The Pact We Made Read online

  ‘That was a different time.’

  She shook her head. ‘Time has nothing to do with it. People are people and marriage is what it’s always been. It’s like now everyone wants a love match because it’s cool or whatever.’ I looked away from her dig at our friend. ‘How many of those marriages end in divorce?’ She counted them off on her fingers. ‘Jenan, Rana, your cousin Hana, Fajer from university, that girl we went to high school with – oh, what was her name?’

  ‘Lulu.’

  ‘Yeah.’ She slammed on the brakes as some guy on a motorbike screamed through the junction. The expletives she reserved for road rage spilled from her mouth with a vehemence I found unwarranted and made me think the rant was at least partly directed at me, or Mona, or some weighted average of the two.

  Like conversations past and those yet to come, my best points were made in my head. There I extracted from her confessions of doubt and jealousy and a rivalry with Mona she never voiced. There she fought valiantly but ultimately conceded that none of it was worth a slapdash marriage. I hacked away at the pact, that tree that would never fall, delivering glancing blows and reopening wounds.

  ‘Allah kareem.’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘God willing, it’ll all work out.’

  This was a terribly optimistic remark, but one that I was used to hearing from her. She had far too much faith that life was just, too much belief that if she played by the rules, God would reward her. I knew better; there was no cause and effect relation to what you got in life. No karma, no good things to those who wait, no tabs kept on such things. It was a crapshoot. The entire enterprise was like some cosmic lottery you hadn’t bought a ticket for.

  20

  You Will Not Escape

  My actions were deliberate.

  For a week I’d kept silent. Silent and covered while the tattoo healed. Silent when the skin around it itched. Silent when it turned red. Silent when it hurt; I could deal with the pain. Pain is real.

  It was late afternoon and faint breezes blew off the Gulf; there was a churn to the blue waters, I could see it from the picnic table we’d set up in front of the chalet, by the edge of the plateau and the eighty or so steps down to the beach. The sun hung placid and uninterested in the sky, its rays barely touching the ground.

  The top I wore was loose and sheer. I knew at some point it would slip off my shoulder and my parents would see what I had done. But still, I’d fidgeted with it all morning and all through our lunch preparation, jerking the wide neck into a tighter fold when I lost my nerve and draping a scarf it was too warm to wear across my shoulders while I helped Baba squeeze lemons and oranges for juice. I pulled the scarf even tighter when Rashid, Mona, and her parents came in, having called with a last-minute acceptance of Mama’s standing lunch invitation.

  I could have backed out then, it would have been understandable, on the grounds that the confrontation should be a family affair. I could have run upstairs and put on a different shirt, one that fully covered my shoulders.

  But I didn’t. Like I said, my actions were deliberate.

  For a moment, just the one, I considered dragging Mona to my room to show it to her, so that I could have at least one friendly, unsurprised face at the table. But I didn’t do that either. A part of me wanted to see that look on her face – the one that said to everyone that I hadn’t told her first.

  I raked my hair into a bun high on my head and put the scarf in my lap halfway through lunch, when Nadia’s kids had wolfed theirs down and run off to the beach with three or four maids in tow. Baba was on my right, exactly where I needed him to be, Mama across the table by Mona’s mother. Mona was by me, but spent most of her time catching up with my sister.

  I waited for it to happen naturally, for the neck of my top to slip off my shoulder as per its design. I stretched for bread, leaned across the table to refill my juice, passed salads and chicken and hummus and olive oil. And nothing. The thing stayed in place throughout.

  The tea was being served, mini-cupcakes and coffee cake slices springing up across the table, and I knew I’d have to force it.

  I pulled my sleeves down so my hands retreated into the cuffs. A breeze whispered against my bare shoulder.

  And I waited.

  He looked at me three times and still missed it. The fourth time he glanced my way it was to ask about something he and Rashid were talking about. His black eyes flicked down to the inked petals. They shuttered once, twice. Something passed over his features, and he said, ‘You had henna done.’

  ‘I hate the smell of henna.’ My voice was weak, almost a whisper. I could barely hear it over my heart.

