Destined to Be

Chapter Originals

In 1997 two women who had been friends since a bus stop in Small Heath agreed, over a kitchen table and a great deal of tea, that Nusrat's daughter would marry Farida's son. Amira Qureshi was four months old at the time and has been hearing about it since she was nine. She is twenty-eight now, a general surgical registrar with four years to go and a flat she is never in, and Hamza Sethi is thirty-one and an architect in Manchester, and the two of them have spent eleven years being extremely polite and entirely unavailable, which is a system that works right up until it doesn't. In the February her mother is diagnosed. Stage three, and the number is sixty per cent, and Nusrat Qureshi says one thing about it in eleven weeks, at two o'clock in the morning, which is that she would like to see her daughter's nikah. So Amira rings a man she has met about nine times in her life and asks him for six months. He says yes in four seconds, which she does not think about properly for another three months. And then in the July her mother's scan comes back clear.