“Zeena, I hope you know how much I love you,” he finally said. Zeena blushed.
“I love you too,” she said as she blushed.
“I don’t think I told you this, but my mom brought up this rishta from one of our family friends a few weeks ago,” he said taking the last few bites of his omelet. “I realized that the notion of being with anyone else is kind of absurd. Who else prays fives times a day while also being familiar with the entire Western literary canon? Who else sips chai with me in shalwar kameez at an iftaar while discussing the importance of Kanye as a black, political artist?”
“I feel the same way about you, jaan,” she replied with a grin. “I never imagined that I would find someone as perfect for me as you are. I feel like life is moving faster and slower now with you in it. I don’t know how to describe it.”
“Zeena, we’ve never talked about marriage, but we probably should,” Shakit said. His eyes looked firm and decided. “If we weren’t in school and if I didn’t feel like my parents would disown me for trying to marry someone without having a job, I would get down on one knee right now.”
“Shakit, what are you doing?” Zeena said.
“I don’t know. I just want you to know how I feel,” Shakit said. “This is kind of embarrassing, but sometimes I think about our kids when we’re together, about how you’ll read to them in our huge library or how our daughter will have your dark brown ringlets in her face like you do or how we will make breakfast together on Saturday mornings while our kids are running around.”
“Don’t be embarrassed. I think about our future together too. It just feels silly cause we’re 21…
“Yeah, and age is just a number. We’re more mature than everyone around us. You know that.”
Zeena let these thoughts of maturity simmer in her head, and she remembered Zack. Sweet and peculiar Zack, the first and last boy that had made any advances towards her. She had sat next to him on her first day of History of Philosophy during freshman year. He was a kind, goofy looking boy that had brilliant blue eyes, wore raggedy ripped jeans and flip-flops, doodled all over his notebook in class, and stood up every time a woman walked into the room.
The last time they had spoke, almost two years ago; Zeena had stood with Zack in the parking lot of a coffee shop after a late night of studying. Zack spread his arms out to hug Zeena. Unsure of what to do, given that they had never hugged before, Zeena walked up to Zack to wrap her arms around him. He leaned into her with his lips. His lips missed their mark as she dodged him and landed on her right cheek. He immediately pulled away from her with a shocked look on his face.
“Zeena, I’m so sorry,” he said. Zeena saw the redness expand on his pale cheeks.
“Umm…its my fault. Uhhh…goodnight.”
Zeena walked away from Zack towards her car feeling tangled in the web of precarious boy-girl relationships. A part of her knew that Zack had feelings for her and that her friendly words edged on flirtation. But did that give him a right to touch her, to explore what fundamentally wasn’t his?
“I just think that Islam is a continuum,” he said, smiling at her flushed cheeks. “It evolves, and while sex out of marriage may be forbidden by most accounts, most other things aren’t so black and white. Also, no sex is just hard. That’s all. It’s everywhere. It’s all around us, and we are just supposed to pretend that its something we don’t want?”
As she pondered this on her drive home that night, she felt that the temptation of kissing him also felt convoluted. He would have been her first kiss and a part of her wanted to get past the firstness of it all, but the possibility of sharing her first kiss with white, Southern Zack made her stomach retch.
Zeena’s mother had always told her in subtle ways as she talked about marriage in the abstract that emotional intimacy led to the physical, not the other way around, and Zeena ascribed to this worldview. Her body was precious and private. For her, Islam protected this right, and she didn’t want to give it up so easily when it meant nothing to Southern Zack. It was just a transfer of saliva, an exploration of a body when he didn’t care too much about the mind.
She watched Shakit eat his meal and remembered the first time they had kissed, five months after they had started ‘talking.’ They had gone to dinner that night, similar to their current date, and they had talked for hours about how Islamic fiqh was purposefully non-specific about sexuality. Shakit mentioned that the only hard and fast line in Islam was when it came to sex outside of marriage, and even then, he felt that if two people were going to get married anyways, what was wrong with having sex a little earlier? The commitment was what mattered.
“Shakit, I hear you, but I just wonder, if you abandon some rules, if you pick and choose what you want to do, doesn’t it all sort of go out the window? What do you believe in then? Is everything just interpretation?” she said.
“I don’t know, but I just think that critical thought is fundamental to our religion. I pray five times a day. I read the Qur’an. I try to be a good Muslim, but I’m also human. I’m critical of things that take my humanity away from me. I’m not perfect. Not having sex is very hard for men,” he said. “It’s awful. Everyone around me is having sex, and I want it too. My body tells me I need it.”
Zeena blushed as he said these words. She didn’t look at him and inspected the restaurant. It was elegant. Velvet drapes framed the long windows, and a candlelit square table sat in front of them. They had never had such a fancy dinner, but Shakit wanted to celebrate the end of finals. He told Zeena that it was a treat.
“I just think that Islam is a continuum,” he said, smiling at her flushed cheeks. “It evolves, and while sex out of marriage may be forbidden by most accounts, most other things aren’t so black and white. Also, no sex is just hard. That’s all. It’s everywhere. It’s all around us, and we are just supposed to pretend that its something we don’t want?”
“I guess my feminist side agrees with you. I don’t want to feel shame about my sexuality,” she said. “I just don’t know. I know that I like to live in the gray area, but where does the grey end and the white or black begin?”
“I think we decide that for ourselves,” he said flatly.
They ended the conversation there and Shakit walked over the to other side of the table and pulled Zeena’s chair out for her. He opened the car door and as they drove to her apartment, she was left feeling sympathy for Shakit. Desire was different for him than it was for her. She could live without sex even though she sometimes lay in bed at night and craved it, but for him it was obvious and immediate.
They got out of his car and stood in the courtyard of her small apartment complex in silence. The breeze was pushing through them, and her heart had felt like it was pumping inside of her neck as she leaned into him and let his soft lips meet hers. His tongue entered her mouth, and she felt like all the things she couldn’t say to him or didn’t know how to say were being communicated through their lips. The unsaid was being said.
She felt whole.
