“Poetry is different. Food isn’t art, woman. Besides, there are lots of respectable poets.”
“Like who?”
Before Dad could launch into a long history of the Urdu poets of Lucknow, the city in India where my paternal ancestors lived before 1947, I said, “She was fine.”
My father glowered in my direction. “What?”
“He’s answering my question. About the girl,” Mom explained. “So, Danyal, did she seem interested in you?”
“If she is interested in him,” my father interrupted, “we shouldn’t be interested in her. No woman with good judgment would...” He leaned forward in his chair, then said, “Wait. Aisha, how did you say you came to meet these people?”
Aisha Jilani, who somehow knew everybody, outlined for her husband a complicated chain of friends and acquaintances, none of whom I recognized.
“And how well do all of these people really know the Akrams?”
“What are you trying to say, Ahmed?”
“I’m saying that there is something strange in this daal. Why would they be interested in this one?” He pointed to me. “We should look into it.”
“Or,” I suggested, “we could just not eat the daal. We could get something else entirely.”
I thought that was a perfectly reasonable comment, but it still drew another grunt from my father. It was an “are you sure this idiot is my child, woman, because I’d rather have been cuckolded than believe my blood flows in this fool’s veins” grunt. I’d heard it a lot.
Mom just ignored me. “You never give our son—”
“Your son.”
“Uff. Fine. You never give my son enough credit. Look how handsome he is.”
“Yes. He’s lucky he got my looks.”
“My son,” my mother said, “my looks. The point is that he may not be all that well qualified, or that intelligent, and he probably doesn’t have a very good future—”
“Hey!”
She waved off my objection without even looking at me. “But he’ll make lovely babies. Think of it like an old- school arrangement. When our elders got married, they looked at the boy’s education and the girl’s looks only. Just think of Danyal like that. Like an eighteenth-century girl from a remote Indian village. Then it all makes sense.”
Ahmed Jilani gave his “you make a decent point but I’m not convinced” grunt, which was the closest he’d probably ever come to admitting anyone else might be right. “Those women had skills. They managed their homes, raised families. Will this one do that? He’s just a pretty face.”
“I’m more than just—”
“Anyway,” my father went on, “I still think their interest in Danyal is strange.”
“Okay, fine, baba, I’ll ask around some more.” My mother masterfully switched over to a placating tone all of a sudden. It was what she did when she realized that reasoning with her husband would get her nowhere. It was something she’d gotten a lot of practice at over the years. “I’m sure people know them. We’ll get plenty of references.”
I grimaced. The last thing Bisma Akram needed was a bunch of desi aunties prying into her life. Someone, somewhere, would have a relative who knew the Akrams before they moved here, and that someone would know a friend, who would know a brother-in-law who’d once mentioned an Akram Sahib’s daughter who made erotic videos and posted them online. By the time Bisma’s story reached my mother, it would be exaggerated all to hell, and it’d spread like wildfire, burning her reputation down in California too.
“No,” I said. “Don’t do that.”
Now it was my mother who frowned at me. “And why not?”
“Bisma seems like a nice girl and everything, but I don’t think it’s going to work.”
“Allahu Akbar.” My father threw his hands up in the air. “Of course it won’t work. Because you have an allergy to work, don’t you? This won’t work. That won’t work. She won’t work. The only thing you’re good for is wasting my money and eating my food, isn’t it? Bloody idiot. Get married to a qualified girl now, so you can live off your woman’s earnings like a shameless—”
“Ahmed!”
“No, Aisha, let me give him a dose of truth, okay? How long are we going to live, haan? When we’re gone, he’ll be cooking in a crappy diner somewhere. Or maybe he’ll be homeless, playing music at the side of the road, guitar case open, begging for scraps. He’ll see then if the Akrams even deign to look at him.”
So...pretty harsh. Not the worst I’d gotten from my father, though. Since I’d first told him I wanted to one day open my own restaurant, this kind of blowup had been happening a lot. When he finally stopped speaking, his face red from the exertion of his words, I gave him a small smile, the most I could manage, and said, “Are you done?”
My father snarled and slapped his hands against his thighs before getting up and stalking out of the room. I sat there with my mother in silence for some time.
Finally, she said, “Danyal?”
“It’s fine, Mom.”
“He loves you, jaan, and he worries about you—”
“I said it’s fine.”
Aisha Jilani sighed and came to sit next to me on the sofa. Her autobiography would probably be titled I’m Here to Make Sure You’re Okay. She ran a hand over my hair. “You’re sure I shouldn’t ask around about this Bisma girl? You didn’t like her?”
“I liked her fine, Mom. It’s just...”
“It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me why. Just tell me you’re not saying no to Bisma because of Sohrab’s sister, that Kaval. Just tell me this isn’t about her.”
I smiled at the gentle way my mother spoke, like I was a fragile thing right now. “Her I really like.”
“I know.” My mother chuckled. “I think everyone knows.”
“So why don’t you talk to her parents?”
“Because I also know what they’re going to say.”
That stung a little. Maybe even more than a little. “You agree with Dad, then? That I’m worthless?”
“No, beta, but...” She let out a weary sigh. “For you to have any chance, Kaval would have to fight for you. I’ve seen that girl grow up. And I can tell you that she won’t do it.”
“You’ve never really been that crazy about her.”
“You’ve always been crazy enough about her for the both of us,” she joked. When I didn’t respond, she said, “Have you asked her if she loves you?”
I gave her a cheeky grin. “Everybody loves me.”
“This is true. I’ll tell you what...if Kaval says that she is interested in you, that she’ll stand against her parents’ objections, then I’ll go over to their house myself and beg for her hand.”
“Really?”
She nodded. “Yes. Trust me.”
Something about the way my mom said this gave me pause. I’d heard that tone of voice before. On TV. On the news. My mother was making me a politician’s promise. One she didn’t expect to have to keep.