Love in a Headscarf (12 page)

“Ahmed explained all this to me,” responded the matchmaker. “He says it was a test.”

A test? Surely marriage and love were complicated enough. I didn’t need a man who was rude or one who couldn’t be straightforward and honest. I didn’t have time to fritter away on a man who wanted to test me before he even knew me. And yet the matchmaker was still on the man’s side.

“He said it was a test to see how the girl responds and Shelina did really well. He liked her.”

Huh?

“Does Shelina want to see him again?”

I began to despair. Where did these men come from? Was there something I needed to know about the male species?

They all seemed so normal but underneath they had these strange quirks. Sharing anecdotes with Sara and Noreen confirmed my suspicions.

“Have the men always been like this?” I asked my mum and her friends, to see if their experiences could shed any light on the matter.

“They are a strange bunch,” they confirmed. “You have to be patient and let them do their thing. It’s like having another child around.”

They weren’t complaining about men or berating them. They smiled when they gave me this information. It was almost as though they wanted to add “and that’s why we love them.” Perhaps they grew up in more understanding times, when you just accepted men as they were. Maybe they understood that it was the quirks that made men perfect.

My generation was young and we knew it was just a matter of time and some effort before we encountered Prince Charming. We told ourselves that the strange men we had come across so far were one-off oddities.

We were optimistic. We had broken all the rules: we had been well educated, gone to good universities, and had great jobs. I worked in marketing, developing new products in the nascent Internet industry, some of them world-first services. We were attractive, interesting, well-spoken, religious, and family oriented. Surely it was, to reiterate, just a question of time and effort.

I had learned to be philosophical about these meetings. I had to be. It was important for my sanity to keep alive a small glimmer of hope that one of these Y-chromosome unmarried individuals might have something to tease me into marrying them. For weren’t human beings full of surprises?

This continuing optimism, coupled with a good old-fashioned British stiff upper lip meant that I ploughed on with the search with stoic determination.

It was all a game of statistics. The big question was, which statistic: “Finding the One” or “Four out of Six”?

FOUR
Only Connect

Waiting

I
t was 4:00 a.m. Outside it was somewhere between the end of the darkness of the night and the pale gray light of dawn. My alarm was ringing wildly and my father’s voice echoed through the hallway. “
Beti
, you have to get up.” It was time for the morning prayer.

How did he always sound so energetic and cheerful so early in the morning? My parents had already been awake for an hour, immersed in middle-of-the-night prayers.

“Allah loves this time of the morning the most, when His creatures give up their precious sleep to be close to Him,” they told me. Their eyes shone with excitement. There was something in the light from their faces—clear, content—that resonated with their words.

“Whatever wishes you have, this is the time to ask.” It was so quiet, so uninterrupted, only your heart and the Divine. The answers become clear even before you ask the question.

I was not feeling so sublime that morning. “Five more minutes,” I croaked. I hung my legs painfully over the edge of the bed, head between my knees, and then swung myself delicately out of bed, bleary-eyed, feeling slightly queasy at the few hours of sleep I had had so far. With the thought of having to get up again for work in less than three hours, I searched for a delicate balance between being awake enough to pray and not so awake that I couldn’t sleep again. It took a force of will to stand up.

I could hear the soft patter of my parents moving about elsewhere in the quiet house as they prepared to pray. This was the magical period of
Fajr
, a time when most people were sleeping. As the seasons changed,
Fajr
would sometimes be earlier, as early as 2:00 a.m. in the summer and as late as 7:00 a.m. in the winter. It was the first of the five ritual prayers that punctuated the day and gave it rhythm.
Fajr
, to start the day right;
Dhuhr
and
Asr
, in the afternoon, to center you during the busy workday, to remind you what the day was for and to pull you back from fatigue;
Maghrib
and
Isha
in the evening, for rest and peace, to give thanks for the day and to remember the Creator before sleeping.

To work out the beginning and end timings of each prayer, you could collect a printed timetable from the local mosque or access one on the Internet. A simple matrix would help you calculate the timings:
Fajr
, starts 3:56 a.m., ends 5:53 a.m. You could pray your
salat
at any time in between, but it was always better to pray early. It showed you were keen, committed. Depending on how spiritual you were feeling, you could spend anything between five minutes or the full two hours.

“If you had an appointment with a lover, your entire being would race through all the chores you had to do, and you would always do your best to be punctual,” used to say the Imam.

The principles to calculate prayer time are based on the movement of the sun, and so timings vary throughout the year as the length of day changes.
Dhuhr
was prayed when the sun was directly overhead, when shadows were at their shortest.
Maghrib
was prayed as dusk fell, on the cusp between day and night. In an urban lifestyle, the prayers created a much-needed sensitivity to nature’s rhythms. “The day was created for work,” says the Qur’an, “and the night was created for rest.”

Before every ritual prayer it was a requirement to wash certain parts of your body, not only for physical cleanliness, but also for symbolic spiritual purification. Each step had a prayer that accompanied it. I washed my mouth:
please put sweet words onto my lips.
I washed my face:
let light shine from my face.
The words made me feel focused and uplifted. I washed my arms between elbow and fingertips:
let my hands do good, let them prevent bad deeds and injustice.
I ran my fingers gently across the top of my head:
when things get pressured, let me stay calm.
Finally, I wiped my feet:
let them walk me to places where I can do good.

