All this happened because my badmaashi miscreantal office colleague and supporter-in-the-faith Basha decided I needed more women friends.
His efforts to expand my social circle usually involved me risking decapitation from riding pillion sidesaddle on his motor scooter while holding onto my billowing chador with one hand and him with the other, especially if traversing any railroad tracks.
***
I had seen my fate clearly. In not too many years—despite all the people here who treated me like a sister, who made me an honored guest at weddings and called me khala to their children—even despite Basha—I’d be that shriveled spinster foreigner who always dies, eventually, alone in a forgotten dusty room, to be discovered three weeks later as a fully-desiccated corpse sucked dry by ants when the landlord finally arrives to collect his rent.
Anyone could see I was halfway there. I was still living in one of our offices, but now in the one on Canal Road, and Aslam and Ashraf lived there with me. They were two of the office peons and for them I was less of an aggravation than their fellow Punjabis in the employee hostel who would treat them as personal servants. They didn’t mind doing the cooking for the three of us because I paid for the food, which let them save most of their pay for their families back home.
It was actually a pretty nice place to do one’s despairing in. The building was a large double-story flat-roofed bungalow with big lawns front and back, green even in the worst of summer because we had the water to keep them so. A neighbor’s loquat tree hung part-way over the wall and there was a small mango tree near the front garden, but one of the senior engineers counted the mangoes every morning and it would’ve been hell to filch those. Aslam had planted a little kitchen garden and we were growing our own garlic.
A narrow cement bridge spanned the canal and the malik of the village on the other side used to herd his sheep over to graze on our lawn once the office staff were gone every afternoon. He was a nice older man and I had enough Urdu by then to carry on conversations.
It must’ve been the middle of June that I was sitting with Mrs. Lodi in her printing shop in Saddar Bazaar in the Cantonment; Basha had selected her for me. She had a complicated history so we got on really well together.
A customer came in and he was discussing his business in English; he was the editor of the literary journal at the university and eventually I interrupted them and asked if he could use a volunteer typist for the manuscripts since I had access to a Selectric at work and I was often not too busy, and he was glad to accept the offer.
The second time he came to my place to drop off work, he brought the assistant editor with him, who began stopping by on his own.
Simple as that. Six weeks of a gentleman caller and I had a proposal of marriage on the last Tuesday evening in July.
I’d thought he was lovely despite those mad eyes of his, but talking of poetry as we did, I ought to be forgiven for seeing it as just a common romantical smoulder.
But I’d forsworn all joy by then and furthermore I knew the men of that place only acquire foreign wives while living in foreign places thousands of miles from their parents, and even further than that, what were the odds we’d be so compellingly destined for each other that fate should intend this to happen?
Our meetings once or twice a week were absent any undercurrents of passion but of course this was during the month of fasting. In those days I kept to certain obligations and he told me he was an atheist when he surprised me by asking for a glass of water.
But I couldn’t overlook the mathematical significance of when he brought me three boxes of halwa.
***
We were each going away for Eid and he’d asked if I wanted anything from his hometown and I said I had no idea of what to ask for, and he said his hometown was famous for a type of halwa, and I said sure, if it wasn’t any trouble it would be nice to have some.
So when he gave me those three boxes, once we were both back in town, I had a bit of a strange feeling because they were a perfect number and a few days later he confirmed the hypothesis.
We sat up all night talking, and that part’s really not important; there will never be a way to tell the lies from the truthful answers.
But I had this strange feeling I’d regret it for the rest of my life if I didn’t say yes even if I’d never know why, and I stood behind him where he sat in one of the office chairs and put my hands on his shoulders and whatever else was completely insane about this, he smelled like someone I could marry.
So I said yes, and further I said if we were really going to do this, we should do it pretty soon if we were going to do it at all, because now it was early Wednesday morning and if we got married the day after, we’d have the half-Thursday and the Friday for our honeymoon, sleeping in the office of course.
And I said I’d make all the arrangements and he just needed to show up and we agreed on what time that should be, and we kissed for the first time and it felt encouragingly predictive of at least a necessary degree of physical compatibility. And he went back to his university hostel and I managed to get some sleep because it was already three in the morning.
Later that day after work I told Aslam I was getting married and asked him to find me a couple of men of good character to serve as the bride’s witnesses and sign their names to the nikah, and I wanted the maulvi I knew from the neighborhood to be the officiant.
Aslam looked at me as if I were certifiable but he went and took care of it anyway.
And I guess we were all relieved when we saw the bridegroom coming up the road in a tonga with his cousin Hameed and his friends Iftikhar and Zardad completing the bridegroom’s party.
Someone told the malik what was going on and he told his wife, and later, once everyone else had gone home after fulfilling their required duties, he brought over a big platter of lamb pulao that she’d cooked as our wedding feast.
Humble people were always the ones to show us the most kindness.
"Humble people were always the ones to show us the most kindness."
Humility means many things; one of those is the opposite of hubris. That's the lesson I learned from reading all of Michael Crichton's modern novels.