Adeeba

"I have waited all my life for this moment! To dress up my beautiful
Adeeba for her Nikah!" Suraiya could not hold her happiness in her
daughter's marriage. Exhausted from running to and fro the
household to make sure everything was perfect, the only thing to
snap her out of it was looking at Adeeba in her wedding dress who
reminded her of her own days of youth. Adeeba wondered if
summing up your whole life to prepare for someone else's marriage
was a selfless thing to do or a very foolish one. What if she had
decided not to marry at all, would her mother's life have no purpose?

Suraiya held Adeeba to take her to the Shamiana in the courtyard

with Insha, Adeeba's sister who helped her manage the flamboyant
and heavy lehenga. It was a crimson lehenga with a green gradient
near the fall, silver meenakari and intricate stonework trailed
everywhere in serpentine waves. The moment she stepped out in the
huge beam of lights, Adeeba sparkled like she was emitting light
from her soul.

But Adeeba could not see her own aura under the huge veil. She
tried to look outside peeping beneath the veil, whatever little she
could see. All she could see were the lower halves of faces.
Everyone had a similar broad smile,

Is everyone so happy? or Is everyone following the rulebook like I

am.
Her parents were greeting the relatives who gobbled up kebabs
served by waiters in shiny blue satin waistcoats under white shirts of
all different shades. People congratulated her father, Junaid for
organizing such a grand wedding for her daughter.

"Oh, How pretty our daughter looks Junaid! Mashallah!" Someone

in the crowd said. Adeeba found it funny that someone whose voice
she didn't even recognize had such huge claims on her.

Outside the veil, everything was lively and utopian. Inside, Adeeba
felt nothing. Like two oceans that refuse to mix together only to
swirl into each other eventually. Adeeba’s eventual was much
closer, however.

"I am sorry Aman, I couldn't convince them and I can't run away
with you. I am so sorry", she had said sobbing to him.

"I won't ask you to run away. I know you. If you run away with me,
it won't be you and a part of you would be lost. What good would
that do to me, to have only a part of the woman I love? Goodbye," a
breaking voice made his held back tears evident. But he still wore
his smoldering smile. Adeeba knew at that moment that she had
loved the right man and had yet broken him.

"Adeeba Junaid Suraiya Bano, apko ye nikah qubool hai?" Adeeba

remembered the three greatest of the mortal sins the maulana taught
her when she was 9- To associate anything with Allah, to disobey
parents and to lie. She had remembered them always and still
somehow everything that happened in her life had condensed to this
very moment where she had to consciously choose one of the latter
two.

"Qubool hai" was the sin she chose.

Adeeba stayed mostly in her new room, talked in monosyllables, and

nods. Zaid's parents were doctors, so was his elder brother Zain.
Still, everyone was conservative enough for them to be okay with
the newlywed bride staying quiet.

Zaid on the other hand just had a general degree in sociology. It was
5 days into the marriage when Adeeba found out that Zaid didn't
work. It took her a hard time to sink that her husband was
unemployed. On the other hand, she was glad that he behaved
cordially with her. Didn't take him long to prove her wrong.

"What tablets are those?" He asked Adeeba about her thyroid pills.
"These are thyroid pills, pretty common." She replied casually.

"What? Why wasn't I told this earlier? I would have never married
you had I known this!" Zaid stormed out of the room.

Adeeba stood with disgust that rose from her feet and finally
consumed her trying to acknowledge that men like this existed in
2017, let alone being married to one.

It was a week after the marriage when Adeeba found Zaid ogling at
her after she had taken her shower. She felt violated with his stare
alone which had a strong stench of lust. The very night, Zaid had her
and she was colder than a dead deer on a December night. He
crawled over her, undid her clothes, and entered her. Adeeba just
stared at the ceiling, heard the creaking of mahogany and panting of
the man above her. "Huh, huh, huh!"

She laid there like a corpse.

