Late at night, when Zaina was pouring her tortured thoughts into beautiful designs, Rabia stood guard over a steaming pot of chicken akni, which Zaina could eat when she came home from campus the next day. While the pot whistled, as scented steam escaped through the tiny gap in the lid, Rabia brought Zaina toasted-cheese sandwiches and coffee.

  Rabia made sure that she fed Zaina’s soul so that it was strong enough to realise she would always be around if Zaina needed her.

  CHICKEN AKNI

  ½ onion, thinly sliced

  ½ teaspoon jeera seeds

  3 tablespoons sunflower oil

  1 tomato, liquidised

  ½ teaspoon chilli powder

  ¼ teaspoon turmeric

  ½ teaspoon Osman’s Extra Special Dhania & Jeera Powder

  2 cups basmati rice, washed

  2 teaspoons salt

  3 potatoes, peeled and quartered

  5 cups water

  1 pot chicken curry minus the potatoes (see page 24)

  dhania to garnish

  • In a large pot, braise the onions and jeera seeds in the oil until golden, about 10 minutes.

  • Add the tomato, chilli powder, turmeric and dhania-jeera powder, and simmer for 2 minutes.

  • Add the rice, salt, potatoes and water, and cook on high until holes form on top of the rice, about 20 minutes.

  • Add the chicken curry and mix gently. Steam on low heat until all the water has evaporated and the potatoes are soft, about 20 minutes.

  • Garnish with dhania. Serve hot, accompanied by raitho.

  Serves 4

  RAITHO

  ½ onion, thinly sliced

  1 tomato, chopped

  3–4 slices cucumber, chopped

  salt and chilli powder to taste

  sprigs of mint or dhania leaves

  ½ carton maas (sour milk)

  • Combine all ingredients and mix well.

  • Put in the fridge to chill for at least 1 hour.

  • Serve in a glass bowl as an accompaniment to akni.

  Makes about 2 cups

  14

  THE THEFT HAD LEFT A bitter taste in the doughnut that was Summer Terrace. Nevertheless, the wedding was almost here. ‘Lucky it happened now,’ said Mrs Hassim to Precious one morning, echoing old cultural sentiments that a misfortune in the run-up to a huge event cleansed it of further misfortune. It was a way of being grateful for everything Allah sent your way, even the bad.

  Mrs Hassim and many of the older women believed a small loss saved one from a larger one – hence Mrs Hassim’s contribution to the group WhatsApp conversation, ‘Make shukr. A big bad luck went away. Thank Him.’ Sometimes, when Precious broke a glass while washing it or burned the edge of Mrs Hassim’s scarf while ironing, rather than get angry, Mrs Hassim would look upwards and say, ‘Subhanallah, may Allah protect us from a greater loss which may have afflicted us.’

  Precious liked this about her madam. She wasn’t attached to possessions.

  While kunchas and jewellery did stir the notion that a wedding incurred a lot of costs and the accumulation of possessions, the main reason the women were so excited about that wedding was that marriage brought forth Allah’s blessings. Getting married wasn’t just an earthly ceremony; it was often said that marriage fulfilled half your deen.

  Despite the bitterness of the theft, the wedding brought neighbours together in a jubilant way. Aunty Shaida decorated pure-butter biscuits with elaborate white and dark chocolate swirls, topped with a flourish of glitter, and baked dome-shaped biscuits filled with nuts and covered in shards of hazelnut chocolate and sprinkles of coconut.

  Laila had been tasked with baking the wedding cake, which would be a triple-tiered naked creation, exposing layers of carrot cake between fluffy cream-cheese frosting. Of course, this had to be explained in detail to Ruki and Mrs Hassim, who were horrified at the word ‘naked’, and whose minds strayed to ghastly imaginings of naked bride-and-groom cake toppers.

  Rabia would be arranging the flowers; white calla lilies and yellow roses would adorn the guests’ tables and be draped around the cake table. She’d handpicked the yellow flowers that would sit on the lapel of the men’s suits, and the white lilies that would grace the bridal bouquet. Each rose would have a diamanté pin in the centre, so it would catch the light in a magical way when Zara walked down the aisle.

