18 | Wariness
"You decide. I'm gonna need a bite of that or we aren't entering any other shop."
We were at a local market buying gifts for everyone. Some steps behind me Hasan carried our purchases, grumbling and complaining. Honestly, I was starting to get a little dubious about those biceps now.
"Are you blackmailing me into giving you my sandwich?!" I asked, not letting myself linger on the fact that seeing the way he had dragged me from the beach, he could actually drag me out of here just the same. And I'd powerlessly comply with his decision again.
"Most certainly! I mean holding this thing alone feels like I'm carrying Hafsa, forget the weight of the rest of the bags. Bringing you here has proven to be, among other things, a warning straight from Allah," he huffed as he carried a vase the size of his torso as if it were so heavy. "You seem to be under the delusion that I possess some sort of extraordinary physical capability. Which is incorrect. I'm sure not even the wives of the real superman ever made him carry things like this."
"Hey, to remind you, he never disappointed any of his wives. Like ever. Not even accidentally."
"I know; definitely superhuman. What a great man!"
"Indeed. And you, sir, ought to have realised sometime before we were a half hour's walk from that coffee shop that you want something to eat, too. Oh, wait, I forgot that you were too busy trying to be a selfish miser to have thought of that sooner!"
"Hey, I'm not being a miser! And, are you, by any chance, forgetting you didn't marry a multimillionaire?"
"Oh, my bad," I said. "I guess I'm gonna have to fix that now. This husband complains too much, anyway."
"Adinah!" He exclaimed, his eyes wide.
"Sorry, I'm not sorry. If my replies upset you, try avoiding them by not saying silly things."
"You're the one who's spending my hard-earned money on useless things, how am I being silly?!"
"I didn't buy anything for myself now, did I? Don't you know the value of giving presents to your friends and family in Islam?"
"Yeah, that is all okay, but couldn't we get a little more modest gifts? Stuff like sweets or clothes or hairbrushes or something? I mean, because Hafsa doesn't need another juicer-blender, she already has a whole collection of these things. And my mamma most certainly doesn't need this fifteen kg vase!"
"Let's go and get those things too, then!" I said enthusiastically.
He leaned down, sighed, and patted his butt.
"Sabr, habibi."
"Did you- did you just tell your butt to have Sabr?!" I started laughing so hard that people passing us by gave me stares.
"My wallet."
That only made me laugh harder.
"You gotta do what you gotta. She needs emotional support at this challenging, hard time."
"Of course," I took a deep breath to stop letting myself from looking like a nutcase in the middle of a market. "I hope she's warned and ready, because look!" I said, motioning towards some more shops lined in front of us, "It's time to get sweets to take home!"
"Where?" Hasan asked.
But before I could turn to ask him if the burden of the bags and vase had blinded him, he dipped and took a monstrous bite of my sandwich.
"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.
Another fact I laid down presently was that if I started a fight with him right now, it would probably last our entire lives.
Hasan was one of those men; now it was painfully clear. He was a slightly different version of Jebrail: a product of the mindset that crushed the very identity of women and placed the men on top of the mess. Some men didn't notice they were trampling women, while most who did chose to ignore the whole ordeal and glorify the cultural torture in the name of, out of all things, Islam.
Hasan, I supposed, belonged to the former category.
Maybe he wasn't wrong about the way he saw things. Maybe mamma, Aunty Husna, Aunty Rahima, Jebrail, everyone was correct. Maybe women really must accept the fact that we will never equate with men. But I still deserved to lead my life my way. Even if I was the one in the dark, and the logic of the society only did not make sense to me because I was stupid, Hasan could only lead me; in no way was he entitled to draw the lines on which I was to walk.
But could I do anything? Defending my rights would not help, because not all of them were visible to him. Maybe there were different ways in which I could explain my viewpoint to him; I knew that Hasan may be everything, but he wasn't stupid. Maybe I could live with him just a tad bit less miserably than I did back home with Jebrail.
But I could always try to talk to him after we returned. I didn't want to ruin a trip we were both enjoying, at least not more than I already had.
When I stared at him but didn't say anything, Hasan did.
"Aren't you going to say anything?"
"Why, should I?"
"I don't know. I just felt like you'd have something to say to what I said."
"Oh. Why?" I asked, to which he just shrugged in reply.
Maybe because you subconsciously know what you said didn't make sense, I thought, but I chose to walk into the shop then just to avoid letting it slip out.
____________
After about a half hour of being crouched over the small notebook that I had brought along, and being relieved that I could quickly scribble down an idea that hit me out of nowhere, while Hasan napped on the hotel room bed, I had a manifestation.
It had to be the soft, briny just-before-maghrib breeze that blew through the windows and struck me that had given me the abrupt but accurate epiphany: Hasan and I were different. We didn't agree on a lot of things, and were destined to argue again and again on precisely those matters that I had grown a passionate hatred debating.
