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Minahat Ahmed

“You look at her with distasteful disdain but she seems unaware of how frustrating she is. Your polite brown eyes look at her and answer her question: no, she wasn’t the first woman you had slept with. She was the fifth.” // HEADER PHOTO: No Place to Hide © CBS 1981

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short story, feb 24

Sticker

With surgical precision, you write her name on the fore-edge of the book she’s been reading before bed every night. In your bluebrownbeige way, you leave a mark on her things, unlike what you’ve been able to do with her. Then you carefully peel the light film covering the book and throw it out the window and over the mango tree. You are right. She didn’t need that.

Record

Let the record show that you turned on her laptop when she was sleeping. That you logged in and checked her emails. Changed the wallpaper on her laptop. Read through all the files that you could open within the time you thought she must have been asleep. Let the record show that she had woken up, and from across the bed, had witnessed with shock, at first, and then surprise, which soon turned into gray anger and babyblue sadness, your manic ruffling through her class notes, that rushed quiet movement of fingers and soft humming, and how the world started getting smaller around the two of you and it wasn’t stopping till it had swallowed both of you in one big gulp. You did what you had to do.

 

Hurt

You peel the mango. Succulent, ripe, fragrant haribhanga. Luscious nectar drips from your fingertips. Summer is in full bloom and bees buzz around you intoxicated by the honey of mango blossoms piercing the air. You slice the mango into four big slices. The first slice goes down your throat. So does the second slice. And then the third and finally, the fourth. She watches you in silence. It’s the first day of your marriage. You love ripe mangoes.

Read

You’re lying next to her. Eyes closed, you follow the lilt of her singsong voice. She reads a passage from the book her father-in-law gave her: Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. He had said this book would help her understand her husband. He had also said that she could navigate the course of her marriage better if both of them read the book together. You’ve refused to read the book, so she has taken it upon herself to read out loud for the both of you. She reads two pages before stopping to check if you’re still awake, which you are. But you breathe the labored breathing of sleep, and she returns to reading the book alone. Honeyed sunshine and afternoon summertime gloom outside, the coolness of the ashbluegray curtains blankets the two of you. As she turns over a page, you seize the book from her hands and toss it over the tabletop beside you. One cannot argue that you are indeed soft with her.

 

Middle

You are in the middle of a story. She interrupts you to ask a question. Her chutzpah is astounding! You look at her with distasteful disdain but she seems unaware of how frustrating she is. Your polite brown eyes look at her and answer her question: no, she wasn’t the first woman you had slept with. She was the fifth.

 

Switch

You have a new person sharing your room. She always turns on all the lights when she is doing her makeup. She has a delicate, chiseled face, light brown eyebrows angled like a soaring seagull’s wings (a product of her recent visit to the beauty salon), a small straight nose, smooth dusky brown skin, and no birthmark (recently checked for). The blinding lights burn your eyes, so you must turn off all the extra lights whenever you enter the room. She complains that she needs more light to finish drawing her wings and turns on the lights. You turn them off and wait before the switchboard, hand on the switch. She is changing too many things. You decide to take control of the matters at hand.

 

Changes

She enters the room. You turn off the AC.

Drinks with a ghost

You take a post-dinner walk on the rooftop with your newlywed wife. It’s the fourth day of being married and you decide to entertain her with a story. She is the one who wanted to know more about your life. You tell her about that one time when you were seventeen and an older woman had invited you to her house and told you to unzip your pants. “It was a dream,” — you say. “I don’t even remember what happened after that” — you say. “Once a girl came to my room and said she wanted to sleep with me. She lived upstairs and came down the veranda at night in her white cotton dress. Do you think she was in love with me?” — you say. Your wife is quiet. Silence hangs in the air like secret loss. “All women are ghosts until the day they get married” — you say. You must be right.

Enter

You have learned your wife’s phone’s passcode. When she goes to shower, you go to WhatsApp and rummage through her messages. You read as many as you can. Messages sent to her friends. To her mother. To her sisters. You find one that says: “I don’t know.” You find another: “I don’t understand him.” Another: “Help me.” You don’t understand what she’s trying to say. You put away the phone when she steps out of the shower.

Delete

You delete photos of your wife when she’s sleeping. It’s her phone.

Begin

You sit down before her.

Remember

You don’t want those images in your mind but the words ring bright in your eyesearslips. “I Love You.” said the last text on your wife’s phone. You aren’t the sender.

Face

You open your eyes to see a face. A face that you don’t recognize. Your glasses are on the tabletop on your left but you don’t turn around. You stare at her face and try to recall who this person might be. You wonder if this face belongs to your wife. You touch her forehead and trace it down to her lips. You are still unsure who she is. You decide to go back to sleep.

Last words

You wait patiently for her to stop crying. She’s acting this way for the third day in a row. When she eventually gets up, she does her wudu without a word, finishes her asr prayer, raises her hands in contemplation and in tears. She folds the corners of the prayer mat and looks at you with much love, you assume. She gets up and takes three small steps towards you, sitting down on the bed you two have shared for the past one month, takes your hands in hers. Her fingers are warm and wet from wiping the meaningless tears that she hasn’t stopped crying. She speaks to you in her softestsweetest voice, but you cannot understand her. Later when you try to recall what she had said, you won’t remember the words. You won’t be able to. She adjusts the dupatta covering her hair, picks up nothing but her phone and the Little Women book she was reading every night, and leaves your bedroomhouselife. You have no idea what is going on, but the middle of your chest hurts, and you begin to cry. There’s a sense that you missed something: the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn’t experience ever before. 

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