Chapter 3: Eight O’Clock and a Dupatta That Was Never About a Dupatta
She almost cancelled three times.
The first time was at 6:15 when she was still at the hospital and told herself the traffic would be impossible.
The second time was at 7:00 when she was home and told herself she was too tired.
The third time was at 7:40 when she was standing in front of her wardrobe and could not decide what to wear, which was information she refused to examine too closely.
She wore navy.
Not for any reason.
The Malik house looked different at night.
Smaller somehow.
Less of a statement and more of a place where people actually lived.
The garden lights were on but softer than she remembered, and the gate was open, which meant someone had been expecting her, which meant someone had thought about her arrival before she arrived.
She sat in her car for a moment.
Then she got out before she could talk herself back in.
She rang the bell.
She waited.
She had prepared, on the drive over, a version of this evening that lasted exactly fifteen minutes.
She would collect the dupatta.
She would say thank you.
She would leave.
It was a simple plan.
It was the kind of plan that required the other person to cooperate.
He opened the door.
He was not in the white kameez tonight.
Dark shalwar kameez, sleeves pushed to the elbows, the look of someone who had come home from a long day and had not expected, or perhaps had expected and was not sure how to arrange his face around the fact that the evening was not yet finished.
“You came,” he said.
“I said I would,” she said.
He stepped back to let her in.
She stepped inside.
The house was quiet in a way it had not been three nights ago.
No family arranged carefully in the sitting room positions.
No tea arriving on a tray carried by someone who had been listening from the kitchen.
Just the house and its warm lights and somewhere in the back, the distant sound of a television that belonged to a different part of the building entirely.
“My parents are at my uncle’s,” he said, as though he had read the question she had not asked.
“And your mother left the dupatta here,” she said.
“In the sitting room,” he said.
She followed him.
The sitting room looked different without eight people in it.
Larger.
More honest.
The dupatta was folded on the arm of the sofa, white with blue edges, placed with the care of someone who knew exactly what they were doing when they placed it there.
Zara picked it up.
“Thank you,” she said.
She turned to leave.
“Tea,” he said.
Not an offer, exactly.
Not a question, entirely.
Just the word, placed carefully in the space between her turning and her leaving, in the tone of someone who had not planned to say it and had said it anyway.
She should have said no.
She knew she should have said no.
No was the sensible word.
No was the word that kept the fifteen-minute plan intact.
No was the word that meant she drove home through Lahore with the dupatta on the passenger seat and her life exactly as she had arranged it.
“Alright,” she said.
He made the tea himself.
She stood in the kitchen doorway because sitting down felt like a decision she was not ready to make, and watched him move around the space with the ease of someone who knew where everything was and did not need to think about it.
He did not ask how she took it.
He made it one sugar, milk after.
She did not say anything.
She did not know what to do with the fact that he had either asked someone or remembered something from three nights ago, when a cup had been placed in front of her by someone else entirely.
She filed it away.
Irrelevant.
They sat in the kitchen rather than the sitting room.
She was not sure how that happened.
One moment she was in the doorway, and the next she was at the kitchen table, and the table was smaller than the sitting room, and the lighting was different, and there was no performance possible at a kitchen table at 8:15 at night.
Only the actual thing.
Whatever the actual thing was.
“You are a doctor,” he said.
“You know I am a doctor,” she said.
“I know the fact of it,” he said.
“What else is there?”
“Why,” he said.
She looked at him.
“Why medicine?” he said.
Nobody asked her why.
They asked where she worked and what she specialised in and how many years it had taken and whether it was difficult being a woman in the field, which was a question that exhausted her every single time.
Nobody asked why.
She wrapped both hands around her cup.
“My grandmother was sick for a long time,” she said.
“When I was young.”
“There was a doctor who came to the house.”
Old, very serious, half the time you could not tell if he was listening or simply waiting for you to finish.
“But he always knew.”
Every time, he knew exactly what was wrong and what it needed, and my grandmother trusted him completely.
“I wanted to be the person someone trusted completely.”
She stopped.
She had not said that out loud before.
Not to anyone.
Not even to herself in quite those words.
Across the table, Ahsan Malik was looking at her with an expression she could not entirely read.
Not pity.
Not the polite interest of someone waiting to respond.
Something quieter than both of those things.
“That is a good reason,” he said.
“What about you?” she said, because the only way out of being seen was to look at someone else.
“Civil engineering,” she said.
“Bridges and roads,” he said.
“The boring answer,” she said.
“The true one,” he said.
“My father built things.”
“Small things, nothing remarkable.”
“Furniture mostly.”
“He had this way of looking at a space and seeing what it needed.”
“Not what he wanted to put in it.”
“What it needed.”
“I think I learned to look at things that way.”
“Spaces, structures, problems.”
“What does this need?”
“Not what do I want?”
He said it simply.
Without decoration.
The way people say things that are true and have always been true and do not require any additional framing.
Zara looked at her tea.
The kitchen was very quiet.
Outside the window, Lahore was doing what Lahore always did, which was everything at once and loudly, but inside this kitchen at this table, it felt very far away.
“I should go,” she said.
“Yes,” he said.
Neither of them moved for a moment.
Then she stood.
He walked her to the door.
She had the dupatta over her arm and her keys in her hand, and her 15-minute plan had become ninety minutes without her entirely noticing how.
“Zara,” he said.
She turned.
He was standing in the doorway, with the warm light of the house behind him, the Lahore night in front of him, and an expression doing something complicated with itself.
“The grey,” he said.
“The first evening.”
“It was deliberate,” she said.
“I know,” he said.
A pause.
“So was the white kameez,” he said.
She stared at him.
He almost smiled.
She walked to her car.
She did not look back.
She did not need to.
She could feel him standing there until she turned out of the gate and the house disappeared from her mirrors, leaving nothing but the road and the night and the specific, impossible feeling of something beginning that you had firmly and with great conviction decided was not going to begin.
She drove home.
She did not think about what he said.
She thought about nothing else.
End of Chapter 3
Chapter 4 is coming soon. Subscribe to 786 Web Stories so you do not miss what happens when two people who came for a dupatta find themselves making an actual choice.
Start from the beginning with Chapter 1: The Meeting They Both Refused to Want, or go back to Chapter 2: The Morning After the Evening Before.