“What is this noise about?” Abbu’s voice came from the living room. “I’m trying to read in here.”
STORY
“Ray!” Hina banged on his bedroom door with both fists. “Open up!” There was no response. She banged on the door again. “You better not be hiding from me, you little—”
“What is this noise about?” Abbu’s voice came from the living room. “I’m trying to read in here.”
“Nothing!” Hina called out. She gave up banging on the door and slumped down against it until she slid all the way down to the floor. She kicked one slipper off. The other one wouldn’t come off. She bent over to remove it and threw it across the hall. It landed at the end of the hall, slanted sideways. It lay there for a while until Hina got up, slid one foot into the nearby slipper and went to get the other one and put it back on. She stood there, undecided what to do next.
“Are you standing there waiting for me to come out of my room?” Ray walked up, a cup of tea in one hand. “I wasn’t in my room.” He looked at the skid marks on the floor. “Looks like you’ve been waiting for a while.”
“You’ve been avoiding me for a while, that’s what,” Hina said, not looking at him.
“Come in,” Ray said, walking past Hina into his room and setting the cup of tea down on his desk. When Hina didn’t move, he called out, “It’s better if we do this now rather than later.” Hina walked into the room.
“That’s better,” Ray said, sitting down at the desk. “Why don’t you sit? We’ll talk.”
“Of course, you want to talk now that you’ve gotten what you’ve wanted,” Hina said, crossing her arms.
“Like I said, it’s better if we talk about this now,” Ray said.
Hina sat down on Ray’s bed and turned her face away from him. “What was so important that you had to do all this without involving me?” she asked.
“Straight to the point,” Ray said.
“Of course,” Hina said.
“There’s nothing new to say, really,” Ray said. “If I had told you that I was going to talk to Ammi about Gohar, what would you have done?”
“I would have immediately called Gohar and asked her about it,” Hina said. “She’s my friend. I have every right to do that.”
“What would you have asked her?” Ray turned the cup around in its saucer.
“Only that what business does she have trying to get my brother, and to stay out of it,” Hina said.
“See?” Ray looked up. “Do you understand why I didn’t tell you about it beforehand?”
“I do not,” Hina said firmly. “It should have been a fair playing ground. You would have gone and asked for her, and I would have told her to put her friendship with me first and to call it off.”
“Are you really that possessive about your friend?” Ray asked.
“I am possessive about everyone,” Hina said. “I am possessive about you separately, and I am possessive about Gohar separately. The two don’t mix as far as I am concerned.”
“Why, though?” Ray asked. “Do you think I’m not good enough?”
“I’m not even thinking about you two as a couple at the moment,” Hina said. “What I’m thinking about is that I have a brother, I have a friend. The brother should stay my brother and the friend should stay my friend. If I give the brother to the friend, then I lose both brother and friend, and am left with absolutely no one.”
“It’s not like that,” Ray said. “If this goes through successfully then you’ll have your friend in your own house as your sister-in-law. I’m not going anywhere just because I asked someone to marry me. I will still be your brother. Anyway, we’ve only just gone to see her as a family. Ammi and Abbu have to make up their minds, and her family has to make up their minds. Nothing is settled yet.”
“It’s easy for you to say that,” Hina said. “You’re not the one losing a sibling and a friend all at once.”
“Hina, I was going to get married someday, alright?” Ray said. “Were you always going to be like this about your future sister-in-law?”
“No, I would have had Gohar to back me up and listen to me talk about my future sister-in-law,” Hina said. “Out of Amani and Gohar, Gohar is the sensible one. You just had to go after my best friend.” She sat up straighter. “Why did you want to play the hero after you found out Gohar’s engagement got broken off? You thought you’d be noble and save her from the shame, didn’t you? Anyway, is this how you thought about Gohar all this time, even when she was engaged to someone else? Couldn’t you have thought of me, how embarrassed I’d be because of your actions? It’s so embarrassing that this is what you’ve been thinking all this time.”
Ray went red in the face. He didn’t reply for a few moments. Then he took a deep breath and said, “You made a lot of assumptions about me in the last few minutes. I’m not obligated to explain myself to you, but I will try. Hina, you were so determined to get to know Sameer even though Ammi Abbu didn’t involve you when they arranged for you two to be married. In a similar way, can’t I be determined for what I want? When you told me about her situation, I decided to do what I did, entirely for my own reasons. You have no right to assume that I was planning this even when she was previously engaged.”
Hina said, “How do you know what you want? How do you know for certain, and that too so quickly after finding out about her situation? You knew about her through me, but that isn’t a good enough reason to want to marry her all of a sudden. Anyway, didn’t you say a long time ago that you’re not old enough to marry someone my age? What happened to that?”
“Hina, you just said yourself that she’s the better of your two friends,” Ray said. “It might surprise you, but I am a good judge of character. The age thing was just something I said at the time. Sometimes life plays out differently from what you used to say or believe.”
“Yes, but that still doesn’t explain how you know that you want to marry her,” Hina said. “The example you gave of me and Sameer doesn’t count because I didn’t get to choose to marry him. I just got determined to know who I was going to marry. Your case is different. You got determined to choose. I’ll ask again, how did you know?”
Ray said, “When you know, you know. It becomes the truth that you can’t deny. I can’t explain it further to you.”
“See, now this is the point where I would run what you said past Amani and Gohar on a group call,” Hina said. “I would get some sort of translation through them. Now, Gohar won’t answer my calls, and I’m not in the mood for a dose of Amani on her own. Do you see what you’ve done to my life?”
Ray sighed. “Gohar will return your calls once her parents have decided about me. It’s probably her mother who told her not to talk to you right now. The first communication after the meeting we had has to be a yes or a no about the matter. It can’t be you and Gohar endlessly discussing things I’ve said.”
Hina got up. “You’re lost to me,” she said.
To be continued...
