The Threads That Pull

‘Anomalous Intimacy III’ by Faizan Naveed. Image courtesy of the artist.

Zeena couldn’t make a decision. She knew what Shakit wanted, but she wasn’t sure that she could give it to him.

Shakit sat across from her on the patio of a packed restaurant and talked intermittently through bites of his dinner. She watched him eat as she tossed the decision around in her head. It felt heavy.

“I don’t want to do anything that makes you uncomfortable,” Shakit said. “I will always respect your decisions about your own body. Feminism isn’t something I just pretend to believe in.”

Autumn had settled into Austin with quiet electricity moving through the air, finally bringing people outside after the searing summer. The days were now filled with clear blue skies, crisp air, and students walking around campus in leather boots and oversized sweaters. Shakit shoveled food into his mouth at their new favorite, trendy dinner spot. It served brunch all day, and Zeena scarcely poked at the salmon benedict.

Shakit paused and looked at her. She didn’t meet his gaze. Her pelvis was ablaze and had been since their last long kiss the night before. The risk of him seeing through her and reading her thoughts was too high. She couldn’t tell him that ever since they had started ‘talking’ eight months ago, she had imagined him tracing the lines and curves of her naked body with his fingers after sex in their apartment as a married couple. She couldn’t tell him that she was thinking about it right now.

“I respect you too much,” Shakit said as Zeena continued to stare at her food. “Honestly, I never thought I would meet anyone like you. I know, we’re Muslims, and there’s a lot of baggage with this subject, but I just want you to be honest with yourself. What is standing in the way here? Is it religion, something I will always respect, or cultural bullshit, which is just that, bullshit?”

At these words, Zeena’s mind began to pace back and forth between Shakit’s words. She remembered the night they had met. It was eight months prior at a poetry reading that she had attended with her fellow classmates from the English department. Shakit had walked in and as their eyes met, she knew that there was something different about this South Asian boy. After all, he was at a poetry reading.

The usual South Asian college boy uniform of basketball shorts and Adidas Slides was absent. Shakit was wearing a white button up with slim fit khakis, and he had a long face with horn-rimmed glasses and a gaping smile. He approached her group, waving a hello to some of her classmates, and the two of them sat next to one another. Through the entire reading, she felt electrical charges moving between them as their arms intermittently touched with whispered sorrys on the armrest.

After the poetry reading that night, Shakit and Zeena went to dinner with a group of mutual friends. The restaurant was cramped, so the group settled onto the patio where the insufferable heat of a summer’s day had abetted, and an orchestra of cicadas played as the background music to the quiet din of conversation. Shakit sat down next to Zeena as she pulled off her denim jacket and placed it over her chair. Zeena felt grateful that the minimal light veiled her rouge cheeks.

“What brought you to the poetry reading tonight?” he asked with a side smile. Zeena watched as two attractive white girls stared at Shakit from across the table.

“Um, well, I’m actually a writer, although I do mostly fiction. Poetry helps me write, and also, my honors class decided to attend,” she said in a way that felt jumbled and confused.

“Interesting. I don’t find many Desi girls that like poetry or write or attend readings.”

She felt pleased that her confused words impressed him, and by the end of the night, she privately rejoiced in the fact that they had only talked to one another. They had started at literature, meandered into racism, the beauty of Islam, literary theory, philosophy, and ended at the absurdity of their parents’ conflation of religion and culture. He told her about the graduate level class that he was taking as an undergrad on postmodernism, and she moved into his words by citing Derrida and Foucault.

As their friends milled around them after dinner, Zeena felt her eyes glimmer as Shakit spoke. The breeze picked up, and she tucked her hair behind her ears as she felt Shakit’s eyes watched her. She looked up at him, and she noticed the reflection of the wall of white lights illuminating the silhouette of his warm face.

She remembered sitting in the restaurant that night and feeling the shock and awe of finding someone that could navigate the world in the way that she did, walking through daily life, absorbed in being a devout Muslim while also being soaked in a level of consciousness about poetry, abstract ideas, theory, and literature. It felt like God had given her a present that she didn’t know she wanted until it was sitting front of her. She went home that night feeling as though this man had set her mind and her heart on fire.

Zeena watched him sip from his bottle of coke while looking out at the lush greenery illuminated by the string of exposed light bulbs just past the gate of the restaurant’s patio, and she couldn’t help but imagine what he was thinking about in his head. Was he thinking about Orientalism, or Gender Trouble by Judith Butler, or Anna Karenina? She examined the Big Bend National Park sweatshirt he was wearing on his lean body and broad shoulders and saw the images of them the two of them hiking through the Chisos Mountains with their kids. In that moment, she felt like anything he asked of her could never be too much.

