The Stranger I Married

Inayat Hasan had a rule about mornings: nothing was allowed to go wrong before nine o'clock.

It was a good rule. It had survived three and a half years of university, two failed bus routes, one flooded hostel corridor, and a professor who believed attendance was a moral issue. This morning it was being tested again, because her alarm had died quietly in the night, her father had already left for the mosque, and her younger sister Mariam was sitting on the edge of her bed eating cereal out of a tea mug.

"You are late," said Mariam, with her mouth full.

"I am not late. I am arriving efficiently."

"Your dupatta (long scarf worn over the head and shoulders) is inside out."

Inayat looked down. It was. She let out a long breath, unwound the white cotton from her shoulders, flipped it, and wrapped it around her head again with the speed of someone who had done it ten thousand times. In the doorway, her mother, Salma, appeared with a steel tiffin (lunch box) and the expression of a woman who had already prayed for her daughter's safe journey twice.

"Eat something."

"Ammi (mother), I will eat at the canteen."

"You will eat Hania's samosas (crisp fried pastries with a savory filling) and call it lunch, and then your stomach will complain to me." Salma pressed the tiffin into her hands. "Final year, Inayat. Last semester. Please walk like a person who is not being chased."

"I walk like a person who is being chased by knowledge."

"Go," said Mariam, flapping a hand. "Go and chase it. I will tell Abbu (father) you left without saying goodbye, and he will be heartbroken, and you will feel guilty all day."

"That is blackmail."

"That is sisterhood."

Inayat laughed, kissed her mother's cheek, and pulled on her sandals at the door. On the veranda step lay a folded slip of paper in her father's neat schoolteacher's hand.

Beta (child, a term of endearment), take your lunch. Allah (God) is with you. Do not argue with anyone before ten.

She read it twice, smiled, and tucked it into her book. Then she went out into the day, quite unaware that it was about to argue with her first.

◆

Three miles away, in a glass boardroom on the thirty-first floor of Sheikh Tower, Ibrahim Sheikh had been listening to a quarterly projection for forty minutes and had only just stopped pretending to find it interesting.

"The Dubai expansion," said the finance head, "will deliver an eleven percent increase in regional margins by next March, provided..."

Ibrahim's phone buzzed against the table.

He glanced at the screen. Yusuf. His younger brother never called. Yusuf texted, sent voice notes, sent memes at three in the morning, and once sent a photograph of a stray dog with the caption "Looks like you." But he never called.

Ibrahim silenced it.

It buzzed again.

Beside him, his assistant Harshit Singh went rigid, the way people do when they sense weather. Harshit was twenty-four years old, spoke as though he were apologizing for existing, and had survived two years at Ibrahim's side through a combination of loyalty and fear.

"Sir, that is Yusuf sir. He has called twice."

"I can count."

The third buzz was a text message. Ibrahim read it without moving his face.

Bhai (brother). Please come. Principal wants to see me. Please. I will explain. I did not do anything. Okay I did something. Not a big thing. Please come.

He read it again. Then he set the phone face down and looked at the finance head, who had stopped mid-sentence.

"Continue the presentation. Mr. Zayan will take notes. We will conclude by lunch."

"Sir, the Dubai delegation..."

"Is not as urgent as my brother's disciplinary hearing, apparently." He buttoned his jacket. "Harshit, bring the car."

Harshit's face did something complicated. "Sir. Which one?"

"My favorite one."

A silence fell across the boardroom. Harshit blinked several times. In two years, Ibrahim had never once told him which car he liked best. He had never told him which tie he liked, which tea, which anything.

"Sir," Harshit said faintly, "you have a favorite?"

"Everyone has a favorite."

"Yes, sir. Of course, sir." Harshit was already backing toward the door, tablet clutched to his chest. "I will bring the black one. The long one. The one you wash yourself on Sundays when you think nobody is looking."

"I do not wash it myself."

"Yes, sir."

"Harshit."

"Sir?"

"Go."

◆

The university sat on the eastern edge of the city, a sprawl of sandstone buildings, old neem trees (large shade trees with small feathery leaves), and cracked pathways that every student claimed to hate and secretly loved.

Inayat took the shortcut behind the library and came out beside the faculty parking area at twenty to ten, with a hundred pages of notes pressed to her chest and a cup of hot tea in her other hand. Hania had thrust it at her at the gate with the words, "Hold this, I need both hands to describe what happened to me this morning," and Inayat had been holding it ever since, because that was what friendship was.

"And then," Hania was saying, walking beside her, "he looked at me. He actually looked at me. Right in the eyes."

"Who?"

"The boy from Economics. With the glasses."

"Hania, he looks at everyone."

"Not like that."

"Like what?"

"Like he is solving an equation, and I am the answer."

Inayat opened her mouth to say something wise about equations. She stepped off the curb to cross the lane in front of the parking area, her eyes on Hania's face, her mind on the boy from Economics.

She did not hear the engine until it was very close.

A long, low, black car swung around the corner of the lane, turning into the lot. It was moving faster than a car should move on a university road, with the confident ease of a driver who believed that roads were a private arrangement between himself and the horizon. Brakes shrieked. Hania screamed. Inayat spun around just in time to see a polished black bumper rushing toward her knees.