  Ruki was quieter than usual. Her medication made her feel weak at times.

  Shirin wondered if Ruki was okay, but couldn’t gather the courage to go and ask her. Besides, her pride stood in her way, like a hurdle. But she kept an eye on Ruki’s gate and made sure nobody was lurking around.

  Mr Bhoola issued a curt letter of apology to the maids whose privacy he’d invaded, but he also made it clear that there would be some measures put in place to ensure security was increased in all areas of the building.

  Zaina emerged from her state of limbo. Her mother’s food had indeed fed her soul. She wasn’t happy with the way things stood with Imraan or her mother, but she did feel a little more like herself.

  The wedding week dawned like a bright beacon of hope for better days to come. The excitement was palpable and almost eclipsed the tension in Summer Terrace.

  On the Monday, a few days before the mehndi party, Zaina sat at Aunty Julie’s dining table across from the bride-to-be. Zaina didn’t know Zara’s mother, Aunty Julie, very well, but the little she did know painted a picture of a pudgy woman who wore too much make-up and turned on the waterworks if something didn’t go her way. Recently she’d become even more dramatic, retelling the theft incident to anyone who would listen.

  Zara had been living in Cape Town for the last three years, pursuing a degree in fashion design. But when she’d called home to inform her parents of her engagement to Doctor Ahmed Meer (Aunty Julie said it as if ‘Doctor’ were his first name), her mother had insisted that the wedding be held in Durban, near her parents’ home, as per family tradition. Zara had also agreed, albeit somewhat reluctantly, to all the hennaed adornments and pre-wedding posing for photographs with overly eager family members and, of course, her teary-eyed mother.

  Applying a bride’s wedding henna was an intimate process amid the celebration of the mehndi party, where guests also had a bit of henna applied to their hands. The patterns Zaina drew would stay with the bride through the most sacred part of her life. For some, the stain lasted over a month; for others, the pattern stayed for just a week. An old wives’ tale said that the darker the henna and the longer it stayed, the more your mother-in-law loved you.

  Zaina was used to choosing the mehndi pattern with the bride. She scrolled through some pictures on her phone, waiting for Zara to smile at a design she liked.

  In the blue glow of the cellphone light, Zara was beautiful. Zaina felt like a frumpy schoolgirl next to this graceful specimen with her manicured nails, and self-conscious about her own nails, which she’d bitten since high school.

  ‘Hmm … I want something very minimal,’ Zara purred.

  ‘Zara bheti.’ Ruki intervened, pulling up a chair next to the bride-to-be. Ruki seemed to have made herself comfortable in the wedding house, as if she was a gift to the bride’s family. ‘This is your wedding day. This is the only day you can go wild with mehndi, huh.’

  Aunty Julie smiled. ‘You know my Zara is very simple.’

  ‘Oh-hoh. Simple dimple. And Zaina, you must write her husband’s name in the mehndi, don’t forget. Old school, huh?’ There was Ruki’s mischievous grin again; it was good to see her in a jovial mood.

  Zaina laughed. It was an old custom for the bride to tantalise her husband on their wedding night by having his name hennaed somewhere on her ankle, back or arm, and it was his job to explore her body to find it. Nowadays, though, brides preferred to henna the groom’s initial on their palm, and have a very simple design of henna around the palm and wrist.

  Joyce rescued them all from Ruki’s further teasing by calling her back to their flat.

  Zara sighed. ‘I can’t wait till this is all over,’ she said quietly to Zaina, her lips pursed. ‘I just wanted a small nikkah and it’s turned into a big hall wedding with people I don’t even know.’

  ‘So why didn’t you have it the way you want it?’ asked Zaina, sketching a design onto a page of her notebook.

