Love Comes Later Read online

  Love Comes Later

  By Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar

  Love Comes Later

  Copyright 2012 Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar

  Cover design by Hamda al Kuwari and Fatima AlSalat

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events depicted here are a product of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Many of the cultural complexities described in this story are the result of careful reading and re-reading by Mariam M. Al Thani, whose patience and thoroughness helped craft the context for many aspects of this story.

  Many thanks are owed to Bill Henderson, Meghan Styles, and the members of the Doha Writers’ Workshop for giving me feedback on the various stages of this manuscript.

  My thanks also go to the staff of the library of Georgetown University in Qatar, without whose friendliness and facilities this would have been a much more difficult project to complete.

  Other books by Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar

  www.mohanalakshmi.com

  From Dunes to Dior http://www.amazon.com/From-Dunes-to-Dior-ebook/dp/B0083AJ294

  Mommy But Still Me http://www.amazon.com/Mommy-but-Still-Me-ebook/dp/B0069D1XPS

  So, You Want to Sell a Million Copies? http://www.amazon.com/Want-Sell-Million-Copies-ebook/dp/B005XNIX1W

  Coloured and Other Stories http://www.amazon.com/Coloured-and-Other-Stories-ebook/dp/B005QRPDP4

  Saving Peace http://www.amazon.com/Saving-Peace-ebook/dp/B006VIOZ1A

  For:

  Hind, Lolwa, Asma, Mariam, Maryah, Nouf, Shefa, Maryam, Noof and Fatima; and Hamad, Saad, Mohammed, Tariq and Saleh

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  A glossary featuring definitions of cultural terms and Arabic phrases can be found at the end of the text.

  Cultural Practices

  ‘Azaa

  Garinga’o

  Eid al Fitr

  Eid

  Iftar

  Khutouba

  Mahar

  Milcha

  Ramadan

  Dress

  Abaya

  ‘Agal

  Na’al

  Niqab

  Gahfieh

  Ghutra

  Hijab

  Jellabiya

  Shayla

  Thobe

  Expressions

  Allah yerhama

  Darb

  Habibti

  Insha’Allah

  Insha’Allah kheir

  Khalas

  Masha'Allah

  Na’am

  Wallah

  Ya waldi/benti

  Yalla

  Terms

  Ajnabiya

  Bukhoor

  Emir

  Emiri Diwan

  Hukoomi

  Majlis

  Midkhan

  Misbah

  Sheikh

  Souq

  Sura

  Wasta

  Zamzam

  Familial titles

  Amati

  Baba

  Ummi

  Ubooy

  Yaddi/Yaddo/Jaddi

  Yuba

  Yema

  Qatari names

  Abdulla

  Ahmed

  Amal

  Dana

  Fatima

  Haya

  Hessa

  Hind

  Jassim

  Khalid

  Luluwa

  Maryam

  Mohamed

  Nouf

  Noor

  Saoud

  Saad

  Wadha

  Prologue

  Abdulla’s mind wasn’t on Fatima, or on his uncles or cousins. Not even when he drove through the wrought iron entry gate, oblivious to the sprawl of family cars parked haphazardly in the shared courtyard, did he give them a thought. Despite the holy season, his mind was still hard at work. Mentally, he clicked through a final checklist for tomorrow’s meetings. I can squeeze in a few more hours if Fatima is nauseous and sleeps in tomorrow, he thought, rubbing his chin. Instead of the stubble he had anticipated, his whiskers were turning soft. A trim was yet another thing he didn’t have time for these days, though longer beards were out of fashion according to his younger brother Saad, who had been trying to grow one for years. Beard length. Just another change to keep up with.

  Change was all around him, Abdulla thought. The cousins getting older, he himself soon to become a father. Abdulla felt the rise of his country’s profile most immediately in the ballooning volume of requests by foreign governments for new trade agreements. By the day, it seemed, Qatar’s international status was growing, which meant more discussions, more meetings.

  He slid the car into a gap in the growing shadow between his father’s and grandfather’s houses. It would have to serve as a parking space. The Range Rover door clicked shut behind him as he walked briskly toward his father’s house, BlackBerry in hand, scrolling through his messages. Only then did the sound of wailing reach him, women in pain or grief, emanating from his Uncle Ahmed’s house across the courtyard. He jerked the hands-free device out of his ear and quickened his pace, jogging not toward the majlis where the rest of the men were gathering, but into the main living area of Uncle Ahmed’s, straight toward those unearthly sounds.

  The sight of Aunt Wadha stopped him short. Disheveled, her shayla slipping as she howled, she was smacking herself on the forehead. Then came his mother, reaching her arms out to him with a tender, pitying look he hadn’t seen since his pet rabbits from the souq died. But it was Hessa, his other aunt – Fatima’s mother, his own mother-in-law – who sent him into a panic. Ashen-faced, her lips bleeding, she was clutching the evil eye necklace he had bought Fatima on their honeymoon. At the sight of it, the delicate gold cord in Hessa’s hands and not around his wife’s neck, Abdulla felt his knees buckle and the BlackBerry slip from his hand.