Shakit turned his gaze away from the greenery and towards Zeena. His dark eyes pulled her out of her thoughts, and he looked at her intently. She met his gaze, and then he lowered his eyes to examine what he liked to tell her were “ the valleys and mountains that exist on your collarbone.” That morning, she had stared at herself in the mirror as she had put on a deep necked, flowy shirt, imagining Shakit’s eyes staring at the only overtly evocative terrain on her body that she allowed him to see with others around. His eyes lingered there for a few seconds, and she felt her stomach fall away from her.

“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?

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.

“You know, I never told you this, but I remember when I was growing up…” Shakit continued in a solemn tone, differing drastically from firmness that was there mere seconds ago. Zeena refocused her thoughts from the moment in the courtyard months ago, and looked at Shakit across from the table with her benedict in front of her.

“My mom used to bring my dad water everyday after work and would bring him food before he even knew that he wanted it. As a kid, I always wondered why, why didn’t he bring her water or food instead? Why she was the one that stayed at home? Why was it that when she wanted to buy something, she had to ask him, and when he came home with a brand new car, no one asked any questions. Honestly, as a kid, I thought it was a part of the religion, Zeena. I thought my mom was being a good Muslim by covering her body and being the good wife.”

Zeena shifted in her chair and played with her earrings as Shakit spoke. She had never heard him talk about the inner dimensions of his parent’s relationship. All she knew was that his father had passed away a few years ago. It was a topic that had always been skirted around as she occasionally shared details on the traditional but warm relationship that her parents had.

“So, I started reading up on Islam. I wanted to understand why our religion told her to do that, and then I realized that it was all bullshit,” Shakit continued. “I realized that Islam doesn’t preach this shit. Islam is used as weapon of control, and that the answer was simpler, that my father was just a tyrant. I watched my grandfather after that and realized that my father’s father was a tyrant. That my mom was being ruled over in her own house like my grandmother had been.”

Zeena looked up at Shakit and tears at the edges of his eyes. Her heart felt as though it had been punched as she saw the one she loved crying across the table from her.

“When he died, 2 years ago, I felt a sense of relief, Zeena. I felt like the tyranny of my father had died with him and that everyone in my house could finally breathe. I felt relief that we were free. Isn’t that awful? I felt relief that my father passed away.”

She wanted to pull the pain, the shame out of him and cut it up into pieces so she could bury it in the ground, far away from the both of them.

“I realized as an 18 year old, Zeena, that all of the things that my mother and father were, they had learned how to be those things from their parents. All of this bullshit about the man being the provider or the head of the house and the mother being the sacrificial lamb, that’s bullshit. It’s all learned from generations, and its cultural bullshit. It’s not religion, its cultural shit. My mother never had any sort of claim over her own body or her life.”

“Jaan, I had no idea. I’m so sorry,” she said as she felt tears coming down her cheeks.

“I will never do that to you, Zeena. I will never be a tyrant,” he said through his own tears. “I will let you work, let you pursue your dreams and your desires. Let you write to your heart’s content, let you make important decisions for the both of us.”

With these words, Zeena stood up and walked over to the other side of the table where Shakit was sitting. She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him on the cheek.

As she did this, the moment and the busy restaurant hit her. The immediate self-consciousness and heedlessness of a public display of affection felt sharp in her chest. She looked around to make sure that no Muslims were near them, and she walked towards the other side of the table to sit down across from her crying “friend,” as she referred to him with most people. Kathy, her best friend from high school, was the only one that knew that her and Shakit were together.

Zeena looked down and realized that her salmon benedict was still untouched in front of her. She looked at Shakit’s plate, and it looked like he had licked it clean. She picked up her fork and began eating her food as Shakit composed himself. He wiped away his tears, and Zeena saw that the hollandaise sauce had soaked into the bread after having sat there for so long. She cut a bite for herself and realized that she liked the moistness. It made it easier to chew.

“Shakit, our parents fucked us up,” Zeena said. “I mean, look at your parents and their dynamic. My parents weren’t as bad but they never even talked to me about sex or relationships or anything. It was always just swept under the rug as if I’m supposed to be pretend it doesn’t exist, as if wanting love or feeling lust is something to be ashamed of.”

“It’s not,” he said with a smile.

Underneath the table, he rubbed his leg against Zeena’s. She smiled and moved her foot along his leg. She felt his dense and thick calves against her toes and remembered him in his muscle shirt while playing basketball for the collegiate intermural teams. His arms were exposed and his body glistened with sweat.

The lower part of her body was throbbing, and she knew that there was nothing more natural than what her body was telling her. They were committed to one another. They loved one another. She was in control of her body. She wanted to share this with him. The decision felt easier than it had seemed moments before. Desire was nothing to be ashamed of.

