I padded quietly down the carpeted stairs and paused outside the closed door that led to the joined sitting and dining rooms. Straining my ears, I tried to eavesdrop but could only make out a few words, so I went into the kitchen where the twins were standing in front of the cooker looking confused.
‘What’s happening?’ I whispered, closing the door behind me.
‘Chachi told us to make masala tea and re-heat all the savoury nasta,’ Pretty explained, looking confused. ‘She said all of us have to bring it into the room.’ Noting my pained expression, she shrugged apologetically. ‘At least you won’t be on your own.’
No, I wouldn’t, but the thought didn’t bring me comfort. Yes, the twins had dressed down, but they were still pretty. Really pretty. At five-six, they were both a couple of inches taller than me and they were slim with curves in all the right places. But more importantly, they were fairer than I was. They would all be comparing me to them. What if they preferred one of my cousins over me?
You don’t want to get married right now, I reminded myself as I filled a large saucepan with water and the loose tea leaves my parents had bought from a relative’s tea estate in Sylhet, adding cardamom pods, a bay leaf and cinnamon sticks and letting it simmer before adding the Carnation Milk. This is you keeping your end of the deal. Who cares if they reject you?
I might not have been a good cook, but I could make a banging cup of masala chai – or cha/sa as we said in Bengali/Sylheti – and I was good at organising things. As the tea gently brewed (the secret to a good cha is allowing the spices to slowly infuse without rushing the process), I got to work re-heating the handmade handesh and samosas. Although Ma and Chachai had been frying them earlier, some of it had become a little cold and given how important the guests were, needed to be served piping hot. Ma’s flaky pastry samosas were delicious, as were her sweet handesh with jaggery – or ‘gur’ as we called the dark, sticky sugar – and her spicy spinach and potato pakoras were the bomb. My chachi had made the savoury yellow ones, called noonor gora or noonor bora depending on where in Sylhet you were from.
As I moved around the kitchen organising the snacks and bumping into my cousins, who kept getting in the way, I felt some of my nerves ease through focusing on the task at hand. For a minute, I forgot that I was about to be paraded in front of a bunch of strangers like a debutante. I was too busy making sure I didn’t burn the pastries while re-heating them in the oven.
‘Here, start putting everything on these platters and we’ll take it all through to the dining room,’ I told the twins, taking out the baking tray and carefully placing it on a heat mat. As I turned around to check on the tea, I heard a crash. Whipping around, I saw the entire foil tray of pakoras and samosas on the floor.
‘Omigod!’ I gasped, staring at the pile of now-ruined snacks. My mum was going to kill me.
‘I’m so sorry!’ Pretty cried, her eyes round. ‘I went to lift the tray up and it was so hot that I dropped it!’
‘Of course it’s hot, it’s just come out of the oven!’ I whimpered, surveying the mess on the floor. ‘What are we going to do? We’ve lost half of our food!’
‘Five-second rule! Five-second rule!’ Pinky interrupted, pushing me out of the way. She grabbed the hot pakoras and haphazardly started throwing them back onto the tray, wincing from the heat.
‘What are you doing? We can’t serve them that! It’s been on the floor!’
My cousin ignored me and soon had everything back on the tray. Her fingertips sore and scalded, she ran the cold-water tap and stuck them under the flowing water.
‘We can,’ she said. ‘No one will know! Unless you want us to lay the table with all the samosas and pakoras missing, jeopardise your chance of finding the one and deal with Chachi’s wrath?’
‘Not really,’ I said weakly. She was right, we had no choice. Allah was probably punishing me for buying that cake and planning to lie that I had baked and decorated it myself.
‘Whatever happens in the kitchen, stays in the kitchen,’ I said solemnly and the twins nodded.
I glanced over at the tea to find that it had boiled right to the top and was about to spill over. Quickly turning the heat off, I began to feel panicky. Why was everything going wrong? And just when I thought all the potential kitchen disasters had been averted, I smelt something smoky coming from the oven.
‘Oh no! The noonor goras!’ I cried, flinging the oven door open to be hit by a plume of smoke and heat, which instantly caused the smoke alarm to start ringing. I grabbed the oven gloves and yanked the tray out, but it was too late. The once-beautiful yellow discs, made from rice flour, turmeric, onions and ginger, weren’t golden anymore. They looked like the coal used to heat shisha pipes.
‘Someone turn off the smoke alarm!’ I coughed, mortified. God knew what our guests were thinking. I didn’t have to wait too long to find out, because Ma came bursting into the kitchen, pushing past Pretty, who was frantically waving a dishcloth at the smoke alarm, trying to get it to stop its insistent shrill.
‘What’s going on in . . .’ her voice trailed off as she surveyed the blackened noonor goras. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Maya! I leave you in charge of something as simple as reheating and plating up some food and you manage to cremate it all!’
Well, we had cremated some of it, the rest we infected with bacteria and whatever else was stuck on the floor tiles. And it was done with the help of a certain pair of identical twins who had apparently lost their voices and were happy to let me take all the blame.
‘Sorry,’ I said glumly. ‘What shall we do?’
