If she could not find plastic bags to tie around her wrists and wrap over her palms, she would have to sleep with her hands dangling off the bed, avoiding the duvet cover at all costs, and that would mean a night of fretful sleep, inevitable smudges of brown paste on the lilac sheets and a missed alarm.
Usually there were bunches of white bags stuffed beneath the sink, jammed between the U-shaped outlet pipe and the bottles of bleach and Windex and piles of soggy sponges. Sainsbury’s, Asda, Holland & Barrett. The long, hollow plastic bag dispenser hooked onto the back of the cupboard door was also empty. The world was conspiring against her by withholding its usual abundance of flimsy plastic.
“Forget this,” Layla said, slamming the cupboard doors shut. She would forgo the henna and get married with bare hands.
Minced chicken meat lay on top of a white plastic chopping board on the kitchen counter ready to be soaked and rinsed in cold water. Next to it, two henna cones wrapped in gold and green shiny foil sat with sewing needles stuck into their narrow ends, holding open the holes.
Layla swiped the cones off the counter and dropped them into a loop of fabric made from her long, black hijab, the one she used for saying prayers, and let the cones bounce in the space between her breasts as she hopped the stairs up to her bedroom.
She opened the top drawer of her dresser, unfolded the polyester and dropped the henna between a pile of Arabic prayer books and a pile of Japanese comics. Then she yanked off the hijab and lay it over the pile so that only the prayer books were on show.
In nine hours and fifteen minutes her cell phone would buzz and she would scramble to tame her frizzy hair, free the fake Louis Vuitton duffel that was jammed beneath her bed and catch the train from Liverpool Street station to Cambridge.
The house would be empty then. Her brothers at the mosque saying their pre-dawn prayers, her mother at work in the Sikh man’s factory where she cut the outline of baby’s bodies into terry cloth.
This evening, her three brothers were out eating fish and chips in Leytonstone, enjoying the easy freedom of young men with beards short enough to qualify as both hipster and halal. Her mother had walked the dozen steps to the house next door where she was borrowing an onion and a pinch of mustard seeds from Layla’s aunt. She could see the outlines of the two women’s bodies through her bedroom window as they stood in the back entrance of the house. Her mother outlined in orange light, her aunt wrapped in a bathrobe pushing a mug of hot milk towards her sister’s chest.
“No, no, I need to finish the onions now,” her mother would be saying. “Just drink this, bhen,” her aunt would respond. “It’s got ground chestnuts in it. It’s good for your joints.”
The back and forth wore Layla out. “Just drink the damn milk,” she muttered, drawing the cream and lilac curtains across the window.
No one would eat chicken burgers this late but her mother cooked religiously preparing dinner as soon as she got home from work which was well after the sunset prayer. By the time the chicken burgers were ready, Layla’s brothers would be back home, jostling for space in the small kitchen, reaching for root beer and leftover gulab jambun in the fridge. Her mother would chide them, humoring their round bellies and endless appetites, while wrapping cling film over a plate of cold burgers.
Layla rarely helped out in the kitchen these days. An understanding had been reached, since she had returned home after graduation, that she was an educated woman who didn’t bother with things like taking meat out of the freezer or slicing white onions.
It was the English way, her mother sighed, dumping a sack of pale flesh into a metal bowl. Girls get educated and think they are women. Meanwhile, they can’t keep a man because they can’t feed him.
“Excuse you?” Layla had snorted. “You think these guys ever eat at home anyway?” She turned away from her mother standing at the sink and walked out of the kitchen before another fight erupted.
The short, tense stay at home was necessary because she didn’t want to spend her savings on renting a flat in Cambridge between the end of undergrad and the start of her Ph.D. Her offer to study social network analysis to predict the recruitment of British Muslims into political movements came with free housing at Jesus College, but Layla wouldn’t get the key until August and she had graduated from Trinity in May.
The wedding could not wait. Ayna had said true love should never be delayed, and on her Christmas travels to Dubai, where she stayed during the academic holidays with her family, she had found the perfect pale pink wedding dress.
“Just do the nikaah and the registry office bit in the summer, yeah babes?” Ayna had said a few weeks before graduation when they sat nursing iced lattes on The Backs watching tipsy undergrads wobble their punts along the River Cam.
“And then we’ll do a proper big glam wedding later on when we got more time.” Ayna reached under her dusky pink hijab which she wore in the style of the Emirati girls, a thick bun angled high on her head lending her hijab the shape of a fabric crown, elevating the angle of her slender cheekbones.
