Chapter 2: The Morning After the Evening Before
She did not think about him in the morning.
She was very deliberate about this.
She made her tea the way she always made it, one sugar, milk after, standing at the kitchen window watching the neighbour’s cat make its slow and self-important journey across the wall.
She did not think about the look.
She did not think about the cold tea.
She did not think about the way he had said her name, just once, quietly, when they were saying goodbye in the doorway of the Malik house, not as a question or a pleasantry but as though he was testing the weight of it.
She was not thinking about any of this.
She was thinking about her ward rounds.
She had three patients to check before nine.
She had a meeting at eleven that she had been preparing for all week.
She had a life, an entire, full, carefully constructed life, that had absolutely no vacancy for a man in a white kameez who looked at her like she was a problem he had not anticipated.
Her phone buzzed.
Her mother.
She let it ring.
It buzzed again.
She picked it up.
“You liked him,” her mother said, without greeting, without preamble, in the voice of someone who had been awake since five and had been practicing this opening since approximately five thirty.
“Good morning to you, too,” Zara said.
“You stayed for two and a half hours.”
“The tea was good.”
“Zara.”
“The biscuits were also very good.”
“His mother called me this morning.”
Zara set down her cup.
Outside, the cat had reached the end of the wall and was considering its next move with the kind of patience Zara was finding increasingly difficult to locate in herself.
“What did she say?” Zara said.
Her mother paused.
The pause was long enough to contain everything she wanted to say and was choosing not to.
“She said Ahsan came home and did not speak for the rest of the evening.”
“That could mean anything.”
“She said he was quiet in a different way than usual.”
Zara picked up her cup again.
“Ammi,” she said carefully.
“I am just telling you what she told me.”
“I have rounds in forty minutes.”
“I know you have rounds.”
“Then why?”
“Because,” her mother said, and her voice shifted then, dropped half a register into something that was not pressure and was not hope but was somewhere between the two, “you smiled twice.”
Zara said nothing.
“I was watching,” her mother said simply.
“I smile at things that are funny.”
“Yes,” her mother said.
“That is all it was.”
“Of course,” her mother said.
And they both let the silence sit there between them, doing the work that neither of them was willing to do themselves.
Zara got to the hospital at eight forty-three.
She moved through her rounds with the efficiency that her colleagues had described, variously, as impressive, intimidating, and slightly exhausting if you were the one trying to keep up.
She checked her patients.
She updated charts.
She had a conversation with a junior doctor that required her full attention, and received it entirely.
She did not think about Ahsan Malik at all until eleven seventeen, when she was sitting in a meeting that had been running four minutes longer than it needed to, and her mind, briefly unoccupied, went somewhere she had not given it permission to go.
She thought about what he had said.
Five.
Just the one word.
Sitting across from her with his cold tea and his careful posture and his complete and obvious lack of interest in performing anything for anyone in that room.
Five meetings.
Which meant five evenings of sitting across from someone and finding, again, that nothing fit.
She understood that.
She understood it in a way she had not expected to understand anything about Ahsan Malik.
The meeting ended.
She stood up.
She told herself, firmly and with great conviction, that understanding someone was not the same as being interested in them.
She almost believed it.
Her shift ended at seven.
She sat in her car for three minutes before starting the engine, which was not something she normally did.
She was not, she told herself, waiting for anything.
She started the engine.
Her phone buzzed.
An unknown number.
She almost did not answer it.
She answered it.
“You left your dupatta.”
The voice was even.
Unhurried.
The voice of someone who had picked up a phone and was now mildly regretting it but had gone too far to stop.
Zara stared at the steering wheel.
She had not noticed.
She had worn the grey dupatta home; she was almost certain of it.
Almost.
“Which one?” she said.
A pause.
“White,” he said.
“With blue edges.”
She closed her eyes.
Her mother’s dupatta.
Her mother’s good dupatta, worn specifically for this occasion, was left behind in the sitting room of the Malik house.
“I see,” she said.
“My mother found it this morning,” he said.
“She could have called my mother.”
“She did.”
Another pause.
“Your mother suggested you come and collect it,” he said, and there was something in his voice then, something carefully controlled, that told her he was as aware as she was of exactly what her mother had done.
“Of course she did,” Zara said.
“You do not have to,” he said.
“I know.”
“I can have it sent.”
“That would be the sensible option,” she said.
Outside her car window, the hospital car park was emptying slowly, headlights moving past in the early dark, everyone going somewhere they had decided to go.
“Tomorrow evening,” she said.
“I am at the office until seven,” he said.
“Eight then.”
“Eight,” he said.
And that was all.
She put the phone down.
She sat very still in her car for considerably longer than three minutes.
Then she started the engine.
She was going to collect a dupatta.
That was all this was.
She was a doctor with rounds in the morning and a meeting she still had to prepare for, and absolutely no room in her life for anything else.
She drove home through the Lahore evening, past the noise and the lights and the particularly beautiful chaos of a city that never quite decided whether it was finished for the day.
She did not turn on the radio.
She did not need it.
Her mind was already somewhere else entirely.
It was in a sitting room with warm lights and cold tea and a man who had looked at her like a question he was not sure he wanted the answer to.
She told herself, one final time, that this was just a dupatta.
She did not believe it even a little.
End of Chapter 2
Chapter 3 will be published soon. Subscribe to 786 Web Stories so you do not miss what happens when Zara arrives at eight and finds more than she came for.
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Start with Chapter 1: The Meeting They Both Refused To Attend