Her Encounter | Islamic Story

Chapter 31

I poured the green tea from the electric kettle into the mug and put it on the tray with some porridge and headed to the room.

"Here you go," I said loudly while putting the tray on Aiza's bedside table. She only groaned in response and pulled the duvet higher on her head.

"You have already missed your second prayer; don't want to miss the third one. Do you?" I asked knowing it would wake her up.

"What?" She shot up and looked at the window probably to check the time of the day.

"Just kidding. It's eleven. You're fine."

"Not a nice thing to joke about," she said while stifling a yawn.

"Just as nice as it is to ignore the hard work of a friend," I replied and pointed to the breakfast I had made her. Her gaze went to the side table and she made an annoyed noise.

"Can I not get something else to eat?" she whined.

"Yes, you can but not before you're healthy."

"You're such a Mom," she said and pulled her tongue out at me.

"Yes, I am and now finish this up."

"Fine." She got up, went to the washroom and came back a minute later and began eating.

I had to wash my clothes so I took some detergent from a cabinet and got to work in the washroom. In our first week here, Aiza got quite sick. There wasn't any doctor in Vemen Society so I gave her the typical remedies and she somewhat got better but every now and then she still happened to get a stomach or head ache, cramps or nausea. Fatigue, well, it was a constant problem. It scared me but we were coping and precisely because of her condition, for two months we had been confined to this place.

The advantage of living here was that we could go to shops and even sometimes go for a short walk because Vemen Society seemed such a farfetched possibility to where a person like me or Aiza would go. Thankfully Aiza and I were able to get some more clothes here because during the visit to the cabin, almost all were torn from somewhere.

With Aiza getting sick, it was hard to ask for different sorts of food from the hotel management, so we took another room exactly as our previous one with the exception of a small kitchen which was the size of the cabin. We did the grocery shopping ourselves and cooked by ourselves too, quite happy to be ridden from the canned and hotel food.

After washing the clothes, I went out through the fire escape door and hung my clothes on the grill.

Aiza was washing the dishes in the kitchen when I came back inside which infuriated me because a bit of strain and she gets sick again. I quickened to the kitchen, rebuked her and pulled her into the room on her bed and went to wash them myself.

It was basically these times, when I was not with her that my mind lingered back to how her life had been in her childhood, her early teens. Which explained why she was so secretive and had no friends.

But now around me, Aiza was getting more comfortable than ever. She opened up so easily to me now, told me things that were better hidden. It was so hard to take in those awful details before but one gets immune to things when he's exposed to so much of it.

Unlike me, she doesn't wallow in her pain. She channels it out through her prayers and now even through me. She says she feels better now, now that she has let everything she went through out aloud.

A question had been nagging me since she told her story; why was it Islam she chose as a religion? She clearly followed nothing when she lived in that hell. Was it because Islam appealed to her or was it because she was forced to accept it as she had to live with a Muslim family? I was going to ask her this but when, I didn't know.