It was the same every night, sometimes in daylight too. The house
would be mostly empty because everyone else had jobs, so he'd have
her anywhere he felt like. Often he'd bite her so hard, it should've
sucked the life out of anyone. But Adeeba was already a corpse now.

In the subsequent weeks, she would often be tossed around the house
for something she did, or maybe she did not. After a month, Adeeba
mustered the courage to tell her parents. Firstly on the phone and
then at her own home.

"You're overreacting, it happens in all marriages. Just give it some

time and everything would be okay", the ease with which they
normalized all of it was more hurtful than Zaid himself.

Adeeba lost her voice, barely ate something in a couple of days to

stay among the living but she was closer to the dead. She missed
Aman, the feeling of his soft touch, how caring he was, how his
words made sense and how worlds apart he was from Zaid.

The broad quest of the human species is to have answers, so we feel

in control. When we cannot control what's happening to them, we
try to justify it and tell ourselves lies that this is meant to be. Even
for things that were never meant to be. A thought that all of it was
somehow her fault crept in Adeeba's head, she just didn't know how.
Maybe this was the price she needed to pay for her sin? A lifetime of
suffering for one lie she was forced to say?

For two months Adeeba tried to accept her fate, but that was not how
she raised herself. Adeeba looked at herself in the mirror, her eyes
sunk deep inside their sockets, cheekbones pierced through her skin
and her chin looked dull, lips now pale and chapped. She barely
recognized her own reflection.

"Get out of here or you will wither away and die", the reflection
talked back

She thought about Aman like most days she did, but she was still too
proud to ask him for help. She felt it would be taking advantage of
him and his love for her. "It has to be you, be your own savior" The
mirror spoke again.

"I am stronger than him. I am stronger than all of this" She spoke
back to the mirror. Today she tells me that the girl in the mirrors
smiled at that moment. My dramatic ass believes her.

Adeeba snuck out her phone at midnight and texted her cousin Saba,
told her everything, down to every detail of every torment she was
living. Two days later, Saba was at her door with Adeeba's father
and her own. Adeeba's father took her home against his will, merely
on the pressure from Saba and her father.

The fight was longer and broader than Adeeba had thought and only
half of it was won. Her mother Suraiya still wanted her to return to
Zaid's home with her naive optimism that things would be better.
Adeeba new returning would be the death of her,

she refused to even consider. Her parents were stunned when she got
back home one evening with divorce papers with Saba's help.

"What would you do! Who will accept you? What did I ever do to
incur such a shame on my family!" Suraiya screamed as she sobbed.

"She will do whatever she wants, it was us who brought this to this.
This is entirely my fault; I should have listened to her. She is my
daughter and I will take care for the rest of my life if I have to!"
Junaid spoke as he firmly held Adeeba's hand. He kissed her
forehead and sobbed. By now, compassion was rare fruit for Adeeba
so tears were obvious. For the first time in months, she felt safer and
more importantly stronger.

Two days later they were all at Zaid's house where every corner was
a trigger for her but Adeeba kept her nerve. Zaid and his family
refused a divorce. "If your son does not sign the papers, I'll make
sure he stays in Jail for the rest of his life for what you have
knowingly let him do to me!"

"Look" Adeeba kept her tone as calm as the spring breeze and
started unbuttoning her shirt for everyone to see the marks on her
body.

"I'll sign whatever you want to, just wear your clothes!" He snatched
the papers from his father's hands before the third button was undone
and signed them in a flash, just like she had expected the coward to
do. Amazing how the same naked body enticed an entirely different
emotion in him. Adeeba smirked with watery eyes. Everyone in the
room was still numb from the stunt she had pulled off.

Even though she still should have sent him to Jai for the rest of his
life, Adeeba wanted no revenge. She just wanted to be free again and
she had it now.
8 months, 4 days and 11 hours later, at the age of 23. Adeeba was
free again.
"Are you really going to write about this Aarav?" She asked me the
day she told me all of this.

"It would be a shame not to," I smiled.