Ayesha At Last(14)

Ayesha wasn’t in the mood for this. She didn’t want to hear her mother’s unsubtle hints about her parents’ marriage. She knew if she asked specific questions about her father, her mother would just shut down. She said good night and climbed the stairs to her tiny bedroom on the second floor.

While it wasn’t as grand as Hafsa’s, Ayesha’s bedroom was her favourite room in the house. With her twin bed pushed against the wall, she had plenty of space for books, every one of which she had read. Her desk was full of textbooks and resources from teachers’ college, and there were posters of Shakespeare and Jane Austen on the wall. She smiled a greeting to both as she unpinned her hijab and shook out her curly brown hair, which had been tied up in a bun all day.

There was a knock at the door, and Nana peeked in.

“I heard you talking to Saleha,” he said, coming in to sit on her rolling desk chair. Nana had spent so much time sitting in that chair, talking and reading to her, that she couldn’t look at it without thinking of him. Ayesha settled on the bed, folding her arms.

“She told me husbands are a distraction and that I should never rely on a man.”

Nana sighed. “Aren’t you too old to be angry at your mother?” he asked gently. “Saleha has not let go of her anger, and it has made her so unhappy. I don’t want to see that happen to you as well.”

“I don’t think she’ll ever forgive Dad, but she won’t talk about it either. It’s not his fault that he died.”

Nana looked down at his hands. “It was such a shock,” he said quietly. “Such a time of darkness in our family. Your mother was not raised to expect . . . She was not ready to deal with the aftermath of such a tragedy. Your Nani and I—we wanted nothing but the very best for our children. I thought it would break her, but she survived. She wants you to be stronger, ready for any catastrophe.”

Ayesha drew her knees up to her chin, curling her body against the headboard. “It’s like she hates him. She doesn’t have any pictures of him, and she never talks about Dad. I lost something too when he died.”

“‘We know what we are, but know not what we may be,’” Nana quoted. It was not lost on Ayesha that he was quoting Ophelia. “Her anger is so strong because it once fuelled a very great love.”

Nana’s loyalty to Saleha was instinctive. Ayesha only wished he was more forthcoming about her father. Her mother and her grandparents were silent on the circumstances surrounding his death, and she had tried in vain to tease out details in various ways over the years.

“Don’t you miss Hyderabad?” she asked instead.

“My life is here, with you,” Nana said, as he always did. “Sometimes I miss my classes at the university, and my books. My library took over the entire first floor of our house. Nani was jealous of my collection. She said I loved it more than her. She was wrong, of course. I brought her when we moved, not my books.” His tone was wistful, and Ayesha felt a well of sadness for all those orphaned volumes. “Your mother loved the Hardy Boys and Agatha Christie mysteries best of all.”

And now I get to live one, Ayesha thought. Whenever Ayesha and Idris asked questions about their father’s death, they were deflected or ignored. At first she thought it was because the subject was too painful. Lately she had started to wonder if her father had been involved in something illegal, a scandal that justified her mother’s anger.

“What sort of man was my father?” she asked. “Was he a good man?”

Nana was silent once more. “Goodness is for Allah to judge. But I can tell you this, jaanu. I have never met a man of more honour than Syed Ahmad Shamsi.” Nana stood up to leave and Ayesha rose too. She wanted him to continue talking about her father.

“Samira Aunty offered to send Hafsa’s excess rishtas my way,” she said. “Did you arrange Mom and Dad’s marriage?”

Nana hesitated. “No,” he said. He reached for the doorknob.

“I thought all marriages were arranged in India.”

Nana started laughing. “Young people. Do you think you invented love and romance?”

“What do you mean?”

“‘No sooner met but they looked, no sooner looked but they loved, no sooner loved but they sighed, no sooner sighed but they asked one another the reason, no sooner knew the reason but they sought the remedy; and in these degrees have they made a pair of stairs to marriage,’” Nana recited as he walked out into the hallway.

Ayesha followed him. “Can you please stop quoting Shakespeare for one minute. They fell in love and you let them marry?”

“They were so happy, jaanu,” he said simply. “I could never be a barrier to such happiness. Saleha must remember that and find her peace.”

His words held a note of finality as he wished her good night. Ayesha returned to her room, pensive, and set the alarm. It was already past midnight, and tomorrow would be another long day spent managing students, and then managing Hafsa at the conference meeting. She was too tired to be angry at her mother and her secrets, or at fundy Khalid and his comments.

Besides, it was not as if she would ever see him again.





Chapter Seven

A headache throbbed behind Khalid’s eyes, making it hard for him to concentrate on the code he was troubleshooting for one of his developers. The script kept blurring on his monitor and the office felt stuffy and airless. Sleep had eluded him last night. Now, no matter how hard he tried, he could not stop thinking about Bella’s.