After a while, Mum nodded at me, indicating that it was time for me to pour the tea and dish out the snacks, so I got up and walked back to the dining table with wobbly legs. I didn’t know how much sugar to put in each cup, which meant that I would have to bring the tray over to the coffee table and bend down as I did it, right in full view of everyone. I decided there and then that I was never going to meet anyone like this ever again. Next time – IF there was a next time – I would meet them in a coffee shop, or restaurant, or even my local library. Anywhere but in my own home. This was making me feel like I was being pimped out by my parents.
I got on with the task at hand and I offered the ladies tea first, which was the wrong way around, but I wanted to delay coming face-to-face with the guy as long as possible. There is no such thing as ‘ladies first’ in my culture. In fact, sometimes when we had a lot of guests, my mum didn’t sit or eat at all, she was too busy serving everyone else. And regardless of whether she ate or not, the men always ate first. They got the food when it was piping hot, fresh off the stove. It was only after they had finished eating and we had cleared up that we got to sit down. By that point, the table usually had crumbs or stains decorating it, as well as half-filled bowls of lukewarm curry and thrice-heated kebabs, reminding us that others had already eaten there.
When I got to Zakariya, it was impossible for me to ignore him any longer, so I looked at my feet and mumbled, ‘Do you take sugar?’, my hands trembling again. When he replied, ‘One, thanks,’ I finally looked up at him. When I saw who it was, I inhaled sharply and almost dropped the hot tea all over his lap. It was him! The obnoxious man from the art class!
As recognition dawned on him, the corners of his mouth tilted upwards in a little smirk. I obviously couldn’t say anything so I carried on with the tea malarkey, feeling annoyed and disappointed in equal measure. There was a moment when I let myself wonder if this meeting would go well . . . and now, it was over before it had begun.
Dejected, I went back to my seat and slumped down in my chair, not caring that my body language was negative. Everyone else continued to slurp their teas, Ma putting on her best hostess-with-the-mostess face, Baba making smart and intellectual comments about Bangladeshi politics and Malik putting on a great show of being charming and polite. It was like something straight out of The Stepford Wives.
I could feel Zakariya looking at me and I ignored his gaze for a while before finally meeting it. We locked eyes and I decided not to look away this time. Instead, I glared at him and he stared back at me unabashedly. The seconds passed and I started to feel silly, but I was too stubborn to break the impasse we had reached . . . until he winked at me! The nerve! I quickly averted my eyes, hoping no one else had noticed and thankfully, the continued sound of voices indicated that no one was paying any attention to us.
Ma got up and started handing out the samosas and pakoras and I shifted my gaze back to Zakariya, who I found was already looking at me. This time, I narrowed my eyes at him and gave him my fiercest glower. He raised a dirty samosa to his lips and took a massive bite. Stifling a laugh, I subtly covered my mouth to hide my grin, feeling a thousand times better than I did ten minutes earlier. He might have thought he had the upper hand, but the reality was, he was eating a pastry that had fallen on the floor. If that wasn’t empowering, I didn’t know what was.
Chapter Eleven
When our guests finally finished eating, Pretty, Pinky and I started loading the trays with the empty cups and crockery to clear up. I couldn’t wait to get out of the living room and into the safety of the kitchen so I could tell the girls who Zakariya was. To my annoyance, his older sister, Halima, got up to help us, which meant I couldn’t offload. Then, to make matters worse, his mother, younger sister Hasina and Ma decided to follow us into the kitchen too, getting in the way as we attempted to tidy up without dropping anything (again).
‘Which of today’s delicious treats did you make?’ his mother asked, placing her hand on my arm and peering into my face, as if she was trying to figure out what I looked like without makeup. I tried not to extract my arm from her grip as I replied in a monotone that I baked the cake and shaped all the samosas. She looked pleased with my lacklustre response and Pretty suppressed a snigger as she put the leftovers into old butter, ice cream and one-litre yoghurt tubs. (I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve opened what I thought was Anchor Butter to find homemade ginger and garlic paste instead. The worst is excitedly grabbing a tub of chocolate ice cream, dessert spoon poised, only to discover a soul-crushingly disappointing frozen mutton curry inside.)
‘You like cooking then?’ his mother continued, as if it was the most important thing to know about me. Before I could reply, Ma jumped in with, ‘Oh, Maya is a bit of a whizz in the kitchen, you know! She’s always whipping up these fancy meals that put me to shame!’
By fancy, she must have meant mushy pasta with Dolmio sauce. I rolled my eyes at Pretty, which didn’t go unnoticed by Hasina, who seemed to pick up on everything. She looked at me as if she were trying to figure me out and I wished her luck with that, because even I didn’t know who I was half the time.
I was desperate to tell the twins about my meeting with Zakariya earlier in the week, but it was impossible with his sisters in hearing distance. And just as they left the room and I was about to combust, Malik came in to tell me that Zakariya wanted to talk to me alone.
‘I don’t want to!’ I hissed, begging my brother with every part of me. ‘I’m not feeling it, M. Please don’t make me!’
Ma stopped midway between putting the teacups away and both she and my brother stared at me like I was crazy.
