She had a
favourite picture of him, a newspaper cutting, which she carried in her school
blazer pocket for two years until it fell out one day making her secret known
to Safi. It didn’t matter by then
though, for every second girl in her school had a picture of him hidden away
somewhere, and it didn’t seem at all abnormal.
It seemed quite healthy for a teenage girl to be smitten by an idol in
contemporary culture. By then, her love
had grown to epic proportions. She was
one of the few girls she knew who actually had contact with him, and her
personality had begun to blossom outwards from the status that brought her
within the peer group. Suleimans
occupation had ensured her the opportunity of having regular contact (albeit
innocent at this stage) with Shakes.
She was
fifteen when he made his intentions known by starting to pay courtship visits
to her home. Who could disapprove? He was the decent type;
“Could have
any girl he wanted.”
What was it
that attracted him to her? Was it her
sense of duty or her teenage infatuation and her excitability at the very sight
of him, which she would never lose throughout her life. Maybe it was all these things or maybe it was
a simple desire on his part to have a girl whom he felt he could mould into a
woman and thus ensure that she embodied all the characteristics he
desired. It’s not easy to tell. History and memories can be muddled by our
need to preserve what is contemporary.
Sometimes we’d rather not know the truth because it makes the present
impossible to bear. Too much history
weights us down because our tools of analysis are too plain to give justice to
experience. To miss the experience is to
miss it forever. No amount of digging
can reveal more than possible motivations for an action and his actions made
sense in the time they occurred. There
can be no doubt that love had taken hold, and no rational explanations need be
given to explain that.
There are
some who believe that we never truly love more than we project affections that
we have an intrinsic need to share, into somebody else. We elevate them and invest them with
qualities we wish we could enjoy forever.
When love fails, it is our failure to realise these qualities that hurt
most. We have needs, powerful needs that
drive us to the limits of sanity in order to satisfy them.
Fatima had
strong needs. She’d inherited her
father’s idealism. It reflected in her
need to order the world around her. She
had an expert feel for creating an ordered environment. Everything had its place. Strangely, this would manifest itself through
her life in many ways, the ultimate of which would be her need to find a place
into which she could fit herself. It
would be as if the need for order around her had actually been a need to define
herself constantly, so that she could be secure and sure of the constancy of
things. This had a profound effect on
the way she loved. She invested the
object of her affections with the qualities she most desired in order to
preserve her need for constancy and security.
He became the ideal man. He could
do no wrong, Shakes was everything in her life.
He would be all she would need.
It was truly a naïve teenage love, and reality was still being painted
into the years of her life.
She looked
forward to her moments alone with him.
They were mostly supervised. He
was careful to preserve the authority of her parents, obeying the traditional
manner of courtship to an admirable degree.
There was no doubting his intentions or his sincerity and he was admired
by all in her family. There were
impressed by his mixture of humility and quiet charm and it was evident in his
success that his quiet strength ran deep.
They were grateful of his demeanour and he soon became a guest in their
home.
She adored
him, doted on him, yet in her girlish way she teased him; trying here and there
to provoke a response from his seemingly immovable calm. It would be a constant theme in their
love. His contentment with himself – as
if he was an individual without a need for anyone else - would always provide
her with a challenge of sorts; she would always have to extract affection from
him. This was new to her, her family had
always openly displayed affection and hugs and kisses were exchanged between
the sexes without hesitation. For him
though, affection wasn’t for open display.
It was something that came in small doses and was dealt out in
private.
“He was
almost displaced in his nature sometimes,” she thought.
His reserve was always intact. It was an immovable veneer which never left
him, even when he angered. This was the
ultimate source of stability and security in her life; that he was immovable in
this way. It also made her feel somehow
disconnected to him though, and this would be a constant source of tension for
her, the oscillating desire for stability and the need to be closer to his
being would drive her to behave like a girl more than a woman later in their
marriage life. Knowing him and loving
him from such a young age would leave her knowing no other way to love. He knew this, and it increased his
responsibility towards her and he became, in a sense, a father to her. It was only through this that she could trust
him to be a father to her children.
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