Asghar and Zahra

by Sameer Rahim

Genres: Marriage & Divorce; Literary Fiction; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

LONGLISTED FOR THE DESMOND ELLIOTT PRIZE Childhood friends Asghar and Zahra were born into the same British Muslim community in west London. But they grow up into very different people. Asghar is a shy boy nervous of stepping outside his family's comfort zone, while Zahra is an ambitious woman who has just finished her degree at Cambridge. The novel opens on their wedding day as friends and family wonder what could possibly have brought this odd couple together. After a comically disastrous honeymoon, painful secrets from the past throw the relationship further off-balance. And then there's the sinister preacher taking a keen interest in them . . . A funny, sympathetic and very human novel about the first year of a marriage, and the difficulties of reconciling the sometimes conflicting demands of family, religion and society, Asghar and Zahra is the debut of a striking new talent.

Release date: June 13, 2019

Publisher: John Murray Press

Print pages: 304

Sample

Asghar swayed happily on his garden swing in a cream-and-gold frock coat, gently sweating in the warm sun. His wedding clothes fitted perfectly, apart from the tight red shoes curling at the toes. He twirled his wrist to check the time on his chunky, loose-fitting silver watch – a present from Zahra’s father. The rest of the family were taking ages. His sister Fatima claimed to have religious objections to layered make-up and fancy hairstyles; but she had still spent forever in the shower, leaving him only lukewarm water. After his mother took twenty minutes compacting his father’s hair with hairspray – making the hazy corridor impassable – she needed an hour to make herself beautiful. On her son’s wedding day, helped by a hairdresser from the community, that hour naturally became two.

Asghar didn’t really mind waiting. Even as a boy, he had many times sat patiently for his family on the same garden swing – a three-seater with faded yellow cushions and rusted springs – playing his Game Boy or, more recently, messing around with his mobile phone. Slowing down, he pushed the swing back again and, as the clouds passed, he watched the garden’s well-tended sunflowers burst into bright halo and back into shadow. Checking his phone, he saw that Zahra hadn’t sent any more messages. He hoped he had said the right thing about that sari-top; the last thing he wanted was to put her under any pressure.

On his lap was a tatty red booklet entitled The Making of an Islamic Marriage. Two days earlier his best man – an older cousin he hardly knew – had awkwardly thrust it into his hands, before telling him to send any queries via email. Asghar had accepted this infamous work with proper awe. At Sunday madressa, he had heard rumours that it described in unblushing detail the true path to satisfying marital sex. Once someone had claimed to have seen it tucked in the jurisprudence section of the madressa’s mobile library; another said that a liberal-minded teacher had read his class extracts. But neither report had ever been confirmed. Over the years, the booklet had gained an aura of erotic secrecy – like a sharia-compliant Kama Sutra, which would be solemnly revealed only on the eve of marriage.

When Asghar finally got his hands on the booklet, though, he found it disappointingly tame. Written by a Pakistani mullah and printed in Birmingham in the early 1990s, it was mostly a rundown of the prayers to be performed on the wedding night, with only a few bald pages on the mechanics of human intercourse. The diagrams seemed to have been cribbed from the same biology textbook he knew from school. And its language was euphemistic to the point of obscurity (there was much talk of ‘tillage’ and ‘cultivation’). Still, Asghar tried to remain cheerful. He was aware, roughly speaking, of what needed to be done that night and assumed – or at least hoped – that once everything got going, instinct would take over. As family legend had it, back in old Zanzibar days, his uncle had been so horrified by what his wife had suggested on their wedding night that he had run to the balcony and threatened to commit suicide. But the couple had been married for thirty-three years and had two children – one of whom was now Asghar’s best man – so clearly they had worked things out in the end.

It was a typically variable English spring morning. The sun disappeared and the sky turned a cool metallic grey. Asghar watched as the scrappy clouds absorbed the sun’s rays. Before getting engaged he had felt a bit like one of those clouds – floating unremarked until caught by Zahra’s brightness. Now, though, he walked round the new mosque with a masculine strut, while the boys who had once bullied or ignored him rushed to offer their congratulations. At the miraculous age of nineteen, Asghar had ensnared the most beautiful and charismatic girl in the community. The girl he had first seen as a little boy at the rickety old mosque, upstairs, escaping the tense vote on whether to move to Manor Grove. He recalled peering round the door and spotting Zahra sitting on the crèche floor as she removed her hijab. She had fiddled with her pins and clips and then used her fingers to comb her long, curly, reddish-brown hair – before she tossed it back in slow waves.