It stopped.

Not quite. It nudged her, the lightest touch, like a hand on a sleeve, just enough to knock the notes from her arm and send her stumbling backward. The tea flew out of the cup. It arced through the air in a long brown curve, and landed, with perfect, devastating accuracy, across the gleaming hood of the car.

Silence.

A single drop slid down the windscreen.

The driver's door flew open.

A man stepped out. Tall. Broad through the shoulders. Dressed entirely in black, with dark hair and a face that looked as though it had been carved by someone who disliked smiling. He did not look at her. He looked at the hood. At the brown tea spreading slowly across the black paint like a map of a very small, very expensive tragedy.

"My car," he said.

Inayat stared at him. Her heart was thundering. Her knees were shaking. "You almost hit me!"

"My car," he repeated, more quietly, as if she had not spoken.

"You almost killed me!"

"You dropped your tea on my car."

"You drove at me!"

"I was driving into a parking area." He finally lifted his eyes, and they were the color of winter, grey and cold and furious. "You walked into my way."

"I was crossing the road!"

"Without looking."

"You came out of nowhere!"

"It is a road. Cars come on roads."

"Not like that. Not like a, a, a missile!" She gathered her scattered notes from the ground with trembling hands. "Do you know how fast you were going?"

"Do you know how much this car costs?"

"I do not care what your car costs!"

"You should. You have just baptized it."

"Good!" She straightened, clutching the papers, tea-less cup still gripped in her fist. "It needed it! Look at it! It is so shiny it is practically screaming at people!"

"It is a very good car."

"It is a very bad driver."

"It is your fault," said the man, flatly. "You came my way suddenly."

"My fault?" Her voice went up half an octave. "I was on the crossing! I had the right of way! You were going so fast that you did not even have time to see a person standing in front of you! Do you have no eyes? Is there something wrong with them? I am not exactly a tiny object! You did not see an entire body of me?"

For a moment, he said nothing.

His gaze moved, almost against his will, from her furious face to her shaking hands to the white dupatta slipping from one shoulder. Something flickered across his features. It might have been shame. It might have been the beginning of laughter. It was gone before she could decide.

"I saw you," he said at last, quietly.

"Then why didn't you stop?"

"I did stop."

"You hit me!"

"I touched your notes."

"You hit my notes!"

"They are paper."

"They are my thesis!"

"Then you should not carry your thesis across a road with a cup of tea."

"Oh, you." She drew herself up to her full height, which was not much. "You, you, you ghamandi (arrogant, proud)."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Mr. Ghamandi. Mr. Arrogant. That is what you are." She jabbed a finger at his chest and stopped just short of touching it. "You drive like the road belongs to your family, you talk like the whole world owes you an apology, and you care more about paint than a person. I hope the tea stains."

"It will not stain."

"I hope it does."

"It is a ceramic coating."

"Then I hope it is jealous!"

Hania, who had been standing frozen at her side with both hands clapped over her mouth, made a small choking sound. The man glanced at her, then back at Inayat. His jaw was tight. But at the very corner of his mouth, something twitched, and then flattened itself, like a man pressing down a smile with the heel of his hand.

"Are you hurt?" he said.

It was so unexpected that she faltered. "What?"

"Are you hurt?"

"No."

"Your knee."

"My knee is fine."

"It is bleeding."

She looked down. A tiny scrape, barely the size of a coin, had opened beneath the hem of her kameez (long tunic) where the bumper had grazed her. It stung. She had not noticed.

"It is nothing."

"It is something." He took a small white handkerchief from his pocket and held it out. His hand, she noticed, was perfectly steady. "Please."

"I do not want your handkerchief."

"Then I will drive you to the clinic."

"I do not want your car either."

"You have been very clear about what you do not want," said the man. "Perhaps you could tell me what you do."

She looked at him. He looked at her. And for the first time, a very small, quiet, unwelcome thought crossed her mind: that his eyes, when they stopped being angry, were not cold at all.

"I want," she said, with dignity, "to go to my lecture."

"Then go."

"I am going."

"Good."

"Goodbye, Mr. Arrogant."

"Goodbye."

She snatched the handkerchief out of his hand, turned on her heel, and marched away, shoulders straight, notes clutched to her chest, Hania scrambling after her. Halfway across the lot, she shoved the handkerchief into her pocket and muttered, loud enough to carry, "Ghamandi."

Behind her, the man stood motionless beside his tea-splashed car.

He watched her until she vanished through the library arch, a small white figure that did not look back once. Then he lowered his eyes to the hood, to the slow brown stain, to the single tea leaf stuck to the windscreen like a comma.

"Miss Cute Fighter," he said, under his breath, and was appalled to find that he was smiling.

◆

The principal's office smelled of old leather and strong tea.