  ‘What then? One of those stickers?’

  Rashid knew it was real then and his eyes caught Mona’s. She fell silent beside me. It seemed even the Gulf was holding its breath for us.

  I didn’t trust my voice, so I shook my head.

  Baba blinked rapidly, like a computer trying to process too much data at once. Buffering and buffering. He leaned over. His breath was hot on my shoulder and his fingers smelled of garlic. ‘What are you saying, Dahlia?’

  Mama’s attention had been captured, but she couldn’t see what he was looking at from her seat. His thumb pressed hard into me, rubbing, rubbing, dragging the skin as he muttered the impossibility of it under his breath.

  ‘What did you do?’ Mona asked. It seemed she and Nadia and our mothers moved as one being to my side of the table.

  And then, there was a lot of yelling.

  ‘Have you lost your mind?!’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘It isn’t real. It can’t be!’

  Baba’s thumb was burrowing a hole into me, his eyes never meeting mine. It was painful. Mama’s hand gripped the bun of my hair, wrenching my head back so I was forced to look at her. My heart beat so loud and hard I feared it might explode.

  ‘Answer me! Say it isn’t real.’

  ‘It’s real. Look at it!’ Baba yelled in a panic. He tossed water at my shoulder, drenching me in the cold liquid, and supplemented his thumb with a napkin. Rubbing and rubbing. ‘It won’t go.’

  ‘You’re insane. You’ve lost your mind.’ Mama was still gripping my hair so hard my scalp screamed, jerking me around as she yelled. ‘Why would you do this? Why ruin yourself like this?’

  I was a rubber band snapping. ‘I’m already ruined!’ I broke free of both their hands and rose to my feet, knocking the chair over with a loud crack. I glanced at Mona. She was wearing that look I wanted, shaking her little pixie head from side to side.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Nadia said, holding our mother’s arm back when it looked like she might strike me. ‘It’s okay. They’re removable now. I’ve seen it. They take them off with lasers.’ Mona nodded like a bobblehead.

  My skin throbbed. ‘I’m not getting it removed.’

  ‘Yes, you are!’ Mama was seething, spitting her rage. Mona nudged Rashid, gesturing for him to lead her parents into the chalet.

  ‘Dahlia, listen to me,’ Baba said, approaching me with one garlicky finger in my face. ‘You will get it removed. You will get it removed as soon as possible.’

  ‘No.’ My lips trembled, my body trembled, my heart trembled.

  ‘What do you mean, “No”?’ he barked. ‘You think you’re just going to walk around like that? My daughter walking around with that on her shoulder!’

  ‘You’re going to hell,’ Mama chimed in, and I didn’t feel I was in a position to argue with that. ‘It’s haram. Tattoos are haram, you know this.’

  ‘Mama—’ Nadia began.

  ‘It’s true. What, are you not praying as well? Do you plan to stop praying? How are you going to pray to Allah with that abomination on your body? How many other sins are you committing?’

  ‘Oh, spare me, Yumma,’ I sneered. ‘You’re not worried about my soul. You’re worried what people will say, what your friends and society will say when they find out.’

  ‘They won’t find out,’ Baba int
erjected, ‘because you’re getting it removed even if I have to hold you down myself.’

  ‘You’ll never get married now,’ Mama said over him.

  ‘Good!’

  She recoiled, mouth clamping shut as though I’d slapped her. But we’re stoic creatures, my mother and I. We don’t cry in front of people, not if we can help it, and she wouldn’t cry then.

  In the quiet that followed, as my father rubbed his hands over his graying hair and I passed a hand over my wet and aching skin, Mona tried to mend what we were shredding.

  ‘Don’t think like that, Khalti,’ she said to Mama. ‘Things are different now. I know a lot of girls, and Rashid knows men, who have tattoos. It’s not like it was before.’

  ‘Mona,’ Baba snapped, his voice like a hard, cracking whip. She was shocked, as was I; he hadn’t scolded her since we were children. ‘Apologize to your parents, but I think our family needs to be alone.’

