Give me some love jihad: Imagining what it is to be a young woman in a small town

We had learnt to accept and ignore them. There was a fair share of them at school too, and what choice did we have? We had heard of the one who complained too much. Within a year, she was married, to ensure there was no stain on the “community honour”. That was a word we heard often: community.

One evening, she got out on the balcony, and there he stood. Alone, with something in his hand. Where had he come from? She had never seen him around there, though something about him said he belonged. As she saw, the thing in his hand fluttered in the breeze. A note? No one had written her anything before, she wondered if anyone ever would again. He saw her looking, and gave a brief smile, barely visible from between the new fuzz around his lips, and the fast-fading sunlight. She smiled back. That was the first thing they had “shared”.

The door below her rattled just then. Her brother was getting out, for his evening round. She looked up in alarm, he saw it and quickly walked away. Her brother returned with some of his friends that evening, including the boys from the road. She didn’t get the chance to step out, there was too much to be done around the house.

Not long after, it started raining. It had been straining to all of that week. Every time she thought of checking for that note — he would have left it behind, surely — someone was always near the door. What excuse could she have given, to step out at that time of the night? She couldn’t think of any that would make sense to her parents.

Next morning, she rushed out. She found the note not too far away, in what had now become a puddle. The ink had run, the paper came apart when she lifted it. She couldn’t cry, not yet. Where there had been one note, there would be others, she thought. They would find a way, they always did in the movies we saw, in worlds so ridiculously removed from ours.

It was with anticipation that she walked to school that day. She couldn’t wait for the first break, to go to the water cooler. He wasn’t there. He wasn’t at the corner of the field either, and neither were his friends.

Her heart skipped a beat. That had been happening often at the school, children who just dropped out of class, in the middle of a school year. We talked about them, but no one gave us any answers.

A few days passed, then one day she saw him again, walking quietly behind a middle-aged man into the school administrator’s office. She watched them emerge. Did he see her? She couldn’t tell. As they came out, an envelope dropped from his hand. He now walked ahead of the man, faster and out of the school gate. She picked up the envelope. It said, “Majid Rashid. Father’s Name Iqbal Rashid. H. No. 32, Abu Lane, Meerut.”

It was two houses away from hers, in the lane they were told not to go. Everything fell into place then, that note, that night, her brother going out, his friends’ strange excitement as they came back.

She never saw Majid again. She left that lane and that town as quickly as she could. Friends who had any recollection of him got settled there, married to the boys who had once reduced them to helpless tears. She comes back sometimes, but they have nothing to say to each other. Nothing that really matters. Majid, Iqbal and the others always hang in the air.

And the words we wish we could say, but we are not those kind of girls, in that kind of town: “Give me some love jihad.”