I returned to my room and unfolded my prayer mat. It was made of deep red velvet, about a meter in length and half a meter in width, with a small arch printed at the top, symbolically pointing in the direction of prayer. I laid the mat to face southeast, toward the
qiblah
, at the heart of which was the Kaba in Mecca. Hundreds of millions of other people, perhaps even a billion, around the world would face the same point throughout their day. I covered my hair with a long cloth, which swept over my shoulders and fell just past my waist. Beneath I was wearing my favorite blue satin pajamas. I drew a deep breath and tried to focus.

First I stood upright, in
qiyam
, the standing position, and recited Arabic verses from the Qur’an.

Bismillah Ar-Rahman Ar-Raheem.
In the Name of Allah, the Lovingly Compassionate, the Kind.

Alhamdu lillahi rabbil aalameen.
All praise is due to the Sustainer of the Worlds.

I continued until the words were complete. Then I bowed down, my hands placed upon my knees, my back curved, my face looking downward. I continued reciting:

Glory to Allah, glory to Allah, glory to Allah.

Finally, I bent down farther and placed my forehead on the floor in
sajdah
, prostration, my hands on either side of my body, almost curled into a fetal position. Being in this humbled position, my forehead touching the ground, was the ultimate crushing of pride and showed that in front of no human being were you to fall so totally and humbly. Only the Creator was worthy of complete devotion.

I repeated these movements and completed the prayer. I sat on the prayer mat, at a loss. I reflected on my single status and the painful, heartbreaking process of looking for a partner, but never finding one. I felt so lonely. I didn’t want to grow old alone.

I wondered whether it was my pride that had stopped me from accepting someone who didn’t live up to the standards of my imaginary perfect prince. But I could not think of even one man I had turned down who could have made a suitable match. My head was tipped downward, strands of my hair trailing over my eyes. I thought about how hard I had been trying.

“Wasn’t effort to be rewarded?” I asked the Divine. “You could magic up a perfect man in an instant if You wanted. You have power over all things. In the Qur’an, You tell us that You say ‘Be’ and It is,’” I reminded Him petulantly. God clearly didn’t need reminding of what He had said.

My eyes welled up, and tears started rolling slowly down my cheeks. I raised my hands, both of them open facing upward. God wasn’t upward, wasn’t in any physical place. But my hands moved instinctively, pleading. “I really want to get married, have a husband, settle down. Haven’t you told us that getting married means to complete half of our faith? It’s awful having to go through this process week after week with all these strange people. I’m only asking for something good. Why can’t you hurry up and send me someone to love me and bring me closer to You? I just want to get on with my life,” I complained
.

I was blessed in my life in so many ways: wonderful family, lovely house, good job, the opportunity to travel, close friends. This was the one thing I felt was missing.

“Am I not ready, or is my prince not ready? Are there more things I need to learn, and if so, what are they?”

I wondered how much longer I would have to be patient. The ability to wait, to hold yourself with dignity and thankfulness when you can’t have what you want, or can’t have it quite yet, is one of the hardest qualities to master. “Allah is with the patient,” says the Qur’an.

My life was on hold. School, tick. University, tick. Job, tick. Traveling, tick. Husband, big empty gaping hole. I was stuck, unable to move forward. But was it God who was teaching me to be patient enough to wait for what I needed, or was it only me who was holding myself back from living my life? If I was to embrace life, if I dedicated myself to growing inside my soul, experiencing new things, and working for a better world, would my love arrive? What was the lesson to be learned?

As time passes, the rules that govern our lives change. As I moved from early twenties to mid-twenties, I became less concerned with gossip. Gossip became less concerned with me. Where once I had only seen malice, I started to see genuine concern from Aunties and matchmakers, albeit hidden under the same mannerisms as before.

“We must get her married soon,” the Aunties would whisper, eyebrows furrowed with worry on my behalf. “Soon all the good proposals will run out and then she will just have to pick anyone, anyone at all.” They meant to be supportive and encouraging but instead they invited the dark clouds of perpetual doom to hover over my doorstep. I refused to be cowed.

Young women were no longer beholden to marriage as the gateway to womanhood as once they might have been. Self-worth was no longer created through wifehood and children. The idea of marrying for the sake of social acceptability and status was slowly bleeding out of our system. This was sometimes misconstrued as rejecting marriage, rejecting culture, rejecting men. But this was far from the truth.

We were still besotted with getting married but not for the title or status; instead it was for companionship and love. No longer were we vulnerable to guilt or necessity as levers to push us toward marriage. It was not social pressure but rather that we recognized and accepted our needs as human beings: we wanted a partner and we wanted to be a partner. The change in mood that we heralded was seismic but the system had yet to catch up.

Being older had its benefits. The strictures of beady eyes and traditional processes started to become relaxed. Gossip focused on younger girls, and I was able to take advantage of newer, less formal ways of meeting suitors. There was a sense that a less structured setting might be more conducive to eliciting a proposal from the boy and an acceptance from the girl. And thus it was that I went on my first meeting outside my family home. Even though Sara and Noreen had been through the experience already, they teased me that I was going on a “blind date.” “All the meetings we have are blind dates,” I pointed out.

Syed lived in Leicester, about an hour-and-a-half’s drive from central London, where we had agreed to meet. I wanted to be somewhere far from home and prying eyes. I had suggested a pretty little café in a popular part of town, with plenty of parking nearby, for a late afternoon coffee. Coffee was perfect: if things went well, then we could have dinner. If they went badly, it could all be ended very quickly. We had agreed to meet at 5:00 p.m. He was an accountant, four years older than me, a graduate in science. We had spoken briefly on the phone to make arrangements to meet, keeping the conversation very logistical. His voice was light and breezy and I felt immediately at ease. He seemed good fun and very laid-back.