Ibrahim sat with his hands folded and listened with grave attention to a forty-minute lecture on youth, responsibility, and the structural integrity of notice boards. Beside him, Yusuf nodded at every pause with the solemn expression of a boy attending his own funeral. When it was over, the principal agreed, after a long and tender negotiation, to reduce the penalty to thirty days of volunteer service in the university library, and Ibrahim agreed to a generous donation toward a new notice board, made of something that could not be defeated by foam.

"Thank you, Bhai," Yusuf whispered in the corridor. "You are a hero."

"I am an ATM."

"A heroic ATM."

"Go. Be good. Do not set anything on fire."

"I will not." Yusuf peered at him. "Bhai, you are smiling."

"I am not."

"You have been smiling since you came in. It is very frightening."

"It is the tea," said Ibrahim, and walked away before his brother could ask what he meant.

◆

Hania found her on the library steps, staring at a handkerchief.

"Well?" Hania demanded. "Who was he?"

"Nobody."

"Nobody does not hand you a handkerchief."

"He was a rude, reckless, overpaid driver."

"He was gorgeous."

"He was arrogant."

"Both can be true."

"He cared more about his car than about my knee."

"He asked about your knee."

"After the car."

"Inayat. He offered to drive you to the clinic." Hania peered at her face. "Why are you smiling?"

"I am not smiling."

"You are definitely smiling."

"I am simply thinking about how I will describe him to Mariam." She folded the handkerchief carefully, running her thumb over a tiny embroidered initial in the corner. A single letter. I. She put it away in her book, beside her father's note. "Mr. Arrogant. I like it."

"Do you want to know what I like?"

"No."

"I like that you gave him a name."

"I gave him an insult."

"Same thing," said Hania happily, and pushed open the library doors.

On the steps, Inayat paused. Between two pages, her father's note had slipped halfway out. Do not argue with anyone before ten.

She checked her watch. It was nine fifty-four.

"Technically," she murmured, "it was allowed," and bit her lip, and did not feel the slightest bit guilty.

◆

Ibrahim told nobody.

That was the strange thing. In all his twenty-six years, he had never found it difficult to tell people things. He had told his father about the Dubai contract, and his grandmother about the board's quarrels, and Zayan about nearly everything. But when he walked into the house that evening, past the gardener and the guards and the warm yellow lights, and sat down at the long dining table with his family, the story lay in his chest like a small, bright coin, and he did not take it out.

"You are quiet," said his mother, Nusrat, passing him the rice.

"Work."

"Is the Dubai thing bad?"

"It is fine."

"Then why are you smiling at your plate?"

"I am not."

"You are smiling at the daal (lentil stew)."

"It is a very good daal."

"Ibrahim." His grandmother's sharp black eyes moved from his face to his father's, and back. "Something has happened."

"Nothing has happened, Dadi jaan (dear grandmother)."

"Hm."

"I paid Yusuf's fine. I came home. I am eating."

"Hm."

"Dadi jaan."

"I said nothing."

"You said hm."

"A grandmother may say hm," said Hajra Begum, with great dignity, and returned to her rice.

Across the table, Yusuf kept his eyes on his food with the elaborate casualness of a boy who suspected he had been spared a catastrophe and did not wish to jinx it.

◆

That night, Ibrahim lay in bed with the lights off and the curtains half drawn.

The room was large and quiet and very dark. A strip of moonlight lay across the carpet. Somewhere in the garden a night bird called twice and was silent. He turned on his side, then onto his back, then onto his other side. He had a nine o'clock meeting. He had a contract to review. He had, he reminded himself, the responsibilities of a man who ran an empire.

He closed his eyes.

And there she was.

A small figure in a white dupatta, with her chin raised and her notes clutched to her chest and tea running down his bonnet. Her dark eyes blazing. Her voice ringing across the lot, high and furious and perfectly, wonderfully unafraid.

You did not see an entire body of me?

His eyes flew open. He stared at the ceiling.

"This is absurd," he said, aloud, to nobody.

He closed them again.

You ghamandi.

He sat up. He ran both hands through his hair, pressed his palms to his face, and let out a long, slow breath that ended, to his deep annoyance, in the beginning of a laugh.

"Miss Cute Fighter," he murmured, and the ceiling, wisely, said nothing.

He had been shouted at by shareholders, ministers, and one very angry sheikh in Abu Dhabi. None of them had ever left him lying awake at midnight, smiling at the ceiling like a fool.

He picked up his phone.

For a long moment, he held it. The screen glowed cool and blue against his face. He opened a message thread, and typed, deleted, typed again.

Then he sent it.

From tomorrow, I will pick you up and drop you at college.

The reply arrived in eleven seconds.

???

Another.

Bhai are you ok

Another.

Who is this and what have you done to my brother

Ibrahim looked at the screen. Then, slowly, he allowed himself a very small smile.

Be ready at eight, he wrote.

He set the phone face down on the nightstand, lay back, and closed his eyes. And somewhere behind them, in the soft dark, a girl in a white dupatta lifted her chin, narrowed her dark eyes, and said, one more time, with perfect, glorious contempt, "Mr. Arrogant."

And Ibrahim smiled, and whispered back, "Miss Cute Fighter."

He slept, at last, with his hand resting lightly over the pocket where, a few hours earlier, a handkerchief had been.