She quickly consumed her benedict and remembered that her roommate was at home for the weekend. They could have the apartment to themselves if they wanted it. The two of them left the restaurant a few minutes later after Shakit paid for their dinner. He walked around the car to open her door.

“Oh stop, I don’t need you opening a door for me,” she said with a smirk. They got into his grey Hyundai Sonata and flipped through the radio stations.

“Where to next? There’s a great Dan Flavin exhibit at the Blanton that I’ve been wanting to check out,” Shakit said.

Zeena looked at his long, kind face and she remembered all the pain he had seen and been through. She looked at him and imagined the life they would carve out together as they grew old together. She looked at him and wondered how to do what came next.

“Why don’t we head to my apartment, Shak? Sheba is out of town all weekend. We’ll have it to ourselves…”

Shakit looked at her with wide eyes through his glasses.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course,” she said. She put her hand over his and wrapped his fingers into hers as it rested on the gear shifter. “I want to be with you. I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life.”

Zeena woke up the next morning, and the sunlight coming through the half-shut blinds felt like sharp shards of glass penetrating her eyes. Every time she blinked, a searing headache felt like it was about to split her head open. She squinted and looked around her bedroom. Shakit was sleeping next to her in her queen-sized bed without a shirt on. She examined his broad shoulders and remembered their taste; they were sweet and salty at the same time.

She looked down and examined her clothes. She was wearing her favorite red and white polka dot pajamas. The front of her pajamas shirt was open and her large breasts hung loosely over her body. She remembered the feeling of Shakit touching her waist and wrapping his arms around her back. She missed his touch. She wanted him to touch her all over, but the consequences of it all felt so real and immediate.

They hadn’t had sex. She had pushed him away in the very last second as he had tried to pull her panties off of her legs. He was on top of her and she could feel that he was ready. There was a foreign hunger and thrill in his eyes as he grazed her belly with his mouth.

“Shakit, I can’t do this. I’m so sorry,” she said. She pulled herself out from underneath him and began crying. His eyes were filled with disappointment. He stood up from the bed and pulled his boxers and sweatpants over his naked body.

“I’m so sorry, Shakit,” she said through tears. “I thought I was ready, I thought I wanted this, but I can’t do this. It all feels wrong.”

She looked up at him and she could see the irritation on his face. His body was turned away from her. She curled her legs up and cried into her knees. She was entirely naked with her panties at the end of her bed.

He wouldn’t look at her, and she felt like the little girl of her childhood that used to cry when her mother would give her the silent treatment after finding out that she hadn’t cleaned her closet. She wanted to make sure that she hadn’t hurt Shakit with this, but all she could do was cry.

Embarrassment was painted across the top of his cheeks as they turned red.

“What about me feels wrong to you Zeena?” Shakit said. He looked defeated. Tired.

“Shakit, this has nothing to do with you.

“Zeena, of course this has to do with me.”

“This is different for me than it is for you.”

He gave her a look of resignation.

“I can’t do this right now, Zeena. It’s late. Let’s just go to sleep.”

Shakit walked to the other side of the bed and lay down. Zeena wiped her eyes, got up, and walked into her closet. She pulled the string to turn the light on in her small walk in closet and put her red and white polka dotted pajamas on. She crawled into bed next to Shakit and pulled the covers over her legs.

Shakit placed his arms over her waist and rested his body next to hers. After a few minutes, Shakit slowly undid the buttons of her shirt. She lifted herself up onto her elbow and turned towards him.

“What are you doing?”

He looked at her with wet eyes, and in that moment, she knew that she had shamed him or hurt him in some way that she didn’t understand.

“Just give me this. Please,” he begged.

Zeena lay back down as he slowly undid the rest of her buttons. He put his arm inside of her shirt and held her waist. They lay there in silence. After only 30 seconds, Zeena heard Shakit’s breath soften into a rhythmic beat. She stayed up and contemplated the pain she caused in someone that wanted to share his life with her, and she began crying in the arms of the man she loved.

Zeena remembered the details of last night as a foggy, distant memory. The words and scene were hazy, but the emotions felt immediate and vivid. Zeena pulled her shirt closed and buttoned it up. She stood up from the bed and walked into the bathroom, closing the door behind her.

Tears streamed down her face as the pleasure and pain of the previous night played in her head. She wondered if anyone felt as empty as she did right now, as if her glass had tipped over and the contents were dripping off the edge of the marble side table. She wanted to stop the dripping, to refill her cup, but the contents had escaped and there was no reclaiming them.

She examined her reflection in the small vanity mirror. She unbuttoned her shirt and studied her body. It felt different, as if guilt and pleasure were written all over her skin, everywhere he had touched her. She buttoned her shirt, wiped her eyes as she peed, and then walked out of the bathroom.