That Zahra was three years older than him only added to the delicious scandal. How had he managed it, everyone wondered? Some suggested it was a political match between his father and Zahra’s – the respective leaders of the new mosque and the old. Perhaps their engagement presaged a reunion of the divided community? Asghar informed them that neither family had anything to do with arranging the marriage. It was, he told them shyly, a love match.

Asking for Zahra’s hand had been the boldest move of his life. When the risk came off, it changed the way the world looked at him, and the way he looked at the world. His teenage melancholy disappeared so fast he could barely remember what it meant to be unhappy. The short time between getting back in contact that autumn and the engagement – just two dates – made it all the more stunning. It was as though he had aced an exam without studying, or won a marathon with only a day’s training.

‘You never thought I’d be the first to get married, did you?’

A few suburban streets away, Zahra was chatting on the phone to Andrea. She checked her sharply manicured nails while she listened to her friend’s reply.

‘Marrying out? That’s all a bit pre-9/11,’ she continued, doing her best to sound insouciant.

Andrea, she knew, wasn’t happy that Zahra was marrying someone to whom she had never been introduced – and therefore was unable to pass judgment. Zahra checked herself in the mirror. She had to admit that the hairdresser had done a good job – but only after being forced to listen to her precise instructions.

‘Yes, we must. We will. You’ll like him, I’m sure. Just a second, I can hear Mum coming. Probably wants to perfume my knickers or something. Must go, darling.’ She put down the phone.

Her mother knocked gently before entering. Zahra overheard two cousins in the corridor arguing over a hair straightener. Some brides crave quiet but she enjoyed the chaos her wedding was stirring. Through the week, she had welcomed a host of East African and Canadian cousins, who all seemed hyperactively excited by her ‘love match’. They had demanded every last detail. Who was he? Where did they meet? How did he propose? She had the story honed to a few dramatic lines that provoked the right amount of ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ but also left it tantalisingly incomplete.

‘I’ve given it more oud,’ said Mrs Amir, hanging up the cream sari on the wardrobe. Zahra coughed. ‘It needed to be smoked a bit longer,’ said her mother defensively, ‘or the smell doesn’t come through.’ She surveyed Zahra with satisfaction. ‘And now it’s your turn,’ she said.

The previous evening Zahra had sat before the oud burner without complaint, letting it smoke her hair, but she knew something more thorough was planned for this morning. Asghar’s mother had dropped round a basket of strong-smelling oils and unguents for Mrs Amir to rub on her daughter before the wedding night. This was traditional, apparently, though Zahra had never heard about it from any of her married cousins. ‘I was rubbed down by my mother,’ Mrs Amir claimed, ‘and she was rubbed down by hers. All from oils sent by your grandmother.’

Zahra said she would have nothing to do with this perfuming business. ‘It’s textbook orientalism, Mummy.’

‘It’s not oriental, it’s Indian,’ said Mrs Amir.

‘It’s the kind of thing they think we would do. Like white men painting brown women.’

‘No white men will be painting you: I will be rubbing you with the oils.’

‘It’s not religious,’ said Zahra, trying a different tack. ‘It’s cultural. They’re two different things.’

‘Not for us they’re not,’ she said, sorting through the basket of oils.

‘And anyway,’ Zahra added, giving it another push, ‘you’re always saying we should be more modern.’

‘It is a bit old-fashioned,’ admitted her mother before turning her irritation towards the groom’s family. ‘But what do you expect from such people?’ She shook her head. ‘The Dhalanis were the most traditional of the traditional, even in East Africa.’

‘That’s what I mean, Mummy, we can’t let them push us around.’

‘I suppose they’ll never know,’ Mrs Amir replied, as though contemplating retreat. ‘But,’ she continued, swerving to mother-knows-best mode, ‘it’ll make things easier on the wedding night if you smell nice – you know what I mean?’