‘Bin the lot of it! And then help me take the rest in. Pinky and Pretty, grab the samosas and pakoras, Maya take the tray with the tea set. Pretty, come back for the cake once you’ve said Salaam.’
‘The tea’s still on the hob.’
‘Put it in the teapot then! Shobta khowa lageh ni? Do I have to spell everything out?’
‘OK, OK!’ I snapped, my pulse quickening. Everything was happening so fast. Pretty and Pinky had left the kitchen bearing trays of contaminated savouries, Ma had walked out with the sweet handesh and mishti and I was left with the worst tray of all: the tea. With trembling hands, I strained the piping hot tea through a sieve and into the pot, wiping away any splashes and carefully began carrying it down the narrow passage, hoping no one would realise that the rattling of the cups and saucers was due to my nerves.
Ma was waiting for me by the door, her scowl gone and, in its place, a warm, loving smile that was clearly meant for my potential future in-laws, not me. If I wasn’t so petrified, I would have laughed at her BAFTA-worthy acting skills.
‘Don’t grin, keep your head down, don’t talk loudly and don’t spill any tea,’ she whispered so fast that I only just caught her words. Before I had the chance to gather my thoughts, she ushered me into the room, following close behind.
Grin? Ma would be lucky if I didn’t burst into tears. Palms sweating and legs trembling, I walked into the living area with my head lowered. The talking stopped the moment I entered and my heart hammered away so hard that I was afraid the guests would hear it from across the room, like the beating of drums. Pinky and Pretty were hovering near the dining table, so I went over to them and carefully placed the tray of tea down with everything else, careful not to make too much noise.
Some of the women had congregated on the dining room side of our lounge, on the chairs arranged around the table. I could see them from the corner of my eye, a blur of bright colours. Even if I couldn’t see them, I would have been able to smell them. The pungent mix of perfumes was making me feel nauseous. The men must therefore be at the other end of the room, but there was no way I would look at them.
I could feel countless beady eyes on me, analysing every part of me; watching my trembling hands as I moved the teapot to the table, measuring both the thickness of my hair and the thickness of my waist. I didn’t look up. I was too afraid of accidentally catching someone’s eye. I kept my gaze firmly on my newly manicured toes, wishing I had worn socks, regardless of how ridiculous they would look with my outfit.
From Ma’s briefing last night, I knew that now was the time to go and join them all, but my feet felt like they were glued to the carpet and I couldn’t move. I wasn’t sure where I was supposed to sit either – at the table with all the women or in the living room with the men? Ma gave me a little poke but still, I was frozen. How embarrassing would it be if I sat with the men and then got told to go and sit with the women?
‘Here, sit down,’ Ma said eventually. She gestured towards a seat that was in between the two sections of the room. I forced my leaden feet to the chair, flinching when it creaked.
‘This is my daughter, Maya,’ Ma said in Sylheti and I murmured ‘Assalaamu Alaikum’, my gaze firmly on my feet. I heard a few ‘Wa Alaikum Salaams’ but I still couldn’t bring myself to look up. I had managed to figure out quite a bit by looking down though. I worked out that the potential groom, Zakariya, was sitting at the far end of the room, on the two-seater sofa with his dad, judging by their trouser legs and socks. I knew it wasn’t Baba because he didn’t sit like that and wouldn’t be wearing socks either. I guessed that the older man was the one in plain navy socks and his son’s had multi-coloured stripes. Although it could easily have been the other way round.
If my dad was on the single armchair, I guessed that my chacha was sitting with chachi on the three-seater sofa, with my potential mother-in-law next to her. I could tell by the hem of her burgundy-coloured saree.
Zakariya’s sisters were around the dining table, along with my cousins and Ma, but I still wasn’t sure which sister was older and which was younger. I guessed that the one closest to me was the younger one, judging by her trousers, which were dangerously short at calf length. It was from that direction that someone asked, ‘So, Maya, what do you do?’
I wasn’t expecting to have to speak or look up so soon. I swallowed nervously, but my throat was so dry that everything in my mouth felt like it was stuck together. I took a moment to compose myself, plastered a smile on my face and then forced myself to look up, but only at the women and not at the guy across from me. I was dying to know what he looked like, but I didn’t want him to think I was checking him out.
As I explained what it was that I did, I looked over at my potential future mother-in-law. She was attractive for her age. She didn’t wear a hijab like my mum. Instead, her hair was expertly coloured without the slightest hint of grey and was done in a professional-looking updo. She was on the pale side, with slanted hazel eyes and full lips. I wondered if Zakariya looked like her and although I could have looked in his direction, I didn’t. I could see him from the corner of my eye, of course, but not clearly enough to discern his features or anything. He seemed tall though and slim, but that’s about all I could make out.
It took a few minutes for me to overcome my initial fear as the mum and I made some small talk. The dad didn’t say anything, nor did the potential groom, so minutes passed and I still had no reason to look over at them. By that point, I desperately wanted to, but I had built up the idea of looking at him to be something so big and embarrassing that the more seconds that passed, the harder it became.
