The speech I never made

My sister, my best friend, the soul of my soul, got married and there's so much I didn't get to say.

In South Asian Muslim culture, when a woman gets married, she leaves her parental home to move in with her husband, and in most cases, his family.

So at the culmination of wedding events (we have several), there is the bidai – the goodbye – where the bride bids farewell to her family and is driven off to her husband’s home.

The bidai is a huge affair – brides are expected to go from big smiles to being downcast and cry on cue (but still maintain some decorum so as not to make anyone too uncomfortable), and everyone knows their place.

The parents, the brothers and sisters of the bride, friends, cousins, and families queue up to hug her as emotions swell inside them and the groom uncomfortably tries to comfort her.

A few days ago, my little sister got married. We all joked she was going to be the first bride in the family not to cry at the bidai. She had always been stoic. In fact, the only person to have seen her cry and comforted her was actually me, someone who has no problem crying in front of people at any given place.

So when it came to her bidai, my parents began with the tears immediately on cue. It was watching my dad’s sausage fingers wrap his face as he shrouded his tears that broke my sister, and all of us, on her wedding day.

He cried unbridled, like a baby, clumsily wiping away his tears. She hugged him long and deep, and I, standing behind them, pushed back the lump rising in my throat before eventually giving in.

We weren’t crying solely because we’d miss her (though this is a huge part of it), and it wasn’t because she was leaving her paternal home. My sister had lived away for medical school for eight years. When she was 18, we dropped her off to Nottingham, waving at her from the car, tears escaping our eyes as we left her on her own for the first time. That was our first bidai, to much less fanfare.

So eight years later, when I no longer live at my parents’ home, we once again said goodbye to my sister, for a different reason this time. But the hurt was all the same.

We were sad because she isn’t a student anymore who’s going to come home for long summers and Christmas breaks. She won’t be at the door to greet me when I go to my parents' or text me to bring her a coffee as I come home. Now she’ll come home for a few hours before she goes back to her husband, and Eids will be divided between family and in-laws, and Ramadan won’t look like iftar at the table with the whole family nor groggy suhoors spent together.

The feelings remind me of what Steve Martin says of his daughter in Father of the Bride:

‘I realised at that moment that I was never going to come home again and see Annie at the top of the stairs. Never going to see her again at our breakfast table in her nightgown and socks. I suddenly realised what was happening. Annie was all grown up and was leaving us, and something inside began to hurt.’

I didn’t make a speech at my sister’s wedding, though I wanted to.

Just four days before she got married, my cousin also got married and I made a speech at his wedding, referencing inside jokes and trying to find the right balance of silly and sincerity. The mic didn’t work properly and as I walked to the stage, a man behind me fell and had a seizure. As I made cracks at the groom on stage, I saw my little sister, the doctor, behind the crowd, leaping to the man as quickly as she would tend to her patients in hospital.

I didn’t make a speech at my sister’s wedding, but there’s so much I want to say. I would’ve got up and said congratulations and commented on how breathtaking she looked. I would have made thinly veiled threats to my brother-in-law as I implored him to take care of my little sister while welcoming him to the family. I would have shared esoteric anecdotes and told stories of her that people didn’t know.

I didn’t make a speech at my sister’s wedding because, despite writing for a living, I don’t even have the words that would encompass or do justice to what my little sister means to me.

So here I am, in my newsletter, professing the deep and irrevocable love I have for my little sister.

I didn’t make a speech at my sister’s wedding, but if I had, I would have turned to her and said:

‘You are dearest to me. To borrow the words of our beloved Palestinian martyrs, you are the soul of my soul.

‘Like that terrible Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear film Stuck on You, you are like a limb attached to me, or an organ; vital and necessary for living.

‘I love you and like you so much – I think you’re so fun and funny, and humble even though you literally save lives every day and then just come home and watch Community re-runs all night.

‘You have a wicked memory that should really be studied – how do you recall faces so well? And my portion of game-playing skills was clearly attributed to you because there isn’t a single game you’re bad at.

‘Beyond all the joy you’ve brought me, the single greatest thing you’ve done for me is bring me closer to my Lord by allowing me to follow your example. You might be my little sister, but you’re my biggest inspiration.

‘You are my heart beating outside of its chest’.

There is no way I could have said any of those things to her on her wedding day because even writing this now, I feel like a leaky tap, tears dripping out of me.

At her bidai, I managed to compose myself and only tap into my feelings briefly to let out a few tears. If I had leaned into my emotions completely, I would never have let go of my sister’s embrace.

Because she is home.

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This post is, as you might have guessed, in dedication to my dearest Suts. I love you, I miss you. Allarhowla.

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