  ‘Honey, we have these weddings for our parents. Do you think this circus of a wedding was my idea? Hell, no. I wanted a small wedding on Camps Bay beach with twenty guests. Not this palaver with taking out nazar and mehndi and all this Indian guilt. And the people they’ve invited! Just because someone was nice to us twenty years ago, we now owe them an invitation.’ Zara shook her head. ‘For some reason, my mom and dad need to show others they can pull off a wedding. Still,’ Zara said, looking philosophical, ‘at least I’m marrying the guy I chose. A lot of people end up marrying people their parents choose. So, whatever. All I care about is marrying him.’ She gave Zaina a look and laughed. ‘And that I must make my mother happy. Her intentions aren’t bad, her priorities are just a little screwed up. But at the end of the day, she’s my mom. She gave me as much freedom as I wanted, so why can’t I give her this? Anyway. Do you have anyone special?’

  Zaina was a little dumbstruck by such wise words coming out of a sparkly girl’s mouth. ‘Er, well, yes, but I don’t know where it’s going,’ she answered truthfully.

  ‘Girl, if a guy wants you, he’ll make it known. You won’t have to second-guess it. Don’t settle.’

  Easy for you to say, Zaina thought. ‘Maybe you’d like a little bit going up past your wrist?’ she asked, drawing some flowers and vines on the page.

  Smiling half-heartedly, Zara slumped back into the chair. She seemed tired from all the words she’d spoken earlier. ‘Anything.’

  Zaina wondered if she also treated her fiancé with such aloofness. Maybe he liked it. Who knew what Muslim boys liked, anyway.

  Indian guilt. It was the first time Zaina had heard someone say it out loud, much less give a name to it. She’d always wondered what that feeling was – the desire to be your own person and the cultural anchors that kept you chained to tradition and the eternal question: What would people say?

  The pattern Zaina sketched was simple and beautiful, and Zara was happy with it, but Zaina left with much more than a decision about a henna design. She’d never thought a sparkly girl would make her think of her mother in such a new light. Rabia wasn’t a bad person – Zaina had always known this. Deeper than that was the way Zara was so unselfish in her love for her mother. It made Zaina feel incredibly guilty.

  Zaina had been working tirelessly every night since meeting Imraan in the architecture studio, losing herself in the beams, double volumes and skylights of the writers’ retreats. She’d even managed to make the balsawood models a bit more realistic with some oasis trees and tiny LED lights.

  It had been good having Rabia around, cooking and bringing her comforting food, mothering her. Rabia had even made her two-minute noodles with the piccalilli sauce she detested, just because Zaina liked it that way. They didn’t need to speak to each other to convey their concern for each other. It was just by being there that they took comfort in each other’s presence.

  Zaina had looked at her mother differently since talking to Zara – more appreciatively. She was going to tell Billy about it today.

  As Zaina drove down the Esplanade to fetch Billy on her way to campus, she thought of the sparkly girls she’d always envied. Zara was one of them. Howard College was like the modelling agency of the university, and Shepstone was its catwalk.

  The Shepstone building was essentially a long, wide corridor with lecture theatres on either side. Billy and Zaina would sit in a little concrete alcove under the stairs and watch people go by. There were three categories of students. First were the ultimate students, who didn’t care much for fashion and wore takkies and track pants. In most cases, they carried backpacks strapped tightly to their bodies as if they were jetpacks that could carry them off into an alternate universe. They were extremely intelligent and seemed to be magnetically drawn to the library or the science building. Sometimes they wore white lab coats with pens sticking out of the pockets or leaking ink into the corners of them.

  Then there were what Billy called the ‘averagers’, who shopped at Mr Price, dabbled with mascara now and then, or carried a stylish bag, but could never quite seem to pull off perfectly sleek hair or a chiselled figure. They usually walked hurriedly through Shepstone, a little overwhelmed by the enormity of the space and being in the centre of it. Zaina was an averager. Even though she’d attended an Islamic private school and had come into regular contact with the cool crowd, she’d somehow failed to absorb their chilled nonchalance. Girls like Zaina would always be ‘regular, never striking’, as her father’s sister had told her years ago.

