The Groom to Have Been by Saher Alam

Author:Saher Alam [Alam, Saher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

The night of Jameela’s engagement party, Nasr worked late and went out with friends to a very different kind of celebration in Williamsburg—a belated Halloween party at the loft of a friend of Pete’s where there would be separate prizes for the skimpiest and the scariest costume. Among the usual ghouls and fanged Draculas were a guy roaming with a noose around his neck calling himself Hanging Chad, women who looked as if they’d simply stripped down to their underwear (“I’m Miss Ohio,” a busty brunette in a red bra said to Pete by way of introduction), and a number of men in street clothes wearing fake mustaches and beards with checkered handkerchiefs over their heads. One member of the group had a red-and-white bull’s eye taped to his back with a note: “Kill me now.”

Nasr hesitated over his first drink. The beer bottle felt like a prop, part of a bizarre costume of the Muslim guy who wanted to pass, especially when he joined in the drinking jokes with a few comments himself about longing for the days when he could drink himself silly. He said this enough times, though, that a kind of nostalgia took hold, and by his third beer he was anticipating the buzz, if not quite savoring it yet. Wouldn’t this be one of his last nights of freedom, of doing what he wanted? Well, no—maybe not. But didn’t he deserve this? Why should he care what the Ansaris would think? They would never know. And why should he care that Jameela and Javaid’s engagement was being treated as a love marriage—with all the investigating gossip focused on how those two rascals managed to hide their blooming feelings? Jameela and Javaid, Nasr decided, deserved each other. They were both impetuous, disagreeable, prone to arguing for argument’s sake—and, as far as he was concerned, they could spend their love marriage talking each other to death.

He left the party early, just before two. There was no moon on the walk back to the subway, no clouds—just a deeply empty sky at the base of which the city lights shone and winked out from the black lines of buildings like the final embers under a pile of logs. He hardly remembered the subway ride that followed, or the short walk to his building, or even the elevator up to his carpeted hallway—only the pillow that seemed to materialize finally under his ear, the cool stealing softness on which the dreams began.

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