UNHOLY MATRIMONY

The last thing Yasmin reminisced was waking up in hospital phasing in and out of consciousness every now and then. Despite the fact that she had no idea how she ended up there, she remembered being struck by this horrendous feeling of terror, and a sharp pain across her chest every time she regained consciousness. Her blurry vision would spot the doctors and nurses rushing around in sheer panic then relief after resuscitating her. One time she overhead the doctor confiding in one of the nurses, telling her her case was hopeless and how she was not going to make it. Yasmin’s heart sank when she heard those dreadful words that she bitterly wept when everyone left. On the days that followed, the young woman started drowning in sadness and she was slowly sinking to the bottom of an ocean of desolation that  she started to believe she was going to perish along with her forgotten dreams,  but deep within her was a flame, a flicker of hope that sought to triumph over her despair, a flame ignited by the blurry memories of a young man in his early twenties whom she would wake up and find sitting next to her bed holding her hand in his with a smile on his face. Sometimes she would wake up to flowers, and a get well soon card, sometimes he would leave a few novels for her to read when she woke up and a box of expensive chocolates. Despite the fact that she did not know who this man was, his visits gave her great comfort that she became hopeful she was going to recover and indeed one day she woke up for good  with a nurse attending to some cuts and bruises that were clearly visible all over her arms and legs. Her bulging eyes were sunken with dark circles around them. Her frame was thin. Her body was weak. She struggled to sit up feeling very tired and shaky and then all of a sudden a wave of memories flashed back in her mind, unwanted memories of a frightful   accident were she had saved a man from meeting a fate most gruesome  to  all yet embraced by some,  a fate  dreaded by most….death.  She remembered the night's events like it had happened just yesterday.  Yasmin had been living in the city for almost two years. She travelled all the way from her home town to find work.  The night had been cold with a little drizzle. It had been raining the whole day but at least the sun had been out. Now the night was chilly and Yasmin was stranded, hungry and homeless with no money. The young woman was about two weeks shy away from her twenty- second birthday. She'd been in the streets for almost two weeks and had spent all her money almost down to her last cent on food and hotels and now she only had enough left to catch the bus back home, which arrived at 5 a.m. She had been sitting at a bus stop for most of the night clutching her backpack and suitcase with both hands shaking, from the cold, her blue coat drenched form the rain. It was almost 4.30 a.m. A dog could be head barking in a residential building nearby and also two voices of a quarrelling couple. Slowly the lights in the building started to turn out. Out of boredom she decided to go for a little stroll. She had gotten used to walking in the night that fear didn't bother her much at all. She struggled to remember some details but the most haunting ones flooded her mind……… like the moment she had come across some pieces of broken concrete and shattered glass,    pieces of fabric that seemed to be leather in white smeared in blood, a few broken green bottles of alcohol and a dented expensive car door casually laying on the ground near a broken ledge on the  bridge that had been  violently crashed. How she had plunged sixteen feet into the cold dirty waters of the river with hopes of saving whoever was in the sinking rubble that was once an expensive blue Lamborghini. The last thing she had felt was a gut-wrenching feeling of fear of suffocating underwater, as her blurry vision spotted the man swimming towards the bank leaving her to die. A sudden   scream then pierced the silence and then it dawned on her that it was just a memory, when she felt the nurse's strong grip holding her down the gurney while she tried to calm her in a quiet voice.  Yasmine's head hurt terribly. "Finally, you're awake!" The nurse whispered with a smile on her face. "How long have I been here?"  Yasmin murmured in a hoarse voice. She seemed to have a terrible fever and her temperature was very high.  "You have been in a comma for three and a half weeks; you need to take some rest because you have a very high fever." The nurse replied irritably waving her hand telling her to lie back on the gurney.  "Almost a month?  Is the man doing ok?"  "What man?" The nurse replied with a puzzled look on her face.  "The man I saved from drowning after the accident. Wasn't he brought in here with me?" She asked irritated at the nurses reply. She was eager to know if the man had survived because he had been bleeding terribly.  "No there was no man dear, you were brought here by some stranger who said he saw you jump over the bridge trying to commit suicide." The nurse retorted with a disappointed disapproving   look on her face.  