Anarkali on Eid Night in Manchester

The aunties' voices rise and fall through the floor — laughter, then someone's name repeated, then the particular cadence of a story that has been told before. Nadia sits on the edge of her mother's bed and does not move to change out of her anarkali. The bedside lamp throws a low amber circle on the ceiling. She has been holding the glass dildo for two minutes now, maybe three, the cold of it migrating slowly into her palm, and she is thinking about Tariq.

Not the Tariq of now, who exists somewhere in her phone as an unread contact. The Tariq of two Ramadans ago, who had sat two seats down from her at the community iftar table and broken his fast with the same date she had reached for, their hands not quite touching, and who had looked at her after with an expression she had spent twenty-three months failing to correctly name.

The anarkali is copper-green silk-cotton, embroidered at the hem in a pattern her mother chose. It is too formal for sitting like this, knees pressed together, the wide skirt settling in heavy folds across her thighs. She is still wearing her earrings. She had come upstairs to change and instead sat down, and the sitting had turned into this — the glass in her palm warming by degrees, her spine not quite straight, the dupatta sliding off her left shoulder until its weight rests across her lap like something placed there deliberately.

She is not going to think about him. She is already thinking about him.

She exhales through her nose, slow, and the sound is smaller than she expected — almost nothing. Below, someone laughs at the punchline, and then the voices settle back into their tide. The lamp. The amber. Her earrings catching light at the edge of her vision.

The glass is still cold where she hasn't held it. She turns it in her palm, and the untouched side meets her fingers and she goes still for a moment with the contrast — her own warmth on one face, the unspent cold on the other. Like that. Like exactly that.

Her knees are together. The anarkali falls all around her, its weight distributed, covering her completely. She watches the door, which is closed. She watches the ceiling, where the amber circle sits. She looks down at her own lap, the dupatta, the folds of copper-green, and she understands that she is in the moment before deciding, which is not the same as not having decided.

Her right hand is still. Her left hand has found the edge of the fabric at her thigh — not lifting it, only resting there, aware of the resistance of the embroidered hem under her fingertips, the specific stiffness of the gold thread.

The voices rise through the floor. Someone is agreeing with something. Nadia's breath comes in, and goes out longer than it came in, and she does not move yet, and the cold glass waits in her right hand, and she lets herself want this for one more moment before she allows it.