No Sex in the City by Randa Abdel-Fattah Read Free Book Online Page B

understood my blessings. Not in any material sense, but simply because I enjoy the freedom and dignities living in peace brings. I never appreciated that properly until I met people like Sonny and Faraj and Miriam and Ahmed and Christina, who have had the most basic human rights denied them. And so, each time I meet them, they refocus the lens through which I view my life.

Seven
    I’m not one of those girls who needs a man to complete her. If that was the case I would have settled for the first, fifth or tenth guy I’ve met or been set up with.
    I want to settle down. But I don’t want to settle. Ha! I should get that made up into a bumper sticker. That way, at every family event, when the aunties and uncles interrogate me about why I’m not married yet, I won’t have to squirm in my seat any more. I’ll just say, ‘Let’s take this discussion to the garage. Meet my bumper bar.’
    I’m not bitter about the fact that I attend more engagement parties and baby showers than girls’ nights out, and that most of my friends and relatives are either recently married or having their first babies (I know all there is to know about pelvic floor exercises and midwives with farmers’ hands). In fact, I am genuinely happy for my friends, and the interior decorator in me secretly loves seeing coordinated crockery and linen strewn around a room filled with wrapping paper and the sound of friends laughing. As for baby showers: who doesn’t love a newborn’s singlet or a pretty basket of baby shampoo and rattles?
    And I can even handle the married girls – the ones who used to moan and groan about never finding Mr Right – jostling me and joking about how they miss the days when they were ‘free of responsibility’ and how they’re jealous of my single status – wink, nudge, giggle.
    I can definitely handle all that with grace and good humour. But for the love of God, I can’t handle these three things:
    1. being forced to watch the unedited version of a wedding
    2. being subjected to endless hours of baby talk (eg: he pooped five times today; she got out of bed at one, then two, then two-twelve, then three, then three-fifteen, then four; I mashed the potato, pumpkin and peas and added organic stock, and then I forgot myself and added salt and so I started all over again, because according to page twelve of
How to Cook Organic Food for Your Baby
, if you add salt you might as well add gin, that’s how bad it is)
    3. being told I haven’t found love because I’m too fussy
    So you can imagine the torture I’m enduring tonight. My parents and I are visiting old family friends. One daughter, Sevil, has just returned from her honeymoon, and another, Arzu, has just had a baby. We’ve been invited to watch the wedding video (three hours long, plus the highlights DVD).
    It’s been forty minutes, although we’re only thirty minutes into it because Sevil’s father insists on rewinding any scenes we appear in and then pausing so that we can relive the moment and drink in a shot of ourselves yawning or taking a massive bite out of the entrée, sauce dribbling down our chin.
    ‘Penang and Langkawi were perfect,’ Sevil gushes.
    ‘Did you do any water sports?’ I ask.
    ‘Esma, look at Sevil in this scene!’ Sevil’s dad cries. ‘Look at how well she dances!’
    ‘Yes, she looks great!’ I cry, then turn back to Sevil. ‘I heard the jetskiing is awesome there.’
    ‘It was fantastic, although there were jellyfish and—’
    ‘I’m not sure if I should be demand feeding or feeding every three hours,’ Arzu interrupts as she burps her baby. ‘But my nipples are seriously aching,’ she whispers, leaning closer to Sevil and me. ‘They’re all cracked, and honestly, when she latches on it’s like a million knives being stabbed into the tips of my—’
    ‘Esma! You’re not watching,’ Sevil’s mum says. ‘You have to watch this part. You remember when they lifted Sevil up onto the chair and she nearly