones, he would probably have called her every ten minutes. She would never have complained. Never.

  Nine

  Even though it was four in the morning, the arrivals area outside Sahar airport in Mumbai was crowded. Neatly dressed limousine chauffeurs from posh hot
els held up placards for businessmen; Muslim women in all-enveloping burqas looked ardently for their Gulf-returned husbands; family members, young and old, all jostled in the pre-dawn hours.

  International air travel is still relatively uncommon in India; there are often several excited people looking out for each disembarking passenger, so the assembly was quite large. As each trolley turned the corner and hove into sight, those waiting stared anxiously to see if it was the one.

  “The flight from Muscat landed fifteen minutes ago,” announced a burly Sikh and the news spread through the throng.

  Suited and booted businessmen were the first out, walking purposefully towards the placards that bore their names and handing their luggage over to the drivers, their movements slick with practice. After that came couples carrying babes in arms, sometimes with older toddlers in pushchairs.

  They gazed around, confused at the large numbers of people and the sauna-like heat, even at this early hour. A whole family rushed over when a young husband and wife emerged with a small baby. The matriarch of the family hugged her son, noting how thin he had become, then turned to her daughter-in-law – or, rather, to the baby with the daughter-in-law.

  From eavesdropping on the family’s conversation before the plane had landed, Dilawar knew that the young couple had been married for almost two years and this tiny male baby had been as eagerly awaited as any heir to the throne of England. He saw with a grim smile that the baby had been plucked out of its mother’s hands and was engulfed by the whole family, pushing the poor mother to the outskirts. The baby, naturally, started howling at being surrounded by a whole bunch of strangers pulling funny faces at it. Oh well, I am sure that the young woman’s standing will rise as the mother of the family’s first grandson, thought Dilawar.

  He waited another five minutes before Shaan finally appeared. Dilawar waved until his friend caught sight of him and came over. Dilawar smiled broadly and moved to shake his hand, but Shaan brushed it aside and hugged him. Dilawar hurriedly pushed Shaan away and said, “Not here, people are looking. They might get suspicious.”