Chapter 1: The Meeting They Both Refused To Attend
Zara had worn the wrong colour on purpose.
Not red.
Not the soft gold her mother had laid out on the bed with the particular care of someone who believed the right outfit could change the direction of a life.
She had chosen grey.
A quiet, deliberate, unmistakable grey.
The kind of colour that said she was there because she had been asked, not because she had agreed.
Her mother had noticed immediately.
Her mother always noticed immediately.
“Grey,” she had said, standing in the doorway with an expression that contained an entire conversation neither of them had time for.
“It is my favourite colour,” Zara said.
“Since when?”
“Since today.”
Her mother had closed her eyes for exactly three seconds, the way she did when she was choosing patience over honesty, and then she had smoothed the front of her own dupatta and said they were going to be late.
They were not late.
They were perfectly on time, which somehow felt worse.
The Malik house was exactly the kind of house that announced itself before you arrived.
The gate was tall and freshly painted.
The garden was the sort of garden that required someone paid specifically to care for it.
The driveway was long enough to make you feel that whoever lived inside had decided, architecturally, that arriving should feel like an event.
Zara hated it immediately.
Not because it was not beautiful.
It was beautiful.
She hated it because it was exactly the kind of house that was supposed to impress her.
And she had made a decision, somewhere between her bedroom and the car, that she was not going to be impressed by anything tonight.
She was a doctor.
She had a plan.
She had a life that she had built from nothing but early mornings and a stubbornness her professors had alternately admired and found exhausting.
She was twenty-eight years old, and she had not come this far to sit across from a man she did not know and smile at things that were not funny.
She would stay for one hour.
She would be polite.
She would leave.
And on Monday, she would tell her mother, gently but with great clarity, that this was the last time.
She had been saying that since the third time.
This was the seventh.
Inside, the house was warm and full of the particular noise of a family that had been cleaning and preparing and arguing about seating arrangements since the morning.
Zara was taken to a sitting room that smelled of fresh flowers and something baking in a kitchen somewhere deeper in the house.
She sat
She straightened her grey dupatta
She waited
She heard him before she saw him
Not his voice
His footsteps
The kind of footsteps that belonged to someone who had never in his life walked into a room, unsure of whether he was supposed to be there.
And then he was in the doorway.
Tall
Jaw set
Wearing a white kameez that someone had clearly pressed and that he had clearly not chosen himself because it was too considered, too deliberate for the expression on his face, which was the expression of a man who had somewhere better to be and had not yet decided whether to pretend otherwise.
He looked at her.
She looked at him.
Neither of them smiled.
It lasted approximately two seconds and contained, somehow, an entire negotiation.
His name was Ahsan Malik.
She knew this from the conversation her mother had repeated to her three times over the past two weeks.
Thirty-two years old
Civil engineer
Lahore born, London educated, Lahore returned.
Eldest son
Serious
Responsible
Her mother had said seriously and responsibly, the way people say those words when they mean something else entirely and are hoping you will not notice.
Zara had noticed
He sat across from her
Not next to her
Across
The distance was not accidental.
The families settled around them like a play beginning, everyone in their correct positions, everyone with their correct expressions, performing the ancient and slightly exhausting theatre of the first meeting.
Tea arrived.
Biscuits arrived.
Conversation arrived in the careful, surface-level way it always did at these things, touching nothing real, risking nothing, moving from weather to work to a cousin someone vaguely knew in common.
Zara answered everything that was directed at her.
Politely
Correctly
Briefly
Across from her, Ahsan Malik did the same.
He had good manners.
She noticed this without wanting to.
He listened when the elders spoke rather than waiting for his turn to talk.
He answered questions directly without the performance of false modesty that some men brought to these evenings like a prop.
When her mother asked about London, he spoke about it honestly, including the parts that were difficult, which was not what people usually did.
She noticed all of it.
She filed it away under irrelevant.
At some point, in the gentle choreography of these evenings, the families found reasons to drift to other parts of the room.
Zara watched this happen with the quiet horror of someone who could see exactly where it was going.
And then it was just the two of them.
Sitting across from each other.
With the ghost of a conversation they were both supposed to start, and neither of them wanted to.
He spoke first.
“You do not want to be here.”
It was not a question.
She looked at him directly for the first time since he had walked in.
“Neither do you,” she said.
Something moved across his face.
Not quite a smile.
Not quite surprised.
Something that had not been there thirty seconds ago.
“No,” he said.
“Then we agree on something,” she said.
“Apparently.”
The tea between them had gone slightly cold.
Outside, through the window, the garden lights had come on in the dusk, and the lawn looked the way things look when someone has worked very hard to make them appear effortless.
“How many times,” he said.
She did not ask what he meant.
“Seven,” she said.
“Five,” he said.
A silence.
“You are winning,” she said.
He looked at her then.
Really looked.
The way no one had looked at her in any of the previous six evenings.
Like she was a person rather than a prospect.
Like she had just said something that he had not expected and was not entirely sure what to do with.
“Ahsan.”
His mother’s voice from across the room.
He looked away.
The moment closed.
Zara picked up her tea.
It was cold.
She drank it anyway.
And she did not think, not even once, about leaving after one hour.
End of Chapter 1
Chapter 2 will be published next week. Subscribe to 786 Web Stories so you do not miss what happens when two people who have agreed on nothing find themselves agreeing on one more thing.
If you arrived here through the Stories section, Still, We Didn’t Say It is another story about two people and all the things that almost got said.