She fiddled beneath the fabric and let loose three dark brown curls so that they framed her heart shaped face. “Are my lashes still cool?” she said, bouncing the tip of her index finger against her thick eyelashes and creeping closer to Layla’s face. “I’m trying out this new glue.”
“You look pretty as always,” Layla said. “You’re a peng ting, even at the end of exam term.”
“You’re just saying that cuz you want some of this, innit!” Ayna howled while patting the zipper on her jeans.
“Pat your pum pum, gyal, pat your pum pum!” they both erupted into song on the sloping grass bank with Trinity College a silent witness behind them.
Layla wondered if they had fallen in love to prove a point. Everyone at Trinity and Magdalene knew about them, from the porters in the lodge, to their directors of study, to the Polish bedders who knocked on the door when she and Ayna were sucking the morning breath out of each other’s mouths.
In her romantic dealings with men, Layla had been discreet. What was there to share anyway? But with Ayna her lover, she took great pride in knowing that the white people at the university were being educated in the many flavors of brown love.
“I wouldn’t say I’m bisexual,” Layla would say to the porter while ripping open her Amazon package in the plodge. “Cuz think about it, Keith. That implies a gender binary and really, gender is a social construct that exists on a broad spectrum. I’d say I’m non-heteronormative, prefer the term queer and I would definitely date a trans person. Ok, I’ll see you later!”
“You could just tell everyone my kisses are the bomb and you would rather be straight because it is easier but you can’t resist me,” Ayna whispered, on her way to supervision, having caught the tail end of Layla’s non-binary non-heteronormative spiel.
“Audre Lorde said the personal is political, Ayna. Anyway, I got to educate these fools. They think we all have arranged marriages and are subservient to hairy, ugly men.”
Layla’s marriage had been arranged three times. First to a medical student at Leicester University, then to an engineer at University College London. The third studied PPE at Oxford. Each time, she told her aunts and east London’s network of marriage planners, that being a married woman would distract from her graduate studies.
“Aunty, let me do my Ph.D. and then we talk husbands,” she would say.
“But these are nice boys and now girls get married while they study!” the aunts would respond.
“It’s just that my Ph.D. is on a topic of really important national security so you don’t want me to be distracted,” Layla would whisper, all the while imagining the Aveda body lotion that Layla smothered on herself at night and the way the scent lingered between her thighs in the morning.
“How you gonna explain getting married now, before your Ph.D.?” Ayna asked when she heard about Layla’s marriage delay tactics. Layla hadn’t planned on telling those women she was in love with a woman. There would be weeks of prayer circles, dedicated fasting and for Layla’s mother, a possible trip to Mecca to right her daughter’s wrongs.
“It would majorly stress them out,” she said. “They’re not progressive like your parents.”
“If by progressive you mean three thousand miles away and wrapped up in my brothers, then ok,” said Ayna.
§
The nikaah took place in the new mosque on Mill Road. Ayna held Layla’s hands and traced the invisible outlines of henna her love had so desperately wanted to mark their special day. Friends from Trinity and Magdalene, as well as faculty from Modern and Medieval Languages and Social and Political Sciences—except for those who had left town for the summer holidays—sat on the starry carpet and nibbled on sweet, yellow rice. Pink milk was served in the mosque. There would be Pimms in Magdalene at a special formal hall in the evening.
The evening reception required a change of outfits. In the morning, Layla had worn a pale cream lengha, a silk hijab embroidered with tiny pearls and crystals, and stilettoes the same color as the pink powder that shimmered in the crease of Ayna’s eyelids.
In the afternoon, as Layla ironed their matching golden hijaabs, she said to Ayna, “You were named after the hoors of Jannah, the women waiting to reward devout men who make it to paradise. How are they described again? Very fair females created by God, not from the offspring of Adam, with intense black irises and intense white sclera.”
“Free from the routine physical disabilities of an ordinary woman,” Ayna said, stepping over the cord of the iron to reach for a round hairbrush. “I remember those descriptions exactly as my mother would read them in Sunday prayer circles. “The hoor of jannah, also known as hoor-el-ayn, are fair women with intact hymen. They do not urinate, defecate, menstruate…”
“…do not suffer menopause,” Layla said. And in unison, they recited: “do not suffer any other related female pollution!”
“OMG!” said Ayna. “You remember the exact words as well! I thought I knew it cuz I was named after them.”
“Of course I remember. Girl, I used to think I was polluted. I would scrub my face with mum’s special whitening soap because of those stories.” Layla pumped the wand of her lipgloss into its plastic tube and said to the mirror: “You were named after the ultimate heavenly prize for a man.”
Ayna replied: “And here I am.”
