| Hawaaon Ke Paighaam | Messages Of The Wind

| The Ballroom |

Naturally, it had been a slight shock to the system seeing her husband almost every day for a week. The hotel which Phoenix International had reserved for the flight staff had been lavish to say the least; known as the crown jewel of the Doha skyline, the hotel had boasted every single luxury one could've dreamt of, and Meerab and Saba had had a blast in their free time. Having scheduled training every morning had meant that Meerab saw Murtasim in the grand ballroom for breakfast every day. Turns out her husband liked punctuality; the humongous grandfather clock would chime once, and like clockwork, Captain Khan would walk in at 9.15am, go straight to his reserved table and sit with the man who had introduced himself at the induction as Omar Maktabi. He'd then have breakfast and leave at 10am on the dot.

Meerab had tried in vain to go on with her breakfast every time he came in, but the same thing would happen every day; he'd sit behind her, facing her table, and though she always had her back to him, the floor-to-ceiling mirror in front of her table meant she could look straight at him. And more annoyingly, that he could see her. Breakfast became a game of 'who would get caught looking first', but no winner emerged as their eyes would clash in the gilded mirror every few minutes, with neither of them willing to admit who had looked first. It was only when Murtasim would get up, tip the maître d and leave, that Meerab was able to release the breath she hadn't realised she'd been holding.

Thankfully the rest of the day would be blissfully Murtasim-free, allowing Meerab to enjoy the activities offered to the flight staff in their free time. She had gotten massages, had her hair styled and even taken a water aerobics class with Saba and a few other trainees. That was of course, after she had finally crossed paths with him on the first evening and gotten over that dreaded first meeting.

Five days to Flight PX501, to Karachi

The Mandarin Oriental, Doha, Qatar

It was surely not often that one randomly finds one's own wife approximately a thousand nautical miles away from where you imagine her to be. Meerab Murtasim Khan was 5 foot 6 inches of dynamite wrapped in a peaches and cream complexion, topped off with a head the colour of espresso, and Murtasim Khan could point her out from a thousand women. With his eyes closed. Partly because she'd be the one standing front and centre, ready to protect those women from the kind of man she'd once believed he was; in her own colourful words, a 'maghroor, khud-parast aur ana-pasand admi'.

Murtasim narrowed his eyes, his nose flaring and his jaw clamping shut. Yes, that was most definitely his officially wedded wife across the room. She was talking to the First Class steward animatedly, waving her hands about, and then in a very Meerab move, gave a smug smile, shrugged her shoulders and crossed her hands in front her chest. She'd just won an argument with the steward, he'd bet his pilot's license on it. It was exactly what she'd done when she had negotiated the terms of their marriage on that fated night before the nikkah, two years ago. She'd actually been doing it since they were children; she'd lecture him on everything she'd thought was wrong with him, and then mistake his silence for surrender. Well, he wasn't about to be silent now. What on earth was she doing in the flight lounge reserved solely for Phoenix Air employees in Doha and perhaps more important, what on earth was she doing standing so bloody close to the steward?

Mid-conversation with Karim, a steward on her flight, a shiver of awareness zipped through Meerab's body. Her skin tingled, goose-bumps suddenly covering her naked forearms. She was being watched and she knew. She'd been spotted. She didn't know how he did it and why her body betrayed her every time. Hated how he sometimes looked at her from under hooded eyes. How he made her nervous with just silence, and how she was perpetually on edge when he was in close proximity.

Karim was long forgotten. Taking a deep breath, Meerab turned her head to her right and landed smack-bang in the capture of her husband's narrowed gaze. The wheels turning in her head at the various directions this meeting could take, she made her move. No way was she going on the defensive. Anything less than playing aggressively on the offensive with this man meant buckling your knees and giving in, like almost everyone around him did. And so Meerab jutted her chin out and shot her own narrowed stare in retaliation.