  I would have preferred witnesses, but I could see she was at least half-relieved by the dismissal. She squeezed my arm as she moved past, but my eyes stayed locked on my parents as though expecting them to launch at me.

  ‘I don’t know what more to do,’ Mama moaned, sinking into a chair and dumping her head in her hands. ‘Khalas, I wash my hands of you.’

  ‘Mama!’ Nadia gasped, dropping a hand on her shoulder to quiet her.

  I won’t lie: there was a definite relief, a crackling joy, that shuddered through me at her words. It tasted like freedom, wet and sweet on my tongue. I was indecisive; should I push them harder, get them to sever the bonds now? Or should I measure my response, see if they’d bend before it was torn forever?

  ‘Shh,’ Baba hissed at her before turning to me. ‘Let’s sit and talk about this like adults.’ He took his advice, sitting ungracefully in the seat by Mama, a strained expression on his face as he waited for me to follow. ‘What’s this about?’

  ‘I’ve told you what it’s about,’ I said with a sigh, refusing to return to my seat. ‘Over and over I’ve told you, but you don’t listen to me.’

  ‘You did this because you’re bored at your job?’ He looked at me like I might have a head injury.

  ‘No.’

  ‘What then? Because of your mother pushing you to marry? To hell with it! Don’t get married, I don’t care.’ Mama gasped, but he placed a hand on her arm to prevent her from speaking. ‘If she doesn’t want it, you can’t force her!’

  ‘It’s not just that. I need to be away from here. I need to leave. Go back to school, be somewhere else, something else.’ I hated the whining quality of my voice but was unable to control it. I felt faint and very close to collapsing.

  ‘No.’ Here his voice had a ring of conviction, of finality, that I was not used to hearing. It was so sudden and abrupt that I flinched as though he’d struck me, and, in some ways, I would rather he had. ‘No. You want to change jobs, fine. You want to put off marriage, fine.’ He shook his head, like this was some mighty concession on their part. ‘But you cannot leave. To go, to live abroad on your own? Forget that, Dahlia. Remove it from your mind.’ He met my eye. ‘It will not happen.’

  He stood up then. He stood and walked away. Mama stood and with one last disgusted look at me, she scurried after him. Nadia, shaking her head, approached the steps to the beach, looking down at the little lives she could still hold in the palm of her hand.

  Panic thundered through me, numbing my fingers and lifting my head. My yathoom did a jig of glee on my lungs. He cackled and sing-songed in my ear.

  ‘Never, never, never. You’ll never, ever be free …’

  21

  It Is Time

  The air was charged and hostile, the three of us avoiding one another like magnets whose polarities had reversed. We’d created – I’d created – sharp, heated spaces between us that no one would come forward to fill. There was a frustration, a defeat of sorts, that slithered across cold marble and down silent walls. It was as though something had died there.

  I was convinced the only reason I hadn’t been dragged forcibly to a laser clinic yet was that my parents were worried I might make a very public spectacle of myself – and also they hadn’t the foggiest idea where a clinic offering such a service might be, nor how to discreetly inquire after one.

  So they said nothing, and I said nothing, and the house remained harsh and silent and toxic.

  My concerns were warranted. I seemed to have gone a step too far, to a place to which my father’s forgiveness would not stretch. He didn’t talk to me, hardly even looked at me. And in those rare moments when his face turned my way, I nearly crumbled under the disappointment I saw there.

  He’d forgiven many missteps of mine: at fourteen when I’d stolen the car because I was running away to Zaina’s house; or two years later when he’d caught me smoking on the roof; when I was nineteen and he’d had to pick me up from the police station. He forgave it all, calming Mama’s histrionics and assuring me that he still loved me and all was well.

  All was not well. This seemed beyond him. Who knew he harbored such religious tendencies, or that he cared so much what others thought? Or maybe it was none of the above, maybe it was just straightforward disappointment, disconnected from any other considerations.