  “What has happened?” he said. He looked from one stricken face to another.

  Numbly, he saw his female cousins were there. At the sight of him the older ones, glamorous Noor and bookish Hind, both women in their own right whom he hadn’t seen in years, jerked their shaylas from their shoulders to cover their hair and went into the adjoining room. In his haste, he hadn�
�t said “Darb!” to let them know he was entering the room.

  “Abdulla, Abdulla...” his mother began, but was thrust aside by Aunt Hessa.

  “Fatima,” Hessa screamed, staring wildly at him. “Fatima!”

  Rather than fall onto the floor in front of the women, Abdulla slumped heavily into the nearest overstuffed armchair. Fatima...

  They left behind gangly nine-year-old Luluwa, Fatima’s sister, who resisted when they tried to take her with them. His father, gray-faced and tired, entered. Abdulla slouched and waited, the growing dread like something chewing at his insides. His father began to talk, but on hearing “accident” and “the intersection at Al Waab” he remembered the Hukoomi traffic service SMS. Then he heard “Ahmed”, and a shiver of horror ran up his back. The driver had been Ahmed, his uncle, the father of his wife.

  Later that night in the morgue, in the minutes or hours (he couldn’t keep track) while he waited to receive her body, Abdulla flicked his Zippo lighter open and struck it alight. Holding it just so, he burned a small patch on his wrist just below his watchstrap. Even this couldn’t contain his rage at the truck driver who came through without a scratch, at his uncle, or at himself.

  The morgue was antiseptic, mercilessly public. The police advised against seeing her, insisting that he wouldn’t be able to erase the memory of a face marked with innumerable shards of glass.

  Surrounded by family and hospital staff, he couldn’t hold her, talk to her, stroke her slightly rounding stomach, the burial site of their unborn child. Any goodbyes he had hoped to say were suppressed.

  He would mourn the baby in secret. He hadn’t wanted to tell relatives about the pregnancy too soon in case of a miscarriage. Now it could never happen: the need to visibly accept God’s will in front of them would prevent him from crying it out, this woe upon woe that was almost too much to bear.

  Fatima’s body was washed and wrapped, the prayers said before burial. His little wife, the round face, the knowing eyes he’d grown up next to in the family compound, and the baby he would never see crawl, sleep, or walk were hidden to him now for all eternity. The secret she was carrying was wrapped in a gauzy white kaffan, her grave cloth, when he was finally allowed to see them. The child who would have been named after Abdulla’s grandfather if a boy, his grandmother if a girl, whose gender would now remain a mystery.

  At the burial site, as was customary, he fell in line behind his father and uncles. Ahmed, the father, carried his daughter’s slight form.

  They placed her on her right side.

  Men came to lay the concrete slabs that sealed the grave, so her frame would not rise up as it decomposed in the earth. Abdulla regretted not stroking the softness of her chin or the imperceptibly rounding curve of her belly. I am burying my wife and our unborn child, he thought, the taste of blood filling his mouth from the force with which he bit his cheek to stem the tears. Their secret would be lost within her lifeless womb. News of a double tragedy would spread with the sand under doors and into the ears of their larger circle of acquaintances. Someone would call someone to read the Qur‘an over him. Someone would search out someone else for a bottle of Zamzam water from Mecca.

  None of it would stop the acid from chewing through his heart.

  In swirls of conjecture and pity, his new assignment as the widowed and grieving almost-father, in a fertile and happy extended family, would erase their memory of him as the eldest grandchild, though this was what got him where he was. Caught between duty and tradition, he did the only thing he could do. He tried to forget that he had been too busy to drive Fatima that day, when he lost a wife and a child because of his own selfishness. He had thought there would be years ahead, decades, when they would have time to spend together. A chubby infant growing into a child who went to school, for whom they would have to wait for holidays to travel abroad, and eventually another child, maybe several more. None of this would ever be.

  He should have died with them. But he kept on breathing – as if he had a right to air.

  They returned from the funeral to gather at the home of the grieving parents for the azaa, the receiving of condolences. Abdulla rode in the back seat of the Land Cruiser, his father at the wheel, his cousins and brothers messaging friends on various applications. For him there was no sharing of grief. This was his burden to bear alone.

  He was the last to climb out of the car but the first to see Luluwa hunched on the marble steps of Uncle Ahmed’s entryway. Something in her face drew his attention, something more than grief for her sister. His mother saw it at the same time and hurried over to the girl, concerned, questioning with her eyes.

  “Yalla, what is it?” she said, pulling her up.

  Luluwa shook her head.