Zeena walked into the kitchen to begin making them breakfast. She pulled the pancake mix from atop the fridge and pulled out the milk from the fridge door. She took out the French press from the white-painted cabinets above the countertop and poured in the boiling water. As she pressed the lever down to pour the coffee into their mugs, Shakit walked into the living room and sat on the recliner. Zeena examined his broad shoulders and back muscles from over the high-bar. She wanted to take his emotional temperature, but she didn’t know where to start.

“Do you want coffee, jaan?” she asked. “I was going to surprise you with breakfast, but you woke up before I could finish the pancakes.”

Shakit turned around and looked at her.

“Ummm, no, I’m fine. I think I’m going to head out.”

“No, jaan, stay. We should spend the day together. We can go somewhere and study. I know you have an essay due on Monday.”

Shakit ignored her and came back with his shirt on. He slid his feet into his boat shoes.

“I think I just need the day for myself, Zeena. I’ll call you later.”

Zeena walked towards the front door and stopped him.

“Talk to me. Please.”

“Just let me go, Zeena.”

“Please, jaan. Just talk to me.”

“What do you want me to say, Zeena?” Shakit said. “I don’t know what to do except leave now. You don’t want me, Zeena. That was clear last night.”

Zeena walked up to Shakit and held his face in her hands. He wouldn’t meet her gaze and his cheeks were red. He didn’t look angry. He looked embarrassed.

“I’m sorry, Shakit,” she said. She stepped away from him and felt tears in her eyes again. “There’s so much pressure from everywhere, from everything. I’m sorry. This has nothing to do with you at all.”

“Who is pressuring you, Zeena?” he said, walking away from her and placing his arms over his head. She watched as the contours of his back shifted with each movement through his cotton t-shirt. “I didn’t pressure you at all. I just want us to be together, in whatever way you’re comfortable. I opened up to you yesterday and you closed yourself up. You have to figure out what it is you want, Zeena.”

“Shakit, I feel pressure from everywhere. It’s like I’m a puppet and I have different threads pulling at me, an American one, a Pakistani one, a Muslim one, a Feminist one, and at different times, each one is tugging at me and sometimes they’re all pulling at the same time, and I don’t know what to do. I’m paralyzed, suspended in the air. Then you talked to me about your family, your parents, and talked to me about our marriage, and I felt something there too. I don’t know, Shakit. It felt like there was a thread that you created yesterday, and it was tugging at me so hard last night until it wasn’t, until the other threads pulled at me as well.”

“Great. I get it now. It’s my fault. I’m just going to leave.”

“You’re not listening to me, Shakit. Please just listen. It’s not just you. It’s all the threads that just pull at me,” she said as she cried.

Shakit’s eyes softened.

“Fuck all of the strings, Zeena. What do you want?”

“All of these strings are a part of me. How do you not see that?” she said. She wanted to make him happy and make his pain go away, but her decision in the heat of the moment last night had been her own. The decision was hers.

“Can we just wait till we get married, Shakit? It feels safer that way.”

Shakit looked at her and sighed. Then, he laughed.

“Yes, we can wait,” he said. “You’re just killing me, Zeena Hussain. I can’t feel this rejected for the rest of my life. We better get married A-fucking-SAP.”

Zeena smiled through her tears. He didn’t hate her, and for now, that was enough.

With that, Shakit walked into the bathroom and left her alone in the living room. She walked towards the kitchen and thought of the previous day. Last night, it had felt so natural, easy and beautiful, until it didn’t, until the fear of everything around her consumed her. She wanted to do this the right way. It was different for a girl. Sex wouldn’t destroy Shakit, but it had the power to cripple her. He was a feminist, but he would never get that.

She stirred the contents of the pancake mix and used the ice cream scoop to pour the mix into a now burning pan of oil. She stood over the pancakes and knew that there was a cost for pleasure for a woman like her, living in a multitude of overlapping worlds. She couldn’t get past the fact that the joy of being with a man she loved bore its costs, that when he had pulled her panties off last night, it was as if he was opening her up to a pain that he would never understand. What if they never got married? What would happen then?

She looked into the bedroom and saw Shakit as he spread his hands over the comforter in her bedroom to smooth it out. He was making her bed. He looked up at her and ran his hands through his dark, dense hair.

Their eyes met from separate rooms, and she looked away.

In that moment, Zeena knew that the grey area wasn’t always easy to live in. Black and white felt safer, more wholesome, less exhausting, less risky. She had never been more certain of anything in her life.

Isbah Raja is a 26-year old writer and political consultant from Houston, TX. She has two cats that are named Olivia Pope and Hobbes. Her interests include: learning how to be vulnerable and joyous in the face of a complex world, attending live sporting events, figuring out how to workout without passing out, and backpacking through all the National Parks within the next 5 years.