Yasmin could not believe her ears! She would have never tried to commit suicide; the thought of death alone was appalling enough to nauseate her and to make her lose her consciousness. Had it all been just a dream?  An illusion? Had there really been an accident that night? Did she really see that car floating in the water? " You must have imagined it, after all you hadn't eaten for days." "What do you mean I must have imagined it I know what I saw!" She retorted this time annoyed thinking the nurse was trying to play a trick on her, or maybe the man had passed and she did not want to disclose the heart-breaking news to her. That all her effort had bee for nothing and the man couldn't make it? Looking at her terrible state the nurse felt sorry for her.  “Just have some rest ok? " The nurse said, this time with a serious oak on her face. "But I remember clearly I saved a man from an accident." "Listen madam, you really need to take some rest like i told you there was no man or accident , you should be happy and grateful some kind stranger risked his life to save yours, he's also paid all your hospital bills for the rest of your stay here as well."  The nurse replied really trying not to lose her temper. She had seemed like a quiet person with a cool temperament.  "Not another word from you or I'll ask the doctor to put you on sedatives. "  That was enough to make Yasmin quiet but she just couldn't shake off that awful feeling that something bad had happened to the man and that the nurse was trying to hide something from her.                                              Finally, Yasmin was discharged from the hospital after a few more days and the doctor handed her a note from her rescuer written in blue ink in Arabic. 'It was a pleasure for me saving your life beautiful stranger, ' ...it read. ' Please visit me on this address for any help you might need,' then an address and name followed printed in capital letters but in black ink.  "He's quite a nice man you know," the doctor a short man in his mid fifties, balding head with a few strands of white hair and a long beard said, wearing a faint looking smile while glaring at her in pity.  " It's not everyday anybody decides to do this much just for a stranger. Especially for him! Do you know who saved your life miss? " He asked with a looked of exhilaration on his face.  "He's the twenty-year-old son of the wealthiest man in the city, a billionaire who runs one of the largest oil companies in the gulf. The young man kind of took a liking to you when he brought you here everybody thought you were his spouse because of the way he was treating you. The man halted his visits after a few days because he knew you were bound to wake-up soon." He the turned and left waving at the puzzled young woman. It perceptibly had to be a mistake because that man had been too injured to walk.  There was cluster of dollar bills stacked between the note. Never had she ever seen so much money in her life. She counted the dollar bills and got about two-thousand-five-hundred U.S dollars. This was more than the amount they spent on their monthly house hold supply including rent back home. Why had he given her so much? She thought of visiting the address just to thank him. Yasmin was relieved because she had worried so much about the after stay at the hospital, she would d be on the streets again and she wouldn't be able to contact her family. The past year had been really hard on her, travelling from place to place looking for work only being employed for a few monthly jobs earning a little bit of income which she would spend on food and stay and even maybe save a few bills to send back home. He sister would also her money from abroad well. Two years had passed and city life had never much really got into her and of course due to her lack of experience and education, it was hard for her to find a decent average or high paying job. She had gotten over worrying about what's she would eat or whether shed make enough money to make ends meet, so all she'd done was stay in her small two roomed apartment staring out the window watching the rain during her spare time. Those were best moments of her life because she got to reflect on a lot of things including her loveless lonely life. But that was it. She had privacy, she was independent.   So now her only two option was to either go back home and lie to her father about earning the two-thousand-five-hundred dollars,  after all he'd be happy she brought so much, or stay and use some of the money for her expenses while  she tried to find more work. Yasmin was the kind of girl who lived by certain basic principles. She would have never accepted the money if she wasn't desperate to stay in the city, her ego wouldn't have allowed her. The reason why she never gave up and went back home was because her father wanted to marry her off. He gave her two options. One: Get married soon and bring home a good dowry!  