a pause in traffic. Heat shimmered atop the silver surfaces of street vendors’ carts as the taxi crawled along. Shirina’s mouth watered when she caught a whiff of pakoras being deep-fried in bubbling oil.
On the taxi’s dashboard, a multicoloured row of miniature plastic deities created a shrine to Hinduism. It looked like the dashboard of that taxi Shirina had taken home from after-work drinks in Melbourne one night, except it was populated with icons and symbols from all religions, plus one Pokémon bobblehead. Too much wine on an empty stomach had made Shirina chatty that night.
‘Do these guys join forces to protect you?’ she’d asked the driver.
‘Yes,’ he said with a laugh. ‘More religions, more power.’
‘What’s your actual religion then?’
‘I’m Muslim,’ he said. ‘From Somalia. You?’
‘Sikh,’ Shirina replied. ‘From Britain by way of India.’ She spotted a small card bearing Guru Nanak’s picture between a miniature Buddha and a little Arabic scroll on the dashboard and pointed him out. ‘He’s one of mine,’ she said. ‘My mum always said just think of God as your father but that’s wrong, I think.’ The words just kept tumbling out of her mouth. ‘My father died when I was just two.’
The outburst was met with silence. ‘Sorry,’ she mumbled.
The driver waited until he reached a traffic light before turning around, his warm, kind eyes meeting Shirina’s. ‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘In my car, you have countless blessings.’
Now Shirina focused her attention on the sprawl of Delhi. Shops were stacked like uneven bricks with shouting block-lettered signs: ENGLISH LANGUAGE INSTITUTE; ALIYAH’S BEAUTY SCHOOL; ICCS TECH SOLUTIONS. Simpler services took place under the Karol Bagh Metro tracks – a barber arranged his tools on a low wooden stool and beckoned his first customer from a small crowd of men; a pair of toddlers, naked from the waist down, their limbs coated in soot, helped their mother sort through a pile of plastic bottles.
The road ahead narrowed and widened inexplicably, its borders determined by the debris that spilled out onto the edges – benches from chai stalls, a rusty abandoned wheelbarrow overflowing with rubbish. Rising behind them was a skyline of anaemic pink and beige buildings. The potholed surfaces of the road made Shirina jostle with her sisters in the back seat. A few times, she caught the driver looking at their reflections in the rear-view mirror and she realized his eyes were tracking the movements of their jiggling breasts.
‘Not obvious at all, mate,’ Jezmeen muttered but she shifted to occupy more space in the mirror.
‘You know what you’re supposed to say to put them in their place, right?’ Rajni said to Shirina. ‘“Don’t you have a sister? Don’t you have a mother?”’ Hearing these English words, the driver focused back on the road. ‘See? It works.’
‘So it’s our job to summon a woman the men own in some way?’ Jezmeen retorted.
This thought occurred to Shirina too but she suppressed it, knowing that this type of argument belonged in a different place. It was the sort of thing her friend Lauren from work would say. The driver’s eyes locked with Shirina’s. She adjusted her dupatta so it concealed her chest. An easy solution. Nothing needed to be said.
Worshippers and tourists were already milling about outside the gurdwara when they pulled up. ‘Water, water, cold cold water,’ called a man pushing a cart full of plastic bottles. Taut muscles bulged through the sheen of sweat on his skinny calves. A marbled walkway led the sisters away from the tangle of cars and people on the street. The temple was tiered and white like a wedding cake, finished with golden caramel on the domes. Nearby, the water of the sarovar rippled gently, catching flecks of sunlight.
First they had to deposit their shoes at a counter, which they swapped for metal tags. Then they returned to the gurdwara’s entrance and stepped in a shallow trough to clean their feet. They climbed the carpeted stairs and shuffled along with the crowd into the prayer hall. Ceiling fans and chandeliers dangled from the hall’s roof and the floor was covered in soft red carpet. At the centre was an elaborate golden trellis, its patterns delicate like embroidery. Three men sat cross-legged there, thumping on tablas and singing holy hymns. The Guru Granth Sahib lay open on a gilded platform, its pages framed by a thick garland of marigolds. Shirina found a small space to bow, touch her head to the floor and then slip her small tithing into the bank.
Pushing herself to her feet again, Shirina felt the discomfort of her padded body. This weight gain gave her an imbalance she was unused to. She stumbled slightly, and recovered. She sneaked a look at Jezmeen and Rajni to see if they had noticed, but they were pressing their own foreheads to the floor and making their donations. Hopefully she was concealing it well enough but if anybody asked, she’d say, ‘Just a bit of winter weight. I need to cut back.’ She’d laugh and look embarrassed so they’d know she was trying and hopefully, they would know to drop the subject. The other day, she had made the mistake of opening her wedding album again and afterwards, she was unable to look at herself in the mirror, saddened by her fuller cheeks and her collarbone fading behind a new layer of skin.
Shirina had wanted to dive into those photographs and make her wedding day come to life again. As soon as she and Rajni and Jezmeen found a place to sit, she closed her eyes and little snapshots of the ceremony rushed into her consciousness. Her hennaed feet poking out from under a full lengha skirt that floated as she stepped closer to the altar; the walk around the Holy Book with Sehaj as their guests looked on approvingly. Peering out from under her heavily jewelled dupatta, she had been so pleased to see the abundance of her husband’s guests – cousins, uncles, nephews, aunties, two sets of grandparents. They had flown a long way to see the firstborn son of the family get married, and when she presented herself in those glorious bridal adornments, she felt as if she had earned her place. She couldn’t help comparing them to her own threadbare family – a smattering of distant relatives, her widowed mother, two sisters, always bickering, never just listening to one another. ‘Do your family members get along?’ she’d asked Sehaj after they met on the Sikh matrimonial website and arranged a phone call. ‘We rarely argue,’ he’d replied. ‘What’s that like?’ she’d asked. He thought she was joking. He told her that he had always had a good relationship with his mother. ‘After my father died when I was sixteen, my mother and I became even closer,’ he said.
That was when Shirina decided she wanted to keep getting to know Sehaj. She reminded herself not to get her hopes up; there were countless stories on the arranged marriage message boards about men being nothing like the pictures and personas they presented online. During the next conversation, she asked if they could do a video call, and she was both relieved and thrilled to see that Sehaj’s handsome profile photo had not been altered or taken ten years ago during a fitter phase – there was not so much as a receding hairline to distinguish the live person on her screen from the one in the picture on her Successful Matches list on the matrimonial site. Not wanting to seem desperate though, Shirina waited for Sehaj to initiate the first in-person meeting. After a few months of chatting on the phone, he finally said he wanted to come to London to see her. Again, Shirina was relieved to see that Sehaj was real, and just as much a gentleman as he was on the phone. He opened doors for her, kissed her lightly on the cheek at the end of their first date, and told her he was looking forward to seeing her again.
At one point, Shirina was bold enough to ask how Sehaj was still single. He was certainly the most eligible bachelor on the matrimonial site, and his membership had been active for a year before Shirina came along. ‘There were other girls,’ Sehaj shrugged. ‘But they balked at the idea of living with my mother. I can’t compromise on that though. She’s family, and that’s what I’m here for – if I don’t look
