‘Qitaar,’ Nadira whispered to me as the entire class watched the Dunce at the Front. Why did I go and sit in the front row anyway?
‘Er, qitaar?’
Giving me a hard look, Ustadha Salma moved on and I exhaled in relief. Hopefully I would be less distracted next week.
When the lesson was finally over, I checked my phone to find a message from Zakariya. With a mixture of dread and anticipation, I opened it:
ZAKARIYA: Tayyabs? Meet you outside after class.
Oh gosh, I hadn’t looked at my face in hours. I wasn’t ready to see him right now! Grabbing my bag, I rushed to the toilets and touched up my makeup as quickly as possible.
Spraying myself generously with my expensive perfume, I tried not to calculate how much each spritz was costing me. I fluffed up my hair, which had flattened throughout the day and walked out of the bathroom to find Zakariya waiting for me by the main door.
‘Hey, Assalaamu Alaikum,’ I said as I approached him, trying not to let my nerves show in my voice. He turned and smiled at me before returning the greeting. There was something different about his smile though. It seemed thinner and more guarded than it was the last time we went for dinner, which was months ago by then. What had changed in that time?
‘So you’ve been really busy then?’ he asked casually as we walked towards the restaurant, careful not to accidentally bump into each other. Nine weeks earlier, I had fallen asleep on him and now, if my arm touched his by mistake, he jumped away as if he’d been scalded.
‘I have,’ I confirmed, not sure what else to say, or how much about my life I should reveal. We arrived at the restaurant before I could add anything else to my dry response and while the waiter showed us to an available table, I tried to gather my thoughts. If I didn’t snap out of whatever funk I was in, the next few hours were going to be excruciating.
Zakariya and I sat down opposite each other and flicked through the menu. I had been there enough times to know I wanted the lamb chops, daal and naan. Zakariya agreed with my choices and added a meat curry, samosas and chicken biryani to our order, together with mango lassi. If only we could just as easily order the awkwardness away.
‘How was Dubai?’ he asked when the waiter left. I remembered then that he had seen that God-awful video of me dancing like a lunatic in the desert and I wanted to curl up into child’s pose and disappear. How could I have forgotten that crucial fact? How did I have the gall to face him after what he had seen? Well, it was too late to back out now. I had to own it or I’d look more ridiculous.
‘It was fantastic,’ I said with faux cheeriness. ‘We did so many new things and had such a laugh. You should have come!’
‘Uh, with you?’
I realised then what I had said. It was a standard response to someone who had missed out on a good time, I didn’t literally mean that he should have come with us.
‘No! Not with me!’ I retracted. ‘I meant that you should try skydiving, it’s exhilarating.’
‘The desert safari looked fun as well,’ Zakariya said with a mischievous smile and my face instantly burned, much to my chagrin. The samosas and poppadum arrived, with a selection of chutneys and I took a bite of my flaky samosa to buy myself some time and figure out how to respond. I chewed the bite so long that it turned into soup in my mouth, while Zakariya – the little git – waited patiently for me to respond to his blatant dig at my Zumba routine gone wrong.
‘It was the most fun I’ve had in forever,’ I said at last, when I couldn’t chew any longer and whatever I had swallowed was now threatening to rise back up my throat. ‘We did this dance challenge thing, where we had to impersonate other . . . uh . . . creatures when we moved.’
‘What? What do you mean?’ Zakariya was about to take another bite of his samosa when I said this, but the surprise made him stop and stare at me instead. ‘Other creatures, did you say?’
‘Yeah,’ I reiterated, avoiding his eyes. ‘Pretty, for example, did a snake dance.’
‘A what?’
‘A snake dance. You know, when you slide along the sand and roll around and suddenly hiss at someone?’
Zakariya looked taken aback. ‘No, I can’t say I’ve seen something like that before. Pretty didn’t post it on her Snapchat.’
AH HA! So, he had seen the video on her Snap. I knew it!
‘Of course she didn’t,’ I said smoothly. ‘She only posts the most curated moments of her life. It’s not real.’
‘It isn’t?’
‘Nope. As for Pinky, she decided to dance like a . . .’ I wracked my brains. What could possibly look worse than my dance? ‘Turkey.’
‘Turkey? Like the Christmas bird?’
‘Like the Christmas bird, not the country. It was so funny, she kept making gobbling noises and jerking her neck forward and backwards.’
Zakariya smiled then, shaking his head, almost as if he had resigned himself to all this madness. ‘You girls are crazy. What was your dance? No, don’t tell me . . .’ He chewed his food while he thought and I took the opportunity to eat the rest of my samosa and a poppadum, which was divine dipped in mango chutney.
‘I know,’ he said, his eyes lighting up. ‘Did you do an octopus dance? You waved your arms around a lot.’
Suppressing the urge to grimace, I was about to reply when he interrupted me.
‘No, but then you were shaking your hair around as well. Was it a wet dog dance?’
Was he taking the mick?
‘NO, it wasn’t a wet dog dance!’ I replied, tersely. ‘It was a jinn dance, OK?’
‘A jinn dance? Since when did jinns dance?’
‘When do octopuses and turkeys dance? It was performance art.’