‘Have you lost the plot?’ Malik whispered back. ‘He’s a decent guy and he’s good-looking! Get over yourself and meet him. I’m going to bring him up to your room.’
‘Maya, please, don’t ruin things,’ Ma implored, grabbing my hands. ‘They’re a good family. Proposals like this won’t come every day!’
‘I can’t believe you want him to come to my room! It’s my safe space.’
‘Stop being so dramatic, what is this “safe space” nonsense? Keep the door open so it’s not bejjoti. I don’t want your reputation tarnished.’
Ma all but shoved me out of the room and I glared at my brother’s back for a moment before legging it upstairs. The last thing I wanted was to be standing there like an idiot when Zakariya came into the hallway and having to lead him to my room myself.
Panting, I flopped onto my bed and then leapt back up, smoothed out the sheets and chose the desk chair instead. Sitting on my bed would have been too provocative. I didn’t want this ‘Zakariya’ to get the wrong idea about the situation and think I was interested in him. The saddest part was, I might have been if I hadn’t known that he was a judgemental know-it-all who talked too much about things that weren’t his concern.
Before I could spend any more time gathering my thoughts, there was a tap on the door and Malik walked in, followed closely by Zakariya, who was towering over him.
‘Affa, this is Zakariya,’ Malik said. He gestured to Zakariya to take a seat on my bed and I bristled as he did. To be fair, it was either my bed or the floor, but still, it felt horribly intrusive. I should have stayed on my bed and let him take the chair. I expected Malik to join him and make small talk but then my snake of a brother turned around, walked out of my room and closed the door behind him.
Staring at the door that my mum had specifically told us to leave open, I wondered if I should get up and open it again. Before I could, Zakariya spoke.
‘Fancy meeting you again,’ he began with a knowing smile, leaning forward. ‘How is your ailing grandmother?’
So that was how he was going to play it. I opened my mouth to respond and before I could think it through, I squinted at him and said, ‘I’m sorry? Have we met before?’
My response threw him and he shifted in his seat, not quite as confident as he was a moment before. ‘At that drawing class in the city? You had to leave early because your grandmother was taken ill in . . . Palestine?’ As the words came out of his mouth, I could see in his expression that he was doubting himself. He had seen my biodata for God’s sake. He would have known if I had a Palestinian grandmother.
I put on my best sheepish look and shrugged helplessly. ‘Palestinian grandmother? I’m as Bengali as they come. Sorry, you must have me confused with someone else.’
A silence followed as he struggled with what to say next, since his plan to embarrass me and put me on the spot was obviously failing. I did nothing to ease the awkwardness. He deserved to feel uncomfortable after the discomfort he had caused me during that class.
Clearly at a loss for how to respond, Zakariya instead got up from where he was perched on the edge of my bed and began nosing around my room. I watched him wordlessly as he took in the plain beige walls, matching carpet and similarly coloured duvet.
‘You like . . . beige, don’t you?’
‘It’s not beige,’ I said defensively, wracking my brains for a colour that didn’t have such a bland reputation. ‘For your information, it’s . . . stone. And I like things to be simple and unfussy.’
‘You’re hardly “simple” and “unfussy”,’ he mused, going over to my bookcase and flicking through the titles. He raised an eyebrow at Ulysses perched on the end of the shelf like a bookend and then I thought I heard a snicker upon his discovery of the handful of spicy TikTok sensations that I should have donated to a charity shop before the Big Marriage Meeting. But how was I to know that my parents – the same people who warned me about looking at boys – would allow a full-grown male into my bedroom, unchaperoned?
If his prying into my taste in books wasn’t excruciating enough, he then moved on to my photographs. There was the one of Pinky, Pretty and me in Cornwall the summer after GCSEs that Ma had taken. One of Malik and me in Bangladesh when we were kids, wearing vest tops and shorts and drinking fresh coconut water straight from the fruit. There was one of my mum and dad on their wedding day and then a really embarrassing one: me, on my own, dressed up to the nines in a full-length gown at Dina’s wedding. He spent the longest looking at that one. I felt the heat rise to my cheeks as I stomped over to him.
‘Do you mind?’ I snapped, snatching the frame out of his hands. ‘This is private stuff, you know.’ I put the frame back on the shelf facing the other way so the photo wasn’t visible and made a mental note to replace it with something less personal, like our next-door neighbour’s cat.
‘Well, it is on display, not hidden away in an album,’ he reasoned, going over to the chair I had vacated and sitting down, crossing his outstretched ankles and making himself comfortable.
‘I wasn’t expecting you to start digging through my room,’ I retorted. ‘If I had known you would be this nosy, I would have put everything away.’
‘I’m glad you didn’t. A person’s boudoir speaks volumes about their personality.’ He leant back in the chair, eyeing me with an interested expression on his face, and I resisted the urge to push him over. His confidence was bordering on arrogance and while a part of me found it endearing, the bigger, more sensible part, found it annoying.
‘Oh, really? And what does my “boudoir” say about mine?’
‘You’re studious. You love your family. You’re smart.’ He nodded to Ulysses then and I held back a snort. ‘You prefer staying at home to going out. You’re soft beneath that prickly exterior. A bit shy and introverted, despite the image you’re trying to portray.’
