**Nadia only has ten more days remaining at the college, and I am helping her pack up whatever is left in her apartment. I still haven’t asked her the question. She doesn’t seem like the marrying type. And I don’t want to put any more pressure on her, in her current situation.
“Nadia, will you marry me?” “Will you marry me, Nadia?” “Marry me. Please don’t say No. Please?” “Do you have any plans for marriage. How about with me?” I run through as many possible proposal lines, in my mind that I can think of, without being able to settle on any.
“Do you like babies…Oh, only fat ones…..Same here…..Well then how about you and I….”
“Marriage; weird concept. Isn’t it? Oh you don’t think it’s weird.…..Well then how about you and I get…”
“Man! Aren’t everyone and their grandmother getting married, nowadays?”
“You know twenty-four for a girl is almost like fifty-four for a guy……You’re almost over the hill……Haven’t you ever thought of marriage?”
Still no luck. I am unable to think of a single potentially successful line.
“Quit dozing off and get to work,” she shoves a 4 x 4 cardboard box into my chest.
“How come you’re not working?”
“I’m management,” she replies.
“And I am your only employee?”
“Yes.”
“Nadia, sit down,” I pull her down to the wooden floor, where the sofa used to be. “I have to discuss something important with you.”
She sits cross-legged, with her back against the wall.
“What happens to us, after you leave?” I ask.
She remains quiet.
“Where do we go from here?” I repeat.
She has turned into a statue; quietly gazing out of the window.
I start speaking slowly and enunciating clearly, thinking she is having difficulty hearing me, ”You and me. Where do we go from here?”
“I heard you the first time,” she replies slowly, clearly not wanting to discuss the subject.
“Well?”
There is a long silence, and then she starts off, all of a sudden.
“I don’t want to hurt you! I never wanted to hurt you! I don’t know how we ended up like this! I never thought it would get this far! I don’t know what I was thinking!” Her tone is desperate for some reason. She is taking the conversation, in a strange direction.
“Nadia, we will both be back in Pakistan. I don’t know how all this stuff works. But I want to marry you,” I surprise myself with such a straightforward approach.
“I…I…,” she seems to be in two minds. “I can’t! I can’t!”
“Why not?” I am confused. “You can’t or you don’t want to?”
“I can’t…and…and…I…don’t…want to.” “I just can’t.” “I don’t want to talk about it.”
We continue packing. There is a strange unfamiliar tension in the air, now. She seems very uncomfortable; unsuccessfully trying to avoid me in the confined spaces of her tiny apartment.
“What about all of this?” I remind her of the past four months.
“I don’t know,” she seems visibly uneasy, again.
“What do you mean you don’t know,” I try, unsuccessfully, to control my anger and confusion.
“I don’t know.”
I try to figure out the reasons behind her uneasiness: “I don’t make a lot of money, but we’ll have enough to support ourselves,” I think to myself. “We won’t be living in Karachi, Lahore or Islamabad, but we’ll have some sort of a place to live.” “You probably won’t be able to do much of your singing and dancing, but you could keep working on your paintings.” Suddenly, like a losing contestant, on a dating show, I start to realize my comparative uneligibility as a marriage prospect.
“I probably wouldn’t marry me!” I conclude. “No wonder she keeps saying, “I don’t know,” I think to myself.
“I could move into a new profession,” I state excitedly, “Though it would be a bit hard to do that, for the next five years,” I add in a deflated voice, realizing the difficulties involved.
“It’s not that,” she finally stops repeating herself.
She walks into the bedroom, brings back her purse and pulls out an envelope that is strikingly similar to the one I had notice in her room a few weeks earlier: white, with purple flowers drawn on its left corner.
I open the envelope, pull out the letter inside, and start reading. Each line of the letter is more unbelievable than the next. I look up at her and then down at the letter, and then back up at her again. She seems completely unwilling to look me in the eyes. Her eyes locked onto the ground.
I finish reading the letter. “When were you planning to tell me about this!” I question her like an overpowering interrogator threatening a scared prisoner.
“I don’t know,” she seems visibly scared now, like a vulnerable wife standing, defencelessly, before an abusive husband.
“I…I owe…I owe you an explanation,” she stutters her way, through a very difficult sentence.
“You owe me a lot more than that, Nadia,” I start to walk out her apartment door.
“Wait….Please wait,” she replies in a tearful voice, as I slam the screen door shut, on my way out.
I get on my car, look back at her apartment, and see her standing at the door, with her face in her hands, crying.
R women really like tht…
The next nine days are the worst days of my life.
I sleep. I wake. I eat. I go to work. I come back to my room and quickly try to sleep again. My only companion, during this whole time, is my trusty PC.
It has slowly dawned upon me how ill-prepared I am for handling the complexities of close personal relationships. I am completely out of my league. Nothing in life had prepared me for the past four months. The highs and the lows; the excitement and the pains; and most of all, the truths and the lies. I feel like an amateur caught in a world made for professionals.
“All of this is too much for the emotionally stale and, otherwise, boring and humdrum life of mine,” I conclude. “It’s not worth it,” I try to convince myself.
“How does one learn to hate a person one loves,” I ask myself again and again. It is a process I am going through, with great difficulty, and without much success. The only thing I have done, over the past four months, is spend time with Nadia. “I have not even taken the time to see downtown Denver,” I scold myself.
**