‘I do know, but I really wish I didn’t.’

Zahra stood up to give her mother a hug and a kiss. ‘Why don’t you go and have your make-up done, and I’ll rub these on myself. I promise.’ Her mother headed off, grateful for the compromise, leaving Zahra with the brown and white tubs. She opened up and sniffed each one. Then she stepped back and surveyed her childhood bedroom for the last time. On the dressing table was a cherished photo of her as a little girl, sweetly beaming for her father’s camera, her thick hair curled in glossy bunches. Pinned to the wall was a poster of Millais’s lazily drowning Ophelia she had bought in Cambridge. Next to the tatty economics textbook was a popular biography of the Prophet and an English translation of the Quran – books she rarely opened. Her mother had told her she would happily keep her room intact and her belongings secure even after she had moved out, but Zahra wanted everything – the red armchair, the large mirror, the Millais poster, the Moroccan side table – taken to her new house in Kilburn. There would be enough space, she had insisted, and Asghar wouldn’t mind. She smiled to herself. Just one more day and she would be mistress of her own home.

Her mother came back in complaining that her brother’s wife – a middle-aged Englishwoman from Exeter – was hogging the make-up girl. ‘Let’s get you dressed,’ she said. After smoothing down the cream sari, Mrs Amir stood behind her daughter and tickled her neck. Zahra giggled when she saw her mother’s mischievous face in the mirror. Her own features were slightly misshapen: narrow and jagged with an aquiline nose. But she had a fairish complexion, almost Kashmiri her grandmother told her, that became even fairer when she dusted it with foundation – covering up the red blotches left over from her teenage years. Her mother told her she was beautiful and, though Zahra insisted she didn’t agree, she knew that boys found her attractive. She could have picked any of the community’s prime bachelors: the heir to a clarified-butter fortune who had entertained her at a wedding reception with import-export tales of woe; the budding cricketer with powerful shoulders who invited her and her younger brother Mohsen to watch him play for Middlesex’s second eleven; the Iraqi maulana’s son dressed stylishly in black jeans and black shirt, whom she liked to distract with a flirty smile whenever he walked past her outside the old mosque. Before going to Cambridge, she had chatted to her mother about all three. They had agreed she should go to university first and settle into a job before getting engaged.

This was almost exactly as things had turned out. Except that rather than her mother nudging Maryam Auntie, the community matchmaker, into arranging meetings with an eligible family, a few short months after graduating Zahra had defiantly announced to her father that she had got engaged to Asghar Dhalani, a boy who seemed to have nothing special or appealing about him at all. When he heard the news, Mohsen was aghast: Asghar was that sad sack who was always bullied at madressa. Her mother worried that the Dhalanis came from a rough Zanzibarian family, in contrast to her husband’s refined upbringing on the banks of Lake Victoria in Uganda. For his part, Dr Amir was terribly disappointed that his favourite child, as he always whispered to her that she was, had betrayed him so badly. The Dhalanis were the Amirs’ arch rivals. During the great community schism ten years earlier, Asghar’s father had founded the new mosque at Manor Grove, while Dr Amir had stayed on with the old mosque – and the bitterness still lingered.

It wasn’t just Zahra’s family who were worried. Andrea told her straight-up that she was on the rebound, and that Asghar didn’t sound right for her at all. But Zahra had ignored everyone; in fact, she had relished the astonishment she had caused. Only now, on her wedding day, with the reality of married life stretching before her, had the anxious tremors truly begun.

‘How are you feeling?’ asked Mrs Amir.

‘Never better. I don’t really have to do anything today; it’ll all be done for me.’

‘I’ve laid out both sari-tops for you: the covered-up one and the less covered-up one,’ she replied cautiously. ‘It’s your choice which one to wear.’

Traditionally, the groom’s family chose the bride’s clothes, though nowadays there was more leeway. Zahra had gone to the dressmaker, picked the material, suggested the cut and sent the bill to Asghar’s mother. All had seemed fine until a week earlier when Mrs Dhalani called Mrs Amir. Asghar’s mother had visited the dressmaker to check on her own wedding clothes, and while she was there she couldn’t help enquiring about Zahra’s sari. The dressmaker showed her the page Zahra had marked in Indian Bride. Mrs Dhalani thought it was far too exposing of the back and shoulders: she had conservative relatives from Dar-es-salaam to consider. On the phone, with Zahra hovering in the background trying to listen in, Mrs Amir protested that Zahra’s choice was fashionable, adding in frank Gujarati that her son would definitely appreciate how beautiful his wife looked, especially on the wedding night.