  Then there were the sparkly girls. Seeming to radiate glitter, they breezed through the campus buildings as if they had a band of paparazzi following them. Within this category were girls who knew they were sparkly and those who didn’t realise their sparkly status. Zaina didn’t care much for those who knew they were sparkly: they seemed to think everything and everyone else was dull in comparison to their lightness. They were fair and swan-like, with perfectly manicured nails and gleaming white teeth. They were waif-like, with long unkempt curls the magazines now called sexy ‘bedroom hair’. They’d put hours of effort into dressing, yet they managed to pull off a careless calm as if they’d put no thought into it at all, as if their high-waisted skinny jeans and lacy coral dresses had simply found each other in the cupboard.

  Naaz Paruk was the epitome of the sparkly girl. With her long eyelashes, she often looked down on Zaina as she got into her Lexus and Zaina got into a taxi after lectures.

  The sparklies sat together near the stairs that led to the car park, taking selfies, obsessed with their profile pictures on Facebook. Boys swarmed around them like bees, the scent of superficially sweet honey enticing them.

  These boys were themselves those perfect specimens created by God to stand as benchmarks for the rest of the human race. Zaina had seen them at the Shake Shack or lazing at the beach, and knew she could never reel in one of those, for her unmanicured fingernails would scare them off.

  What bothered Zaina most about the sparklies was that they seemed to have encountered nothing but good fortune in their lives, never once having had a crisis except perhaps for a broken nail. She remembered listening to a sparkly boy and a sparkly girl talking in front of her on an escalator. He was complaining that his hair colour was a shade darker than he would’ve liked. And the girl recommended that he go to her hairdresser to sort out his ‘auburn disaster’. Zaina decided that this must have been the worst event to ever have occurred in the sparkly boy’s life.

  Billy was a sparkly girl who wasn’t aware of her sparkliness; Zaina liked this about her friend. She was incredibly unself-aware. Sure, she had opinions about everyone else, but she didn’t think much about herself. She was quirky and straightforward, and completely herself in any kind of company. Her air of self-confidence made her shine – today, literally: she’d put together an ensemble of silver tights, a grey top, a silver bag and silver rhinestoned shoes that made her glint in the sunlight like a piece of foil as Zaina pulled up to the curb on the Victoria embankment.

  ‘Whoa!’ Zaina exclaimed, putting on her sunglasses.

  ‘Don’t judge me,’ Billy said, throwing herself into the passenger seat, with an array of balls painted to resemble the planets stuck to a glittering black A3-sized styrofoam board, and a platter of weirdly shaped sausage snacks labelled ‘Flying Saucers’. ‘It’s for a play called In Space. It’s for the children.’

  Zaina laughed. ‘Wow. Just wow. I need a picture of this!’

  Billy posed awkwardly while Zaina clicked a quick picture and a taxi hooted impatiently behind them.

  They drove towards the university tower, which seemed to preside over Durban like the spire of the grand cathedral. Zaina drove through the large, looming boom gates of the campus and parked the little white car in her usual spot in the parking lot under a flowering tree. Billy tumbled out like a silver bauble and sped off in the direction of the drama department.

  Zaina made her way up the sweeping stairs, carrying four small balsawood models atop a masonite board, and her sketches in her barrel-shaped bag over her shoulder. She was due to see her supervisor, Dr Tannen, in the Tower Building.

  It was quiet. All the undergraduates were busy with exam preparations. Zaina enjoyed the tranquillity of having a part of such an epically proportioned place all to herself. Silence found its way towards her once again. It tapped her on the shoulder and made its way up the stairs with her, holding her hand in public on the way to Dr Tannen’s pale-green office on the sixth floor. Zaina and silence were like lovers who’d woken up to each other after an eternal slumber.

  Pat Tannen’s design space was on the seventh floor, at the top of the towers, and that’s where you could usually find her. But today’s meeting would take place in her office, which was crammed with books, and small enough that the academic could just turn around in her swivel chair to reach any volume with ease.

  Zaina never really looked forward to these meetings with her supervisor. She always felt like a first grader, asking a brilliantly fluent academic to pan for gold in the muddy mush of her work. Nervously, she sat down across from Dr Tannen, who reminded Zaina of an overgrown prefect, with her brown bob and love for white shirts and tartan skirts. Zaina carefully placed her masonite board and some of her sketches on the piles of books on the overcrowded desk, then sat down and waited expectantly.