Two: Find work and earn money to support her younger sibling and parents. Yasmin really hadn't had much of an option here because the thought marriage frightened her. The eldest daughter in their family was already deceased due to the abuse she suffered at the hands of her cruel husband. Now her father had married off her sister who was two years younger than her. Jasmine left the hospital feeling uncertain about everything. She thought of going back home. Her father would have reminded her of her failure because the day she left she had made a promise to him in rage that she would come back successful.  "I'll show you! "she had screamed.  "I'll show you girls are as good enough as boys we aren't useless like you think." "Ok then," her father had said with a critical scornful expression on his face, you can leave any time you want Yasmin, go and be successful, let's see. I promise you'll come back desiring for  your father's help." He had chuckled contemptuously and swayed away in to the kitchen mumbling under his breath. "It thinks it is as good as a son. Ha-ha."  Her sister Nadia had been peeking through a corner the whole time scoffing at each and every word of their squabble with tears streaming down her face. She had been eighteen at the time about to be wedded off to a polygamist in his fifties. Yasmin felt sorry for sister but she wasn't about to allow her self to suffer the same fate, the thought of her sister capitulating to a  man in his fifties was repulsive enough to make her sick.  It not that everybody did not care about this quarrel that led to her leaving, everybody was deathly terrified of the father including the wife. It wasn't more like man of the house sort of thing, ...it was more like a master living with his slaves because everyone would listen to each and every one of his commands even the most perverse ones. Yasmin hadn't had much schooling in her twenty-two years of life. The girl had stopped at an early age due to her family's financial situation but she had enough to learn how to read and write. Yasmin grew up with eight siblings three brothers and three sisters one a brother succumbing to pneumonia in his early teens and her sister passing on the day wedding. She was only twenty-four. She would have been twenty-six now. Now they were only five of them. Nadia, twenty years old, Salim who was fourteen years old, Haider who was nineteen, Mohammed who was twenty-four and a half and her sister Harran who was taken away at the age of seven to go live abroad in the United States of America with her aunt, she was about twenty-one now. Anyone would have felt that its a sad thing her sister passed on the day she got married, and one might wonder what could have been the cause that drove her new husband  to commit such an indisputable  act, but then everyone was enraged to know why he did it. The wedding had just proceeded well and it was night and time to consummate their marriage, but apparently the husband was clearly unsatisfied with his newly wedded wife because she wasn't a virgin, so he strangled her. How did he know this? Because she didn't bleed. Of course, Yasmin thought of it as a disgusting tradition that needed to be left in the old era. She viewed her husband as nothing more than a murderer. Her poor sister's innocent life had been unjustly taken and no trial was ever held, no one reported it. It was dubbed and accident and she was buried within the next few hours of early morning. Her father didnt seem to care that one of his daughters had been murdered, he was too happy about the large handsome dowry to care. He'd always cared more for his two remaining sons than his daughters. She remembered her father's scornful look as her mother expressed the idea of girls being educated like boys and females receiving equal rights to men. Its really not that her family lacked the financial means to educate her, it's just that her father's lived by old principles and ideologies which were sometimes not only frowned upon by female relatives in his family circle but also by modern society. Her father, a stern and crude man, believed It was simply a waste of money to educate a female child because her only purpose was to marry off early and bring a large ransom in the form of dowry. So, he used his financial situation as an excuse not to educate any of his daughters but he'd always find enough for his precious two sons. Jasmine always used to peek through the key hole of the kitchen door as her parents fought about her and her sisters. It always  ended with her intimidated mother laying on the floor after she'd received a beating from her father who would stomp out slamming the kitchen door behind him to go to buy alcohol at the local store while she sped to the bedroom she shared with her sister to avoid being caught after eavesdropping on their quarrels.  Yasmin decided she' d go back home, after all it had been two years. But she wouldn't go empty handed, she would use the money to buy a few groceries for her family and school supplies for her brother.