What Not To Do When You're In Love

18 | Wariness

"H-how dare you?!" I cried in pain once I realised what he'd done.

"Fowwy," he attempted to speak. "Vewwy ungwi."

He said something else through my sandwich, but I had stopped listening.

"What did I do to deserve this?" I whispered, looking at the remnants of my lunch. "My own husband deceived me. My closest associate turned out to be a snake in my sleeve, who tricked me so casually. I've lost faith in humanity."

By now Hasan had swallowed my stolen food.

"You need to chill. It was just a bite!"

"No, you left me just a bite."

He squinted at me. "It should be your priority to take care that your husband eats. My mamma could never eat while knowing my papa was hungry."

Now, I could speak on and on about the differences between his mother and me, but all I said was, "Well, breaking news, Hasan: Your mamma and I are you distinct personalities that have individual thought patterns and reasoning of choices."

"Then perhaps you're doing it wrong. Just a thought."

I was mere steps from entering the shop we were walking towards, but I stopped.

"Excuse me?"

"Excused?"

"Are you going to teach me how to be a wife, now?" I asked, baffled. "Or let me rephrase that- do you think you can teach a woman how to be a wife?"

"Are you expecting a serious answer to that?"

"Maybe I am!"

"Then you better be assured that I may need to teach you how to be a good wife, which is obviously if it ever comes down to it."

Now I didn't know how to reply to that.

"You think I'm a bad wife?"

He sighed. As if I was the one who was being ridiculous instead of the other way round. "There's no black or white to this stuff, Adinah. And you seem perfect to me so far anyway. I'm just saying that if I feel like you're getting something wrong, it's definitely my duty to call it out. Only helpful criticism."

"Get something wrong?" I asked, conscious of the anger slowly rising in me. "Wrong?"

"Yeah?"

"Wrong," I repeated, "as opposed to what?"

"As opposed to . . . to the way my mother thinks you should be doing things," he paused.

I was expecting the word. Heck, from what I had gathered of Hasan's beliefs, I was nearly sure he'd say it.

And he did.

"As opposed to what the culture suggests you should do things like."

The culture. Of course. It was like a hard and fast rule to speaking nonsense - blame it on the culture for unchecked authorisation. No one would really come to grab your collar even if they object since the culture itself didn't make sense half the time.

I decidedly remained quiet. I would've loved to fight, but I refrained from it, not just because I didn't know how to make Hasan understand that I couldn't understand him, but also because now I'd started to figure us out; at least a little.

From what I had gathered by analysing the causes of our arguments, I'd been able to establish a few things. And among them the chief fact I'd laid down was that Hasan and I may be compatible in the elemental sense of the word, but the truth remained that he thought very differently from the way I thought, about some significant things if not most.