Love Across Borders by Naheed Hassan, Sabahat Muhammad Page A

throat.
“Thank you.”
    Later, as Shambu drove back
in an oppressively empty car, Munira converted her currency and
passed through the security scanners, clutching the book close to
her. For this time, this was enough. She would wrap Salim’s words
around her, his simple, alive scribbles, his forgotten, resurrected
doodles, to be preserved with cloves and naphthalene balls, to be
recalled on rainy evenings, to celebrate with the fragrance of
the champa tree outside her window, to be stretched and pulled so they
may suffice another twelve months.

    ∞

 
    ABOUT PERVIN
SAKET
     
    Pervin Saket writes poetry, short fiction and
screenplays. She is the author of a children's
series 'Adventures @ Miscellaneous Shelf Four' and of
a collection of poetry ‘A Tinge of Turmeric’. Her work
has been featured in 'Breaking the Bow', 'Page Forty
Seven', 'Kalkion', 'Kritya', 'Perspectives', 'Katha',
'Sampad', and ‘Ripples’, among others. Pervin conducts writing
workshops for children at the British Council and also works with
teachers to integrate stories within classrooms.
    Pervin engages with stories that are subversive,
allegorical or give voice to those silenced by history. She is
particularly drawn towards the politics that underlie what is
personal and private. ‘Twelve Months’ was written to explore a
quiet love stretching across volatile borders, hoping to eventually
transcend the boundaries we draw around ourselves.
    ***
    What Kind of Book…

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from cover to cover? An Indireads’ novella, of course!

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    An Unlikely Romeo
    M M GEORGE

    Romeo. What kind of a name was
that? When he had first walked into her little shop and offered her
his services as cleaner, deliveryman, general dogsbody, anything,
she had asked him his name.
    ‘Romeo,’ he had said unblinkingly,
just looking at her with that passive brown gaze.
    She had quelled a smirk at the
sheer audacity of the name. Romeo? And this small, brown-skinned
man, looking patiently at her with his ancient eyes? A more
unlikely Romeo it would have been hard to find, she had thought as
she handed him the mop.
    But now, as she strived to shorten
her stride to keep two paces behind him, the name irritated her.
She couldn’t have said why, but the irritation persisted all the
way to where they were going.

    ***

    Nafisa had come to the UK as
a young bride of seventeen. She and her family in Pakistan had been
overwhelmed by her good luck at having been chosen by a vilayati family for their son. Simply put, she was plain looking.
Her parents had despaired of ever getting her married. It was only
when she reached London that she learnt that it was her cooking
skills that had earned her the ‘Missus’ tag. And she was made to
work hard to hold on to it.
    Mazhar’s family ran a takeaway shop
and they desperately needed a cook, a cheap one. UK immigration
rules did not permit them to import a cheap cook from Pakistan, so
they brought Nafisa instead. Nafisa cooked from morning till
evening and then worked late into the night, cleaning up. For
years.
    Nafisa hardly ever saw
Mazhar. He did the deliveries for the takeaway. She stayed in the
kitchen. She knew his smell though, from the rough, awkward nightly
couplings that left her sore and hurting. When he was arrested and
then put away for delivering more than just biryani to his
clients, she was not really troubled. All she thought was that she
could now, perhaps, enjoy a few hours of untroubled sleep. Till the
day Mazhar’s father summoned her and told her to pack her
things.
    “Get out!” he said, tersely. She
had been divorced, he told her. By then, other daughters-in-law had
arrived, the wives of Mazhar’s brothers. She had become
dispensable, a burden, just another mouth to feed.
    She wept a bit and then
mused, it could only get better. After all, thanks to her marriage,
she had acquired a British passport. She looked at the gold