But maybe, if we consider one of the basic concepts of Islam, a good explanation for why Hasan and I actually compliment each other can surface. We are all trialled repeatedly over the courses of our lives, which is because life on this Dunya essentially means hardships and what we learn through them, what we prove to be under uncontrollable circumstances and with what attitude we emerge out from such situations. And this supposition is actually a very comforting hand over your head that whispers softly, "Don't worry, it is all going to be just as lovely one day as it is horrifying right now, and all you need to do to get to that point is be patient and keep saying His name whilst." So it had to, (and did) feel good to think that maybe it's not a very big price to give if all of the trials I had to undergo comprised the sacrifice of my career, not having a cat, some bickering with a mother in law who wants better food than I can make, and a husband who isn't a hundred per cent congruent to all my beliefs and opinions.
The thing was that I was finally reaching that point when I acknowledged that my trials could so well be so much more severe. To think that Hasan was not perfect was impractical when I thought about all the other imperfections he could've entered my life with. And it was no secret that moms in law around here could be a hell lot worse than mine was. Where were my Alhamdulillahs then; where had I lost my gratitude?
And if really coming down to the core requirement, the only thing that really did matter, wasn't it already settled that Hasan cared for me? Nearly nothing mattered more than that, at least not anymore if it had before. It was I rather, who was being unfair to him. He had made it clear more than just a few times that he wanted to know more of me, and that he liked whatever he knew. If it wasn't enough and he was not evaluating me correctly, and I sat around doing nothing to alter and fix his perception, it was no one's fault but mine; it was immoral on my part to not let him know the other things that had a significant impact on my personality.
About my messed up head, though, I was not telling him. I knew very well how much pain it would cause me if he didn't react to knowing about my depression correctly, (which was possible, although not likely), and so telling him, or even allowing him to sense anything pertaining to it no matter how small or vague was completely out of the question.
But somewhere down there I had started to wonder: why couldn't Hasan know about my struggles with housework? The uncontrollable rage triggered in me by gender inequality? My incessant love for cats? My maddening empathy for women who were killed but yet breathed?
The fact that I could probably only stop writing the day I died?
It was undeniably a big aspect of my personality. If I wanted him to know me better, he needed to see me as the hopelessly dependent writer I was.
And I was aware he wouldn't judge me for it; I just knew he wouldn't. He most likely wouldn't even care to know what I wrote, I knew him enough to be sure of that too. And . . . No matter how hard I tried to run away from this reality, no matter how hard my subconscious tried to make me question it over and over again, and the fact that I still hadn't quite believed it, it was still true — he loved me. He had said he did. I was not really sure of the degree of that love, and I was by nature accustomed to initial disbelief in matters like this - it was a manufactural defect - but none of that meant that it didn't exist. His words definitely, and his behaviour subtly expressed it often.
There was no doubt that I was confident that Hasan wouldn't have any negative reaction when he did come to know, but it still wasn't easy for me to imagine going about my life with him knowing. Of course it made sense to assume he could ask to read something at some point, which was a reason for my vehement hesitation. I still wasn't very confident if I wanted myself unravelled before him so openly, because however faintly, my characters resembled myself; even though my characters did not totally reflect me, my writing was a large number of words which spelt out my deepest thoughts, urges, wishes, and anguishes. And they would all be clearly comprehensible for someone who had the slightest inclination to understand not only what I wrote in words, but also what I said in the spaces between them.
And the fact that I wrote a pile of cutesy bullcrap that could satisfy no one but me was additionally concrete, too.
So, all in all, there was no reason I couldn't tell him, so I concluded that I would. Soon, if not right away. Now was definitely the best time, with us being away from everyone else, but that was exactly what made me uneasy, my palms sweaty and heart race. We were alone.
I had distractedly turned away from my notebook, which I only realised when he stirred under the sheets. I was actually looking at Hasan sleeping while I daydreamed of an uncomfortable scenario of the first confession between the two of us which he would not initiate.
When I figured out he was awake, I jumped on my seat to put away my notebook.
Somehow he saw me do it.
"What are you doing?" He asked.
Oh no.
"Nothing."
"Nothing," he asked, but it sounded less like a question and more as if he was mocking me.
"Yeah."
He looked towards where I'd kept the notebook near my backpack and then sat up before he faced me again.
"Let me see it," he said just when I was praying he wouldn't ask that.
"No!" I said, quickly.
A little too quickly. A little too vehemently.
And from what it seemed like, judging by his expression, perhaps a little too rudely.
"No?" There was very little time to really read what his eyes said about his mood.
"It's . . . nothing. You can, uh, go back to sleep," I stuttered. "Unless you want to go down? For dinner? Or we can order something up here. Whatever you want."
He just looked back and forth between the notebook and me for some moments. Then he finally replied.
"I can't sleep. I had a bad dream."
"Oh," I said. "Do you want to tell me what you saw?"
He looked away. "I saw someone I love sitting in a corner, sad. Crying."
He stood up. "But each time I tried to go near, nonchalance and wariness came between us."
And then I watched mutely as Hasan grimaced, walked over and locked himself in the bathroom, the farthest he could get away from me.
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A.N.
This is your mandatory boring reminder to vote if you enjoyed reading :P