  I found a perverse delight in it though – or perhaps delight is the wrong word; it was more of a quiet satisfaction with the idea that finally they’d stopped to notice, finally they saw that I needed some modicum of control over something. More importantly, they could now see that if I did not have it, I was willing to wrench it from their grasp.

  Word of what I’d done reached Zaina, who called me full of screeching recriminations and confused pauses. She was as bewildered by me as she had perhaps ever been. She reached back into our past, deep into my history, turning it over and combing it through for signs that something like this had been coming. Even someone as close to me as Zaina struggled to reconcile this action with the creature she was used to, the one that had always danced just inside the line. And I thought how easily she would have fit in our family, how with just a few minute twists of fate she might have been their daughter. And then, everyone would have been happier … or at least more at ease.

  I texted Bu Faisal and asked him to meet me at the memsha. I’d been running for an hour and I was tired and sweaty, with aching muscles and bubbly blisters on the balls of my feet. A knee-jiggling, jittery energy had not left me. I didn’t know what else to do, how to keep the panic at bay. I had considered calling Yousef, seeing if he had anything to calm my mood, but I’d never done that and he’d want to know why and what was wrong and I didn’t want to talk anymore. I was so tired of talking, all these infinite loops that went nowhere and resolved nothing.

  It was past nine and the footpath was deserted and dark. It was just me and tunnels of thick trees sprouting from desert sand, interspersed with tall white streetlamps. The moon was high overhead, shrouded in a mist that translated to humidity on the ground. Aside from the moon the night was empty, empty and dead. There was no sound around me, not an insect buzzing or a cat mewing or a cricket chirping. No night orchestra or constellations to name. Nothing. Even the air was dead, no breeze to stir the branches or rustle the leaves.

  Death is a kind of nature. I pulled my feet up onto the bench, propped my chin in the dip between my knees and waited.

  He found me there. He found me, rocking too lightly to be seen, with the roar of the highway far behind me. He sat at my side, quietly at first, then with soft words and hesitant questions. So hesitant, like I was some fragile thing liable to go to pieces at any moment. And perhaps I was exactly that. I didn’t look at him. My eyes were on the gravel pathway, and I let his questions chase themselves.

  He didn’t touch me, just sat at my side. I felt his eyes on me; what must he have been thinking? That I might be too much of a handful? That perhaps he should renege on his offer? He asked me what was wrong in about five variations. And I was torn between a mad desire to rope him into a commitmen
t and an even madder compulsion to push him away.

  I pulled my sleeve up, baring my right shoulder to him, eyes still glued to the ground.

  There was silence again, but it was not quite as bad as the dead night surrounding us. It was a contemplative silence, one I recognized as him thinking about his response rather than reacting. I waited for disappointment to win out. He’s from my parents’ generation, where getting a tattoo is a horrible transgression, where it’s equated with intentionally scarring your body, where it’s tantamount to turning your back on religion and renouncing your family. I’d known this on some level, known it when I’d been getting it done. And though I couldn’t honestly say I’d thought about it at the time, was it possible this whole thing was an act of subconscious self-sabotage?

  He touched me then, just the back of his index finger lightly brushing the skin of my shoulder. I watched it move over the smooth black ink, and then it was the calloused pad of that finger, gentle as it traced the lines and curves and lettering. It lulled me, caused a feeling of safety and calm to rise in me. It almost didn’t matter whether he approved of it or not; I just didn’t want the feeling to go away.

  ‘Let me get you out of here.’ His voice was so low I thought I’d imagined the words.

  There are moments in our lives that feel epic, even if we don’t know what will come next; perhaps they feel that way because we don’t know what will come next. When you drove a car alone for the first time and it was the sweetest freedom you’d ever known; when you graduated college and the world seemed limitless and full; when you said no to a choice made for you and came out the other side. These moments are so fleeting, and yet they hold within them entire galaxies spinning with possibilities. One word, one action could alter your entire life.

  My eyes flicked up and Bu Faisal’s lips were moving. He repeated himself, stronger and louder, as though willing me to believe him.

  My yathoom rested, and I breathed a little easier.