not very convincing. "He's like a brother to me," she added, misguidedly. And she knew,
even before a cloud passed over Mammy's face and her features darkened, that she'd made
a mistake.
"That he is not," Mammy said flatly. "You will not liken that one legged carpenter's boy to
your brothers. There is no one like your brothers."
"I didn't say he...That's not how I meant it."
Mammy sighed through the nose and clenched her teeth.
"Anyway," she resumed, but without the coy lightheadedness of a few moments ago,
"what I'm trying to say is that if you're not careful, people will talk."
Laila opened her mouth to say something. It wasn't that Mammy didn't have a point. Laila
knew that the days of innocent, unhindered frolicking in the streets with Tariq had passed.
For some time now, Laila had begun to sense a new strangeness when the two of them were
out in public. An awareness of being looked at, scrutinized, whispered about, that Laila had
never felt before. And wouldn't have felt even now but for one fundamental fact: She had
fallen for Tariq. Hopelessly and desperately. When he was near, she couldn't help but be
consumed with the most scandalous thoughts, of his lean, bare body entangled with hers.
Lying in bed at night, she pictured him kissing her belly, wondered at the softness of his
lips, at the feel of his hands on her neck, her chest, her back, and lower still. When she
thought of him this way, she was overtaken with guilt, but also with a peculiar, warm
sensation that spread upward from her belly until it felt as if her face were glowing pink.
No. Mammy had a point. More than she knew, in fact. Laila suspected that some, if not
most, of the neighbors were already gossiping about her and Tariq. Laila had noticed the
sly grins, was aware of the whispers in the neighborhood that the two of them were a
couple. The other day, for instance, she and Tariq were walking up the street together when
they'd passed Rasheed, the shoemaker, with his burqa clad wife, Mariam, in tow. As he'd
passed by them, Rasheed had playfully said, "If it isn't Laili and Majnoon," referring to the
star crossed lovers of Nezami's popular twelfth century romantic poem a Farsi version of
Romeo and Juliet, Babi said, though he added that Nezami had written his tale of ill fated
lovers four centuries before Shakespeare.
Mammy had a point.
What rankled Laila was that Mammy hadn't earned the right to make it. It would have
been one thing if Babi had raised this issue. But Mammy? All those years of aloofness, of
cooping herself up and not caring where Laila went and whom she saw and what she
thought...It was unfair. Laila felt like she was no better than these pots and pans, something
that could go neglected, then laid claim to, at will, whenever the mood struck.
But this was a big day, an important day, for all of them. It would be petty to spoil it over
this. In the spirit of things, Laila let it pass.
"I get your point," she said.