The Writing on My Forehead by Nafisa Haji

Author:Nafisa Haji [Haji, Nafisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: en
ISBN: 9780061493867
Amazon: 0061493864
Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
Published: 2010-03-01T16:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

I CAME HOME FROM that summer in Karachi and London—head swimming with the voices of a reconstructed past, full of a self-importance I couldn’t wait to share—only to find that my family had been busy arranging the future in my absence. Ameena’s future, at any rate.

At the airport, after a quick hug, my mother began, “Your sister is engaged! To a doctor! He’s an Indian boy, finishing up his residency in San Francisco. From a very good family in Bombay. We are so excited! We didn’t want to tell you the good news on the phone. So we decided to wait and surprise you. Isn’t it wonderful? It will be a long engagement, of course. Your sister is still very young. Two years at least—though I suppose it all depends on how long we can keep them apart, eh Ameena? Well, Saira, aren’t you going to congratulate your sister?” Mummy was breathless from excitement. I was breathless from shock, looking from one dearly missed face to another for some sign that my mother had developed a rather disconcerting sense of humor in my absence. There was none.

Ameena wouldn’t meet my eyes. But her fair skin was suffused with a flush of pink that I took to mean only one of two things: she was either embarrassed, or she had a fever. I touched her forehead, when she leaned forward for a hug, and drew the obvious conclusion on finding it cool and dry. My father just grinned, punctuating my mother’s continuing monologue with an occasional nod of pride and pleasure.

“It happened only three weeks ago, just after you left town. Can you imagine? Three weeks ago, when we came to drop you at the airport, we didn’t even know the boy…and now? Now, we have a new son-in-law…a new son. Ameena has a fiancé! Don’t worry, Saira. I know you must be dying to meet him. He is coming tonight, flying in from San Francisco for the weekend. In fact, he comes every weekend that he can and stays with his aunt who lives in Diamond Bar. Though he spends the whole of the weekend at our house. His poor aunt—you know her, Saira, she is Nilofer Auntie, she’s the one who introduced Shuja to us—she complains that she hardly sees him when he comes. Of course, it is not her that he is coming to see, is it, Ameena? He’s been waiting for you to come home, Saira, is dying to take Ameena out. But I told him they had to wait for you to come back. So that you could play chaperone. Won’t that be fun? You’ll get to eat with them at all the fancy restaurants he wants to take Ameena to, lucky girl. And movies, too. Though I told him, G-rated movies only. I don’t want him to be getting ideas. Ameena is a very good girl, aren’t you, Ameena? And Shuja will only love you all the more because of it.

“Doesn’t your sister look beautiful, Saira? She’s lost some weight, I think.

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