Death Comes for the Fat Man

5

So now I’m a married man, thought Kalim Sarhadi.

Throughout the ceremony he had felt curiously disconnected, more like a casual onlooker than one of the main participants. His even stronger sense of disconnection from Jamila hadn’t helped. A few weeks ago she’d announced that she wasn’t going to wear the white bridal gown usually favored in marriages in the West, but a traditional shalwar-qameez outfit. He’d been amused, thinking her main motive was to take the bangers by surprise, but when he saw her, he’d been struck dumb. In Western white she would doubtless have looked beautiful, but in scarlet silk richly embroidered with heavy gold thread, she was an exotic jewel. He could not believe this lovely creature was his Jamila. In his sharp gray suit and brilliant white shirt he felt shabby and out of place. It was as if he had entered one of the old stories in which a young man affianced since childhood to some unknown girl approaches his wedding day with considerable trepidation, only to discover he has been contracted to a princess.

But he didn’t want a princess, he wanted his Jamila.

The feeling of not-rightness persisted all the way to the Marrside Grange Hotel where he found himself enthroned alongside Jamila on a sofa raised on a shallow dais so that the assembled guests could see them together and approach them with congratulations and gifts. He turned toward her and she turned toward him. For a second they looked, solemn faced, into each other’s eyes, two complete strangers wondering what the future might bring.

Then she grinned and murmured, “Any chance we can skip the nosh?” and suddenly she was his Jamila again.

He relaxed and began to enjoy his wedding day.

It was, as most second- and third-generation marriages were these days, a mix of old and new, of East and West.

The nikah in the mosque had naturally followed the old established pattern but once they’d moved on to the hotel for the walima, tradition had been considerably rearranged. This enthronement was taking place before the actual walima rather than after, and the walima itself, which back in Pakistan traditionally consisted of two separate banquets, one for the men, one for the women, was going to be mixed.

“Don’t care what they do over there,” Tottie had declared. “Over here, them as pays the piper calls the tune.”

Any mutterings from fundamentalists had been stifled by the Sheikh’s ready agreement to all the arrangements Tottie wanted to make. When Sarhadi thanked him for not raising any objection, he had replied with a smile, “Fundamentalism is about substance, not form. Preserving old truths does not mean we cannot learn new tricks. And I daresay many of the old traditions will still be observed, if only by accident. For instance the one which declares that strictly speaking the walima should not take place till after the marriage has been consummated.”

This hint that he knew how far Sarhadi and Jamila had gone in their very untraditional courtship had come as a shock. More likely it was just an educated guess. Thanks be to Allah that the bangers were not so educated.

His mother had greeted news of the imam’s accord with typical directness.

“Grand,” she’d said. “Not that it ’ud have made a ha’porth of difference if the old bugger had said owt else.”

While Kalim never doubted that his mother’s had been a true conversion, it was quite clear that the spirit of Allah had supplemented rather than replaced the spirit of Yorkshire independence.

Tottie was standing alongside the sofa-throne now, taking care of the gifts of money, most of which came in the form of notes or checks, though some of the guests, harking back to the days when the bride was showered with coins, gave all or part of their offering in the form of purses stuffed with golden coins. The gift received and thanks given, any guests who looked inclined to linger too long were soon chivvied into the dining room by this redoubtable lady. There was no doubt who was in charge here. When Farrukh Khan, one of the group of young men who formed the Sheikh’s unofficial bodyguard, tried to station himself behind the sofa, Tottie tapped his shoulder and with a jerk of her head sent him packing, to join the pair of bangers who were checking on the guests entering the lounge.

The self-important and officious manner of most of these self-appointed guards got up Sarhadi’s nose, but there was no escaping the fact that some lunatic had fired a gun at the Sheikh’s car, so any occasion which involved his presence meant you had to put up with the bangers too.

By now the flow of guests was dying to a trickle and Tottie was glancing at her watch with the satisfaction of someone whose timetable was proving atomically accurate. She frowned as she saw Farrukh’s bulky frame once more approaching the sofa, but the young man ignored her and said to Sarhadi, “Got a woman outside trying to get in. Says she’s a photographer and she knows you. You not been arranging another photographer, have you? My uncle Asif’s got the job, right?”

“Yeah, sure. What’s her name?” asked Sarhadi, puzzled.

“Kent, something like that, I think. I’ll tell her to push off.”

“No, hang on,” said Jamila. “Kentmore, could it be? Kilda Kentmore?”

“That’s right.”

“Kal, you remember her? Last week-she’s the sister-in-law of that guy who was on the TV with you. We met her again at the fete. I talked with her a lot. She’s a real photographer, Kal, did fashion, knows all the top models. If she wants to photograph us, let’s ask her in.”

“What about Uncle Asif?” protested Farrukh.

“What about him?” said Jamila with spirit. “Everyone knows he’s going blind in one eye and that’s the eye he puts to the viewfinder. I say you let Kilda in.”

Farrukh looked at Sarhadi. Tottie was one thing, but he wasn’t about to start taking instructions from this mouthy girl.

Sarhadi said, “Yeah. Why not? Let her through.”