Zahra mimed puking with two fingers.

Yet Mrs Dhalani was unmoved. Zahra saw her mother’s face crease in frustration as the phone’s corkscrew curls bobbed against the fridge. In the end, they deferred the decision and ordered two sari-tops: one naked round the shoulders and one demurely covered up.

‘I think I’ll go for the longer one,’ said Zahra, going over to the bed, where they lay spread out like lifeless puppets. ‘The bay windows at the new mosque are so draughty. And if you’re going to go traditional, then why not go the whole way?’

‘I thought you wanted to wear the short one!’ her mother said in surprise. ‘Your father wouldn’t mind you wearing anything you wanted, you know that.’

‘Oh I know he would prefer it. It would show off how terribly modern his family is.’

‘He would,’ said Mrs Amir putting a hand on her daughter’s cheek. ‘He would have loved to see the nikah ceremony. But you know how stubborn he can be.’

Her voice had the breathless, pleading tone Zahra knew well.

‘Don’t worry, Mummyji,’ she said, striving for a gracious tone. ‘I understand. Dad said he’d never set foot in the new mosque – even for his daughter’s wedding. That’s his right.’

‘Come,’ said Mrs Amir, bustling her daughter back towards the mirror, ‘let’s get you ready.’ She noticed the unscooped oil tubs but decided not to say anything; instead she opened a box filled with gleaming silver pins.

Zahra stood up and faced her mother. ‘Dad always says how bad Asghar’s family is – how Mr Dhalani took his rightful place as mosque leader. Like he was Abu Bakr, and Dad was Imam Ali. That’s really hurtful to Asghar.’

‘You haven’t told him he says that?’

‘He picks up the vibe. Dad’s always squeezing Asghar’s shoulders, tapping him on the chin, throwing pretend punches.’

‘He’s known him since he was a baby. He can’t see him as a grown-up.’

‘How do you think that makes me feel?’

‘Your father agreed in the end, didn’t he?’ She started sorting through the lipsticks lined up like little rockets on the dressing-table. ‘Let him have his head; let him enjoy teasing Asghar. Men need to feel like they’ve won, even when they’ve lost.’

‘Not exactly my style,’ murmured Zahra.

‘Husbands are simple creatures,’ she said, a pin in her mouth. ‘A nice cooked meal in the evening, and always tell them they’re taller than they are.’

A cousin burst in dramatically. Auntie was needed now – the make-up girl had dropped nail polish on the carpet. Mrs Amir bustled out of the room quickly, telling Zahra she needed to decide which sari-top to wear. Just then her phone buzzed. It was Asghar texting a good luck message with a smiley face. He sent a picture of the sunflowers from his garden. She replied telling him to wait a second. Pulling off her green T-shirt, she tried on the more revealing sari-top. The material was stiff and the hooks at the back tough to cleanly connect. She photographed herself in front of the mirror, before doing the same with the long sari-top, sending Asghar both images and asking which he preferred. She felt a thrill sending him vaguely revealing pictures. Waiting for his response, she texted again: Why don’t I tell you which one is easier to undo? xxx

Sitting on his swing, Asghar responded: They both look v pretty.

New message: Your choice.

Zahra slumped in her armchair. Asghar’s declarations of undying love were courtly and chaste, which was lovely and romantic – up to a point. That point, she thought, had surely been reached on their wedding day. She was disturbed by an unruly memory of Krish’s warm hands on her leg. Putting the phone away, she walked round the room to clear her head. That boy had had no respect for her boundaries; he had treated her like his property. The man about to become her husband, though, would wait until they had bound themselves in the eyes of Allah before giving her everything he had – body and soul.

