“Layla, you look too young to be the mother of a young man,” Khadija said.
Amar smiled at that. Layla told Amar about Khadija, who had just recently moved from Hyderabad to live with her son and daughter-in-law.
“Do you like it here?” Amar asked in Urdu, and Layla was again touched. He had used the respectful aap. Why had she assumed he had forgotten?
The two of them talked, Khadija telling Amar how she had adjusted to California, the pleasant air and hills, an ocean nearby, and Amar asking her questions in a broken Urdu that was making them laugh.
“That’s one thing that’s a shame,” Khadija said, turning then to Layla, “that the children here have forgotten their language. I fear for my grandchildren.”
Layla gripped the loose fabric of her sari tight, the little beads bit into her skin. She did not want to nod and agree with Khadija, not in front of Amar and not at all.
“Nice to meet you,” Amar said to her in English after a while. He stepped back into the crowd. Layla excused herself too and walked off as though called by an errand.
Khadija had raised her children in India. Her son had moved here alone. He was what her children would teasingly call “a fob”—fresh off the boat, what she liked to remind them that their own parents were once. Layla was twenty when the proposal from Rafiq came. She looked at Hadia now, twenty-seven and seated on the stage surrounded by Tariq’s sisters. But she still seemed so young to Layla.
On the eve of her own wedding night, while the mehndi lady covered her hands with henna and drew in Rafiq’s initials, the life that awaited her was a blur. She could picture just the corner of the apartment they would live in, the outline of the hills. At that point she had seen Rafiq in person twice, had received from him five letters her mother read before giving them to her, had written him back four that her mother had checked and made her rewrite before allowing the envelope to be sealed and stamped. Rafiq had sent photographs with each letter. The hills green and empty of houses. The wide gray roads and the street lamps curved at the top like drooping flowers. The promise he would purchase plane tickets for her parents to visit them. Her father would turn to her flapping the photographs around like a fan saying, “Layla jaani, Layla raani—look, it is exactly like my paintings, and how entirely appropriate that a place like a painting is where my daughter’s destiny lies.”
Almost thirty years ago, Layla had herself been a bride, walking to the stage where Rafiq waited, her sight obscured by rows of thick flowers she was not allowed to peek through. How was she to know then what it would be like to raise her children in an unfamiliar land, a land that held no history for her but the one they were making together. Bismillah, she repeated, as her sister held her to guide her to Rafiq, I begin in the name of God. She had never traveled out of Hyderabad before. She was like the women in the novels or the movies, the ones who stepped onto a plane or boat and watched their world shrink behind them. The Compassionate, the Merciful. The scent of jasmine and roses. Wondering only if her husband would be a kind man or a stern one.
* * *
TARIQ ASKED HER how much longer the smiling and greeting would continue. He gestured at his jaw. Hers ached too. Never had she sustained a smile for so long—during conversations and the moments between, when the photographer asked them to look up. She scanned the wedding hall: the rows of chandeliers twinkling, casting golden light on the tables beneath them. People she had seen all her life seated at the tables, leaning into one another, laughing and talking. The guest list reflected more her parents’ and Tariq’s parents’ circles than theirs, but neither she nor Tariq wanted to take that from them. The women had gathered on the right side of the hall and the men on the left. No partition, so everyone could move freely, especially the teenagers who wandered in hope of stealing a glance or bumping into a particular boy or girl. Hadia smiled to remember what that had been like. One by one the guests came to greet them and Amar had not come. Had still not met Tariq. Had the thought even occurred to him?
She spotted Huda and waved her over. She had not intended to lower her voice and speak quickly in Urdu, but when Huda’s face was close to hers, she did. Tariq’s parents spoke Urdu but he and his siblings had not learned it. Hadia had not realized how important it would be for her until she found she kept wanting to speak to him in the language she used with Mumma and Baba, the language she slipped into when afraid or when she stubbed her toe against the desk. She had begun to sense that there was a barrier between them, unnoticed on most days but still obstructing a complete intimacy, the intimacy of home, and sometimes she felt unreasonably that until she called for him in her first language and he returned her call, they would not be truly, completely, a family.
She did not want Tariq to know that her own brother had to be urged to meet him. She wanted Amar to walk up of his own volition, but if he did not come soon it would be time for the speeches. Huda gave her a look—not of sympathy or pity, but something in between—one that said that Hadia should know better than to care, than to have any expectation from Amar at all.
* * *
HE WANDERED FROM the hall out into the lobby and then back into the hall again. Where he really wanted to go was the bar but he could not go back there. But what was the difference between one drink and one more? There was none. Only after a few was there an effect. One drink was like none at all, like a sip of water. He had two things on his mind and they took turns occupying his thoughts; to be free momentarily of one was to soon be assailed by the other. The first was that in an hour, maybe less, he would walk out to the courtyard to meet Amira. The second was that his father had still not spoken to him properly. When Amar looked out across the hall his father was on the other side, as though they were following separate orbits.
Just before they had left for the wedding, Amar had looked out the sliding door at his father walking in the backyard. The mist that time of day, the bluing light, his father’s green sweater and white kurta rippling. It had been three years and Amar wondered, what do I feel now? He was still angry. It was an anger that had been useful to him: to step out from his home and never return to their street, not even to drive by at the darkest hour of the night. An anger he touched like a totem to gain strength: they do not understand me and make no attempt to. I can’t be like them. On and on it went, each thought taking him farther to a place he could not return from.
But hours earlier, when he watched his father in the garden, he realized that the anger had dimmed, and he was surprised to find that after anger, or alongside it, was not a bitterness or resentment, but regret. Afsoos was the word in Urdu. There was no equivalent in English. It was a specific kind of regret—not wishing he had acted differently, but a helpless sadness at the situation as it was, a sense that it could not have been another way. He could not call his father Baba, nor could he think of him as Baba. Other women he did not know saw his father’s face in his, but his own father could not see it.
Someone called his name. He turned to see it was Huda. She had come to the men’s side of the hall to see him. He smiled at her.
“You look like you’re enjoying your night.”