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turned to me and said, “I never want to lose you.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œI want to spend the rest of my life with you.”
    We laid our janamaz, prayer rug, upon the floor facing east. After doing namaz toghether, we cupped the palms of our hands together and said our dua, prayer, into our hands. I asked God again for the suhkoon, Urdu for “peace of mind,” I’d been seeking since I was a child. We washed our faces with the palms of our hands and then phoonked upon each other. It meant to blow a breath of blessed air. Our mothers had done this to us ever since we were children.
    When I told him that he was my chand ke tukrah, he knew it meant “a piece of the moon, a saying of admiration.”
    I called my parents, giddy with new love and happiness that I had fulfilled my familial obligation. “I feel such relief,” I told my father. He told me, “A weight has been lifted off my shoulders.” A few days later, my brother woke up with a panic attack at 6:30 A.M . and jolted awake my parents.
    â€œWho is he? My sister calls one day, says she is going to be married, and we say, ‘Okay?’” he screamed. “You’re so immature!”
    Little did we recognize my brother’s wisdom.
    With my engagement, I felt as if I had created a modern picture of that old black-and-white image of my parents on their wedding day, completing the circle of our immigration with an Eastern marriage even though I was raised in the West. Not many of even our generation dared love marriages. I was one of just a few of our cousins who married in the name of love. One insisted until her parents relented. Another evaded her brother’s chase down the New Jersey Turnpike to marry in a masjid, a mosque.
    We dreamed of an outdoor wedding. I wanted it in my home state of West Virginia. His mother argued ill health. She had always dreamed of the day she would open both her front doors to welcome her daughter-in-law to her new home. I agreed to wed in his hometown of Islamabad. I tried to accept this idea.
    I was in such mania. My brother had a nervous breakdown for me, becoming seriously ill. I asked God, “Why?”
    Why this calamity upon my brother? I sat on the janamaz, the prayer rug, my dupatta pulled tightly over my hair and tucked behind my ears.Was he haunted by the curse I’d made when we visited India years earlier? “I wish you’d die!” I had said, jealous because I was sick and he was outside enjoying himself. Could trauma from the malaria that he got soon after have stayed with him for years? Allah, I was repentant.
    â€œPlease bring peace and balance to my brother’s mind.”
    Even though my fiancé had had sex with girlfriends, he and I chose to do everything but. Afterward, one time, I told the man I was about to marry, “I’m so in love with you.”
    He stirred. What sweet words would come from him?
    â€œI think I’ll jump in the shower.”
    My heart fell to the pit of my stomach as he rolled away from me.
    I wrapped my drinking glasses in the New York Times Sunday newspaper and tucked them into juice boxes I picked up from Jewel, my neighborhood grocery store. I was turning my life upside down in one month’s time. I had just left my sweet blond boyfriend. I had gotten engaged to another man. I was about to leave my dream apartment in a 1920s building off Chicago’s Lake Michigan and move into my fiancé’s apartment in Chevy Chase, Maryland, on the fifteenth floor of Highland House West, opposite a Jewish community center. It was the kind of sterile high-rise apartment building I had told my Chicago real estate agent never to show me. I went shopping for the first time at the professional woman’s store, Ann Taylor, to buy a dress to interview for a new job that I got in the Wall Street Journal Washington bureau.
    I went through with a traditional engagement ceremony on the new wooden