Zahra arrived at the new mosque in a cream sari brocaded with a hundred tiny mirrors. The long top she had chosen covered her arms and shoulders thoroughly. Her hands were painted with dark branches of henna and her entire body smelled sweetly of oud. She felt as though she were performing in a television show she had seen many times, but one which she had never imagined she would be starring in – making the same moves as a thousand brides before her. She had always told her mother that when she got married everything would be different. And indeed she had charmed her way into getting the bridal train to wear matching blue and gold outfits – not the garish designs suggested by Asghar’s mother. (His pious little sister Fatima, who had insisted on wearing a full black abaya and black scarf over her bridesmaid’s dress, was looking awkward and hot.) But she hadn’t had it all her own way. Mrs Dhalani was upset at Zahra’s suggestion that she wear her grandmother’s red wedding sari. Western white was the appropriate colour these days – red was far too Hindu. Her wish to be driven to the mosque in a horse-drawn carriage was stymied by both the mosque sub-committee for marriages and deaths – which was worried about the hygiene implications – and by Asghar’s father, who had insisted on picking her up in his dented Mercedes.

Her most daring challenge to convention had what she believed was the best religious grounding. Rather than have a male representative speak her marriage vows for her, she wanted to recite them for herself. However, this would entail her voice being broadcast from the women’s section into the men’s – something the new mosque had never entertained. In an email sent to the sub-committee, she cited the example of the Prophet’s wife Lady Khadija, a wealthy businesswoman who had married her younger employee on her own terms. ‘Was she ever silenced?’ she asked pointedly. She received no reply. After three days she emailed again. Eventually, Maulana Haider responded that although it was religiously acceptable for her to recite her own marriage contract (as long as her Arabic was perfect), it was wrong for a woman’s voice to be so brazenly broadcast to the men. It would be improperly distracting. She shot back asking for textual evidence. Where was it written that it was fine for a man’s voice, like his own, to be heard by women but not for a woman’s to be heard by a man? Weren’t both sexes liable to the same distractions? In a spirit of compromise, she added that she would be happy to recite without having her voice broadcast into the men’s section – the women on her side could be witnesses. But the mosque still refused. She complained to Asghar about the unfairness of it all, threatening to move the wedding to the old mosque, where they were more relaxed about such matters.

‘But sweetheart, you know the problem with the old mosque. We agreed it wasn’t big enough.’

‘Why don’t you ask your dad? He’s meant to be the president.’

‘Dad said it wasn’t his decision,’ he said. ‘It’s for the maulana to decide. It’s okay. When Faisal Uncle is reciting your vows, I’ll imagine in my head that I’m hearing your voice.’

The thought of Faisal Uncle – an elderly man with a high-pitched voice and betel nuts permanently lodged between his teeth – channelling her voice was not especially appealing.

‘Darling,’ he continued quickly, nervous of her silence, ‘why don’t we say the vows ourselves later, in the hotel? We can practise them together?’ He took Zahra’s hand and kissed it. ‘You’re better at reading Arabic than I am,’ he said, his eyes brimming at the thought of her unhappiness.

She kissed his hand back, pleased that, even if she hadn’t got her own way, he had acknowledged the injustice.

Stepping out of the Mercedes, Zahra’s sari train was rescued from the dusty white gravel by a parade of flapping aunties. They were quickly shooed away by the older married cousin who had been assigned to take care of her. Zahra had wanted someone she knew better as her maid-of-honour – had they not fallen out, it would have been Andrea – instead of this woman from Minnesota she barely knew. Once again, though, she had been overruled by her mother who insisted that she needed someone who could tell her where to sit and when to stand on her big day. Zahra smiled broadly for the video camera that was catching her every step and gesture – grateful, at this point, for the Minnesotan’s advice to kick out her feet to avoid tripping over her heavily embroidered sari.

Walking slowly across the courtyard, Zahra looked round the new mosque curiously. When Asghar’s family had founded the place, they had taken more than half the community with them; but her own family had stayed resolutely loyal to the old hall. On the few occasions she had been here for weddings or funerals, she had been struck by its strange hybrid nature. The new mosque’s website said that Manor Grove had been built by a minor Georgian earl, and been put on the market by his last female descendant, who couldn’t afford the inheritance bill after the last earl – Octavian Michael – had passed away. The large estate overlooked a pleasant spread of fields and farm cottages; in . . .