Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [77]
Whenever I had enough money, I traveled to see her: we tended to meet for a couple of hours every few months at a train station midway, where we sat on benches opposite one another so that we wouldn’t feel tempted to commit zina.
“When are you going to tell your parents about us?” I asked her one day. “You need to be my wedded wife to protect my Islam.”
“I can’t tell them. My father would ship me back to the village we’re from.”
“Why?” I asked, surprised that I wouldn’t be seen as marriage material.
“We haven’t done things properly,” she explained.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that we shouldn’t have found each other.”
“How should we have met, then?”
“Through destiny.”
“Wasn’t it destiny that we were in the same chat room at the same time?” I asked, smiling.
“Destiny means that, rather than you and I choosing one another, our parents should have created the conditions for our meeting. Everything arranged.”
“Well, that’s not what happened,” I retorted. “Is there a way to solve this?”
Bilqis nodded and laid out a multi-step backup plan that would satisfy her parents and allow us to achieve our goal of marital union. It was as follows:
(a) The first goal was for us to become like strangers to one another, because if her parents became aware that we’d been in close proximity with one another, they would assume that we had fornicated. This would lead them to ship her off to a village in the old country, or to punish her (and me) by marrying her to an old and ugly cousin in Germany.
(b) I had to inform my parents that I wanted to marry a girl and get their approval. This had to be achieved without my parents learning that I’d had preexisting contact with Bilqis. The onus was on me to achieve this feat.
(c) Once I’d received approval from my parents, they—out of the blue—had to call Bilqis’s parents and have a conversation about something mundane, such as the weather. The aim of this call would be to signal to her parents that there was a family out there in the world who had heard about their daughter completely by chance and wanted to ask for her hand in marriage for their son.
(d) At this point, Bilqis and I had to wait and pray that simply on the basis of that conversation about the weather, her family would invite my family over to their house for tea. This step required intervention from Allah because:
i. Only divine fiat would ensure that her family didn’t think the proposal was for Bilqis’s older unmarried sister or older unmarried cousin.
ii. Only divine fiat would ensure that the hearsay inquiry her parents would launch—into my character, my religiosity, my job security, my looks, my parents’ religiosity, my earning potential, my family’s gross and net income, the divorce record in my extended family, the skin color of the children born in my extended family, and the ratio of boys to girls born in my family—would produce results that would satisfy her parents.
iii. Only divine fiat would ensure that two families who didn’t live anywhere near one another would see fit to ignore geography.
(e) Finally, a look at our respective heritages would have to reveal that Bilqis and I were ethnically compatible. Due to the ravages of colonialism, with its divide-and-conquer legacy, as well as general Muslim bigotry, most Muslim races were incompatible with one another. Whether or not we would indeed be declared ethnically compatible depended on such things as her father’s mood and his prior history with other ethnicities.
I eagerly went through the checklist with Bilqis. “I think we’ve got it covered,” I concluded.
“No,” Bilqis said sadly, stuck on the final point. “I just remembered that my father hates Punjabis.”
“But I’m Punjabi,” I said, feeling as hurt as if I’d been struck.
“My father says they oppress everyone in Pakistan.”
“What does he