“Or, you know, we could play a game that isn’t old.”
“XCOM 2 is a classic, all right? Being old is how something gets to be a classic. Besides, it’s all about the brown experience.”
The game was actually about aliens who invade Earth, take over all governments, and have to be fought off by a small resistance force of elite soldiers the player recruits from various countries. Intezar thought the whole thing was a metaphor for colonization. I, on the other hand, seriously doubted the developer had been thinking about the plight of our ancestors when the game was made.
Anyway, I was a little bored of it. “Let’s see what Sohrab wants to do,” I said, because I knew he felt the same way about Zar’s XCOM obsession. “Maybe we can just play some 2K.”
“Fine,” Zar grumbled, folding his arms across his chest. “If you feel like being lectured about praying on time or something for the rest of the day, I guess.”
Sohrab was the last member of our trio. We’d all been close once, but recently he and Zar had seriously cut back on the time they spent together. This was mostly because Sohrab couldn’t help but talk about religion, and Zar didn’t want to hear anything about it.
Arguing about whether to call Sohrab ended up being a waste of time. He couldn’t hang out with us because he’d apparently decided to join some after-school Quran study group. I told Zar that he sounded sorry to be missing out, which was true, but Zar just rolled his eyes and made me play XCOM 2 after all.
The forces of humanity weren’t doing all that well when my phone rang half an hour later. It was my mom.
Not a lot of Pakistani guys could say this, but my mom was cool. She was the one who taught me to play the guitar, who secretly told me it was okay to go to a culinary school if that’s what I wanted, and who had passionately argued against my getting a minivan, suggesting a 1977 Pontiac Firebird instead. I think the name of that car spoke to her soul. She’d loved it since she’d seen it in a movie with Burt Reynolds. She’d said that Reynolds was the only man she’d leave my father for. Knowing my father, I’d have thought the list would be longer.
“Come home,” she said.
“I’m kind of in the middle of something, Mom.”
“The Akrams are here.”
“Okay. And?”
“They have a daughter. She’s your age.”
I groaned. “Mom.”
“Just come home. I know you’re probably with those nerd friends of yours, playing games on the computer, haan?”
“No.”
“Hold on.” I could hear Dad’s voice in the background. When she got back on the line, she said, “Your father says not to be a nonsense fellow and to come home right now.”
“How long do I have to listen to him call me names?”
“Probably as long as he’s alive.”
I grumbled under my breath. For someone who was usually awesome, Aisha Jilani was being a real mom right now. “How long is this thing with your friends going to take?”
“Not long. I promise.”
“Fine,” I sighed. “I’ll see you soon.”
“Excellent. And Danyal? Keep an open mind about this girl. She’s not, you know, hot, exactly, but she’s got...sex appeal.”
I made a gagging sound. Not a phrase that was okay for mothers to use.
“I’m serious,” she insisted.
“Those are the same thing,” I told her.
“No,” she said, in the manner of someone imparting an ancient wisdom. “They really aren’t.”
“Have to head out?” Intezar asked as I hung up the phone.
I told him where I was going, and he made a face. This wasn’t my first rishta meeting, where I’d be introduced to a girl because our parents hoped that we’d hit it off and ultimately decide we liked each other enough to get married. I was “on the market,” as Zar put it.
He thought arranged marriages were really old-fashioned, but they were pretty much the only option in my opinion. Muslim men and women aren’t supposed to hang out alone with each other or go on dates, which makes finding someone to marry on your own pretty hard.
And getting married is super important because, Islamically, if you’re going to have sex with a girl, you need permission from your parents. And her parents. An imam has to sanction it. And the state has to be informed, of course, and the proper paperwork has to be filled out. And you need witnesses who can swear that all the necessary parties were advised. You also need to throw a party, so everyone you know can dress up in their best clothes and come to congratulate you about the fact that you’re going to finally get fucked.
It’s the way things are done in polite, proper society.
Once you have your official papers in order, what was once forbidden becomes legal. It’s like getting your driver’s license, except going to the DMV is a lot less frustrating than going through the arranged marriage process.
“We’re way too young, dude. Your parents are crazy. No disrespect.”
I really was pretty young for the market, but my parents were looking because, as they told me, they feared my personal charms and extraordinarily poor judgment would lead me into sin.
Anyway, getting an arranged marriage didn’t bother me. What did bother me was that even though I’d dropped a ton of hints about Kaval, my mother had completely ignored them. I was going to have to just spell it out for her soon, so we could stop with these pointless rishta meetings.
Because no matter how great the girl I was meeting now ended up being, she’d still be a distant star next to the shining moon that was Kaval Sabsvari.
CHAPTER TWO
The Akrams—was I supposed to know these people?— were seated in the formal living room of my parents’ deceptively nice house when I snuck in. Mom and Dad had bought it with the only serious money they’d ever had, my father’s inheritance, and were lucky that they’d made the purchase just before houses in the Bay Area got crazy expensive.
So now my parents were house rich. Their home was all they really had in the world, which was fine. It wasn’t like we were living in the earthquake capital of the world or anything.
The house was their fortune and their misfortune. It made people expect that they would live lavish lives, hosting and attending parties, driving cars that cost more than they could make in a year. I don’t know why my parents cared about what “society” thought of them, but they did, at least enough that it made their finances really tight.
It would have given them hope, I think, to imagine that there was help coming from their son, that he could grow up to be a doctor or lawyer or engineer, capable of making the facade of their lives real.
I think they’d gotten to know me well enough, however, to realize they shouldn’t dream such dreams.
The slightly sweet smell of saffron-infused chicken biryani that lingered in the air distracted me from the guests and lured me into the kitchen. Given the pile of plates stacked in the sink, it was obvious that everyone else had already eaten.
Grabbing a spoon, I took a bite straight from the pot and let out a happy sigh. The basmati rice was perfect, each grain separate from the others. It was somewhere between spicy and mild, and the baked chicken wasn’t dry. Mom had the proportions of her dum biryani down to a science.