Scribbleriana

If Kalsuma had had any doubts about Azhar’s interest in her and why he had opted for an arranged marriage they were removed on one particular day. Kalsuma had felt Azhar’s interest was indeed serious and genuine when he sent her a message that day panicking that he could no longer see her on his Whatsapp messenger.  Kalsuma had no idea why she wasn’t showing up. Even if she had blocked him he would still be able to see her name appear, while her picture would be removed. These were the joys of modern communication.  You could block someone on a messenger application to show them that you no longer wanted to speak to them.  You didn’t need to write this out, let alone verbally communicate the message to them.  As the number of people you might speak to was increasing with globalised technologies, the methods of removing someone from your life was also easier. You could unfriend, unfollow or block someone if you had the mind to.   However, in this case Kalsum...

Kalsuma had met so many different kinds of guys she could write a novel about which types of men were unsuitable and should be avoided by a girl looking for commitment.   In the beginning she had courted the professional ones. The architects, lawyers and bankers. These were fairly good looking prospects, mainly on the short side because she was under the impression that she, being 5’3, was a short Bengali girl. She soon found out that she was in fact not short, but quite tall for a Bengali and her dates were unhappy that she was the same height as them or almost as tall as them.  You are not as much of a midget as I thought you would be one of her first ever dates told her. They never saw each other again.  It might have been to do with her height but it might have been how she kept accidentally gushing about her crush on Tom Cruise over dinner. It was her nerves and she was trying to assure him that she didn’t care about height, but understandably he didn’t take it ...

“Our second son works as a manager in a bank and his wife is a Nurse.  She is here with us of course.  Our fourth son is at university and my son Juber as you know has completed a law degree”. It was a chance to display the successes of her family and Mrs Islam was not one to let go of an opportunity to list each of her children’s occupations including professional titles or what she understood of them.  She wasn’t one of the more staunch mothers who would not have shied away from mentioning which university her children had attended being knowledgeable about University league tables and the prestige attached to particular faculties of higher education.  Mrs Islam wasn’t an egotistical woman but she discussed her children’s occupations and achievements as much as any other family or mother would coming from a Bengali household; with a certain amount of pride and with the simple satisfaction of saying her children were educated.  It did not really matter whet...