Azra turned towards me, pushing her knee up against my groin. Her nose stud glittered like a distant star. Then she shrank away towards the far side of the mattress, pulling the bed sheet tight against her body.
‘It’s normal,’ I stuttered in Urdu. ‘Don’t be frightened.’
I reached for the light switch on the wall and clicked it off. In the darkness I fumbled again for the drawstring, my fingers slipping underneath the waist of her trousers. I could feel the rapid rise and fall of her diaphragm and between her legs she felt hot. She seemed to tremble and I could hear her laboured breath. She jerked awkwardly away from my touch once more. I no longer felt in control; afraid I would come in my trousers, I pulled away. I switched on a bedside lamp, a softer light that cast an elliptical illumination against the wall.
‘It’s okay, Azra. I won’t force you.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ she replied.
‘We’ve got the rest of our lives,’ I said.
‘You swear on Allah?’
‘I swear on Allah.’
Slowly she sat up, the bangles falling to rest at her wrist. Her face, in profile, was shielded by the veil.
‘Won’t you look at me?’ I stared ahead at the window, the curtains drawn against the night. They were new and pink. Mum had said that all brides liked pink. Azra shook her head, her headscarf rustling loudly against the headboard.
‘Why not?’ I asked softly.
‘I can’t.’
‘You’re my wife, you can.’
Azra laughed drily. ‘Is that what English wives do?’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ I replied quietly. ‘I’ve never had an English wife.’
‘Ten years ago,’ she said, ‘I was given a picture of you. It was when I was in my final year at school.’
‘I wasn’t ready for love,’ I said.
‘You looked kind. I praised Allah.’
‘I was too young. We both were.’
‘I stared at it every day, wondering what you would be like. And then one day I came home from school to find my father had torn up the picture.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘No, you’re not. Saying sorry is feeble and too easy. It’s like love, a word you’ve borrowed from the English. My father,’ she continued, ‘sent me to a madrasa. There I would be useful. I could repent my shame, the shame of having my betrothed fall into the arms of the infidel army.’ She shook her head ruefully. ‘In Pakistan such rejection falls like sin on a woman’s honour. I became a teacher at the madrasa. I had eighty students and I was happy. Now, so many years later, in Pakistan I am considered an old woman; only now you pay the dowry, and my father, he comes for me. For once he is happy. He comes to the madrasa bearing papers from England. He says when I am settled I should send for him.’
‘All I know is what my mother told me. She said you were patient and would wait.’
‘So you could do what you liked and I would just pray and wait?’ She shook her head again.
‘You’re a beautiful woman — you should have married someone else.’
Azra put her hands to her face as though she was about to cry. Floral-patterned henna tattoos wove around the backs of her hands. They twisted and turned, branching threadlike down each finger.
Suddenly I understood. ‘My mother didn’t tell you, did she? Nor your father. No one told you I was crippled.’
She shook her head but said nothing.
My left knee instantly throbbed. The lower leg, mutilated by entry and exit holes, had healed like a withered branch on a tree. When I stood, it hung like a dead appendage. Now, in bed, I straightened it, approximating its true position. I kneaded at the joint between titanium and flesh, my face screwed into a knot of pain, feeling for the ridges of cold metal beneath the skin.
She shrank away a little. ‘I saw it at the airport.’
‘When I’m lying in bed,’ I said, ‘and there’s no weight on my knee I feel like any other man. Sometimes I dream that I’m walking like I used to. It can’t be fixed, and as my wife you should know that. At the hospital they wanted to cut it off and give me a prosthetic leg. They said I’d be able to run with a metal leg. I don’t want it cut off.’
‘Maybe you want it this way,’ she said.
‘When it hurts really badly I’m happy because I think the life is coming back to it.’
‘You have two arms and one good leg. I’ve seen worse.’
‘Yeah, but you didn’t marry them, did you.’
‘I wouldn’t have minded. If he was kind.’ Her lips, thick with red gloss, were just visible at the edge of her veil.
‘All these years they had you wait for a cripple.’ I felt like a grotesque medical specimen.
‘My father had even purchased my wedding gold, and to everyone in our sector he had boasted that he would send me out clad in a lakh’s worth of gold. The day we learnt of your defection, my father swore, he beat me, he cried.’
‘Your father’s anger should have been at me.’
‘He has forgiven you. And your knee, to me it is of no consequence.’
‘Azra,’ I said loudly, ‘you lie.’
‘I throw myself on Allah’s mercy, but I do not lie,’ Azra sobbed. I listened to the noise from downstairs. The TV was on loud, the familiar opening tune of the nine o’clock news. From the kitchen I could hear the clatter of pans as my mother tidied up after the wedding feast.
‘Allah?’ I said. ‘Which Allah? Every Muslim I ever met had a different Allah. They fight over Allah. They die over Allah. But here’s the funny thing, no two of them could ever agree on what or who Allah is.’
She clamped her hands over her ears.
‘Mercy?’ I continued undeterred. ‘In the name of Allah they make war that has no end. The Taliban killed and we killed but there were no martyrs. There was only maiming and death.’
Azra moved towards me and took my chin tightly in her fingers. Through an opening in her veil I saw her face for the first time, slim, angular and beautiful. Her irises were brown, her gaze penetrating, and the whites of her eyes were as opaque as paper. Her thick lashes had been painted with mascara and a faint pink blush dusted her cheeks. She had a thin, pointy nose and a gently curved chin, and I knew, I knew she was out of my league.
Azra spoke forcefully. ‘I married you and I will accept your body as it is.’ She took a deep breath and went on. ‘But an infidel who has fought for the enemy? Allah, no! Not an infidel. I cannot have married an infidel.’
‘I may not know much about women but it is not right that a thing of beauty like you should speak such hard words. I am not what you say, but you cannot measure me against the imams and students of your madrasa.’
Azra slumped back against the headboard, breathing heavily. I stretched out a hand and touched her shoulder. She shrugged it off.
‘Why aren’t you married?’ I said. ‘Are the men in Pakistan so stupid?’
‘My father dictated it had to be a cousin and it had to be England. Is that a precise enough answer for you?’
‘Well, now that you are here, what is your decision?’
‘You have not denied that you are an infidel. Only through Allah do we understand our lives.’
‘You need not worry. I am a believer. But I do not believe blindly.’