  “Go inside, habibti,” said Abdulla’s mother, but Luluwa shook free and drew back, panic in her face. Abdulla’s mother turned her face back to the men, her eyes questioning. Then they heard the shouting.

  “When? When did this all start?” Hessa’s voice screamed, raw and startling, from inside the open door. “Leave this house.”

  The family halted in their tracks, exchanging uncertain glances.

  Ahmed emerged, looking shaken but defiant, a weekender bag in one hand. Abdulla’s father, the eldest of the brothers, stepped forward and took him by the arm.

  “Everyone is upset,” he whispered harshly. He was trying to lead him back inside, as his wife had done a moment ago with Luluwa, when Hessa burst forward into view, her face aflame with indignation.

  “Tell them,” she spat at her husband. “Tell them now, so when you don’t come back here everyone will know why.”

  The words made no sense to Abdulla. His first thought was to speak up and still the voices. He had already forgiven Ahmed in his mind. The accident hadn’t been his fault. “There’s no reason to throw him out,” he called out, half-climbing the steps. “It was my fault, not his. I should have been driving them.”

  Hessa turned towards him and laughed in a way that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. “Who needs to throw him out when he’s leaving?” she said.

  “Yuba, no,” Luluwa cried, moving toward her father, but her mother grabbed a fistful of her abaya and spun the girl around by the shoulders.

  Abdulla’s mind whirred to compute what they were witnessing. A sudden white-hot rage stiffened his spine. His gaze narrowed on Ahmed. So the rumors were true, he thought.

  “He doesn’t want me and so he doesn’t want you,” Hessa hissed, nose to nose with her daughter.

  The family froze in the entryway as understanding sluiced them like rainwater. Ahmed stood for a moment in the glare of their stares. He shifted the weekender bag into his opposite hand.

  Saoud, the middle brother, stepped forward to question Ahmed, the baby of the family, but Hessa wasn’t finished yet.

  “Go,” she screamed at her husband. “You’ll never set foot in any house that has me inside ever again.” She collapsed onto the floor, her abaya billowing up around her like a mushroom, obscuring her face.

  Saoud moved quickly to stand in front of his brother as his wife helped Hessa up. “Think of your daughter,” she added pointedly. “The one that’s still alive.”

  Abdulla brought Luluwa forward. Her face was tear-streaked and her body trembling so hard it was causing his hand to shake.

  “Keep her, if you want,” Ahmed said, his glance flickering over Luluwa’s bent head. “My new wife will give me many sons.” He sidestepped Mohammed and Saoud, continuing on down the stairs towards his car.

  The look Hessa gave Luluwa was filled with loathing. She dissolved into another pile of tears.

  The girl darted inside. Abdulla followed as his parents tried to deal with the aftermath of his uncle’s leaving. His aunt looked as though she might faint. His cousins’ faces were ashen. Mohammed and Saoud murmured in low voices about the best way to deal with their brother’s child. She couldn’t live in a house with boys; one of those boys, her cousins, might one day be her husband
.

  He followed Luluwa’s wailings, sounds without any force, the bleating of a cat, one of any number roaming the streets of the city. Without a male family member to look after her she would be as discarded as those animals. And, in the eyes of their society, as susceptible to straying. He found her on the sofa, typing away on her laptop, and hoped this wasn’t her posting their family’s mess on the internet. Wedged next to her hip was an opaque paper bag stamped with their grandfather’s name, the white tops of a few pill bottles visible.

  Abdulla came and sat on the sofa next to her, unsure of what to do next. He was assaulted by her screensaver, a photo of Fatima and Luluwa on the evening of the wedding reception. He hadn’t yet arrived with the male relatives; the bride and the rest of the women were still celebrating without hijab. His wife’s eyes stared back at him even as her sister’s poured tears that showed no sign of stopping.

  With trembling hands Luluwa wrenched open the bag of medicine and dug around for pills. She let the laptop slip and he caught it before it hit the floor. As he righted it, the heading of the minimized Google tab caught his attention: suicide. For one moment he allowed himself to admit that the idea she had contemplated had begun to dance at the edge of his own mind.

  “Don’t,” he said. “What will we do if both of you are gone?”

  He put the laptop aside and, as if calming a wild colt, he reached out slowly, deliberately, to take the bottle from her shaking hands. With little effort he wrenched it from her and with it any remaining shred of strength. She dissolved into incoherent sobs, a full raging reminder of what it meant to be alive, to be the one left behind.

  Abdulla folded her into his arms, this slip of a girl who used to hide his car keys so that her weekend visits with her sister and brother-in-law wouldn’t end; this girl who had already lost so much, a sister and now a father. Instead of shriveling into himself, as he had felt like doing from the moment he saw his family in mourning, Abdulla’s heart went out to Luluwa. He murmured reassurances, trying to reverse the mirror of his own loss that he saw in her eyes.